THE POWERS OF TEN.

A month ago, we found a German work extra with steam power.  More recently, a video of another German Decapod, slugging it out over hill and dale with a gravel train, came to light.

I don't know, those level crossing warning bells don't sound that authoritative, but the stack talk is compelling.

That got me looking around for a serious North American revenue move with a Decapod, and one took place not too far from here.  A few years ago, the Illinois Railway Museum leased its mainline to Union Pacific to store idle unit coal train consists, and Russian Decapod Frisco 1630 was available for its break-in run to return the coal cars to Union Pacific.

On a preservation railway, it's not featherbedding to have a few extra hands on board to help out just in case, or perhaps to record the activity.

The museum did not rent out the main line for storage this past winter, which freed up track space for a few commemorative events. The steam season will resume Memorial Day weekend.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Silly me, I thought "March Madness" referred to the NCAA's basketball tournaments, and here it really means the celebration of a school shooter in Weimar America.  "The Democratic Party and its press allies have created an environment where mentally ill people are 'affirmed' instead of being given the help they need and then they want us to play by their rules when one of those mentally ill people lashes out and commits an atrocity."  Sapir-Whorf are wrong.  "Not calling transsexualism a mental disorder did not make it any saner."  At least hippies could take a bath, and get a haircut, or nature would run its course.  "Usually fads aren’t quite so permanently damaging as the trans mania has proved to be. I would cautiously hope that this one is on the deflationary spiral, although I am afraid that whatever appears to replace it in shallow public awareness might prove to be even worse."  Women and girls are hardest hit.  "'Self-identifying female' athletes aren’t competing with girls and women so much as swaggering and peacocking before them. And if you’re a talented female who’s worked hard at your sport, all you can do is smile with your second-place trophy." It's reality versus fantasy time.  Just don't call attention, the rage mob will come after you.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

MARINATE IN THE SMUG.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg reacts to an indictment in the way of the lakefront liberal.  "Those addicted to the brew of lies and self-regard that Donald Trump deals in aren’t about to change their minds."  I suppose he'd consider Mark Levin's "America, you are looking tyranny in the face right now" as just the predictable response of voters who deserve no respect.   Losing skippers blame everybody but themselves, and the corollary proposition is for smug cosmopolitans to blame the voters.

Being an expect-the-worst kind of guy, I simply assume Trump will win in 2024 against a senescent Joe Biden. Of course he will. The whole thing will begin again, the lies and bombast, grievance and cruelty, will roll over the country like a tsunami. Worse this time, because the shock has become blunted, and helpers have stepped up and are ready, with a Supreme Court, a third of whom he picked himself, ready to sing “Amen” to his every overstep. Abroad, tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu will be comforted by the success of a kindred spirit, and at home the people who live for this kind of thing will ululate like true believers, clap like seals, salaam in adoration, and the whole madhouse will thunder on for another four years.

That "senescent Joe Biden" has put into office the most diverse cabinet of incompetent box-checkers has nothing to do with the understandable anger of the voters.  Mr Steinberg can't quite come to terms with that reality.

No addiction is easy to break, particularly not one offering blanket permission to live in your own fantasyland of perpetual grievance and self-assigned victimhood. It’s too powerful a potion for millions of Americans to pass up.

They’ll never quit Trump. As I’ve been saying for years, he is a symptom, not a cause. The Republican reaction to Jan. 6, 2021 should have made that clear. Trump is the whistle on a boiling tea kettle. Take the whistle away and the tea kettle is still boiling. It always has been.

I mean, when Robert Reich comes up with a sensible observation?

Trump’s fusion of himself with his supporters galvanizes those who project onto him the power and status they feel they’ve lost in America — people who are mostly white, rural, and without college degrees.

But Trump is not engaging in this fusion as a means of being reelected president. In fact, even if it helps him win the Republican nomination, it will lose him the general election, because it will turn off all Republicans who are focused on real issues or who worry that he’s nuts, and it will cause independents to flee.

Well, yes, I reject the false binary and have no patience for anybody who tells me that if I vote for somebody other than the reality show host or the corpse I'm somehow wasting my vote.  I also reject the invalidation of voters' choices because of some perceived loss of status some sociology professor probably dreamed up.

The dirty little secret of Trump’s third campaign for president — one that the media has so far ignored — is that he is not seeking to become president of the United States, at least not the United States as it is now organized. He is seeking to become president of a very different nation — overwhelmingly white, straight, Christian, and authoritarian.

That there might be some overlap between that population and the bourgeois norms of the American High is too much for any of the self-styled progressives to acknowledge, even though the past sixty years of the Consciousness Revolution have not been an unambiguous blessing, even for the people supposedly liberated by it.  And Reality gets a vote.  "Yet in fact he will not be elected — unless the U.S. economy is by then in a deep recession, or Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has a serious health problem."

GOD MADE MAN BECAUSE HE LIKES STORIES.

Elie Wiesel might have been on to something.  Knowledge of family stories links to positive youth outcomes.  That's a peer-reviewed stylized fact, dear reader.

We had just published our first few articles demonstrating that if adolescents knew more about their family history, where their grandparents went to school, how their parents met, and even difficult events such as a terrible illness that a family member suffered, they showed more positive outcomes: lower anxiety, higher self-esteem, a higher sense of family cohesion.

Those conversations around the kitchen or dining room table -- assuming everyone is able to gather around, and has put away the electronic shackles -- are valuable.

Some adolescents and young adults know more stories, tell stories in more elaborated ways, and especially tell stories from the perspective of their parent, what their parent was thinking and feeling, and how their parent interacted with their parents. The life lessons they may have learned from these experiences. These adolescents and young adults really benefit from knowing these stories – we have replicated again, and again outcomes such as lower anxiety and higher self-esteem and have further found that these adolescents and young adults have a higher sense of meaning and purpose in life.

We have also determined that it is storytelling that is important. Certainly, open communication plays a role, but even in those families that report high levels of open communication, trust, and engagement, knowing family stories still predicts higher well-being. And it is the stories about families that matter. Stories about friends and mentors are important but do not have nearly the same impact as stories about parents and other family members. Critically, although the 20 questions is a good predictor, it is not whether adolescents know these specific stories – rather, these question index the extent to which a family frequently engages in storytelling.

So why family stories? Parents remain critical identity figures for adolescents and young adults; they look to their parents as they explore their identity: who am I and who do I want to be? How am I like my family (or possibly not like my family)? How do I understand my life as it unfolds? What are the important lessons and values? Answers to these questions are embedded in the stories that adolescents and young adults tell about their parents – stories that chart their parents' successes and their problems, difficulties, and challenges.

How parents and their parents before them met the inevitable obstacles of life, provide models of perseverance and hope. Family stories make abstract values concrete; they embody a way of being in the world, and adolescents and young adults model themselves on these stories – this is the kind of person I am. These are the kind of people I come from.

Perhaps, pace those Russian novelists, every happy family is alike in that it shares stories, even though the stories are different.

THE RETURN OF VERBAL TERRORISM.

That was the locution Sixties loudmouths, so sure of themselves, sometimes used to describe the disruption of presentations or job interviews that were contrary to their tight priors.  I'm not sure what locution, if any, the current cohort of loudmouths uses, but the effect is the same.

A group of trans-activist students had to be escorted by campus police out a speech by former Campus Reform Editor in Chief and current Daily Wire editor Cabot Phillips on Friday night at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt).

Campus Reform has covered the turmoil leading up to the event at the public Pennsylvanian institution. The event was hosted by the University’s Turning Point USA chapter and funded by the Leadership Institute, the parent organization of Campus Reform.

I'm not sure what public ownership of the means of production has to do with snipping off your means of reproduction, but the propensity of socialism to attract the freakazoids has long been a phenomenon.

Various signs carried by protestors were sponsored by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Signs included phrases such as “Fight for Socialism and LGBTQ Liberation.” Other signs read “Trans Rights Now,” “Unite and Fight for Liberation,” and “Trans Lives Matter.”

What these thin-skinned freakazoids are mostly liberating themselves from is any exposure to differing points of view.  Apparently champion swimmer Riley Gaines, who isn't crazy about swimming against male-to-female crossers, also appeared at Pittsburgh, and the self-same verbal terrorists wanted her to go away.  "These morons are afraid of Riley Gaines. They don’t want a highly-accomplished NCAA swimmer to come to their precious liberal campus to exercise her First Amendment rights. Lord forbid they expand their minds. And they have the nerve to call HER a fascist."

IT'S JUST ANOTHER DAY AT TRACKSIDE.

Pajamas Media contributor Matt Margolis asks, "Another Train Carrying Hazardous Materials Derails. What's Going On?"  Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation.  "There are suggestions that these recent train derailments are happening more frequently than usual, but it’s possible that the heightened attention is due to the East Palestine disaster."  Yes, once a train with a load of nasty stuff goes on the ground, crash-chasing journalists will be looking for the nasty stuff.

Pay attention, dear reader, the next time you are stuck at the level crossing.  Tank cars carry placards, and each of those has a specific (and internationally understood) meaning.  Modellers of modern image freight trains add realism to their models by using the right placards.  In addition, if you're close enough to the train, you might see stencils on the tank noting what the car ordinarily carries.  There's some truly scary stuff in those tanks, and you wouldn't want to use any old available empty tank car for your next load: think putting bleach in a car that previously hauled anhydrous ammonia.

I repeat, as well, would you rather that stuff be hauled in tank trailers on your interstates or maneuvering along your stroads?

THREE YEARS AGO.

There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Michael Smerconish's Saturday morning show devoted a fair amount of time to the political economy of shelter-in-place responses to a pandemic.  The show poll question (scroll down) was "Is a universal quarantine worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health?"  The correct response is "it depends" and credit ought to be for your explanation.  Online polls don't work that way, and the response as of 9 am God's time was that it was worth it.

His show spent a lot of time, though, on the "it depends."  One guest was Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, who tackles the question, "how deadly is COVID-19/WUHAN?"  The short answer, which probably frustrates people no end, is "we don't know."

Three years on, Dr Bhattacharya appears to have been more right than wrong, and people who should know better still refuse to acknowledge tradeoffs.  Bryan Caplan gives his space over to medicine reporter Gabrielle Bauer.

Remember the early days, when everyone was telling us to follow the science? Like many others, I had a problem with this slogan. From the day the lockdowns were announced, I wondered: Why are only scientists being consulted? Where are the mental health experts to tell us how social isolation will affect our most vulnerable, both young and old? Where are the economists to insist on a cost-benefit analysis? Where are the ethicists to weigh in on the appropriate balance between risk avoidance and human rights? Or the philosophers to zoom out to the big questions, like the perils of splitting off biological subsistence from meaningful living?

These perspectives, so often missing in the Covid discourse, carry no less weight than the epidemiologic one. A young human-rights lawyer has important insights to impart about a pandemic, as does an aging philosopher. Or an author of ground-breaking fiction. I stumbled into their thought leaders in magazine articles, academic papers, podcasts, and elsewhere, and felt it was important to gather their insights in one place. That’s why the 46 dissenting thinkers showcased in the book include not just scientists and doctors, but philosophers, ethicists, economists, politicians, lawyers, writers, musicians, as well as a comedian and a priest.

The mantra was sloganeering, and people deployed it in support of scientific conclusions consistent with their priors.

Managing a pandemic is not just about containing a virus, but about shepherding the human family through a massive societal upheaval. An upheaval that threatens not just lives, but livelihoods. Not just lung health, but mental health. Not just heartbeats, but hopes and dreams. It’s about striking a balance between collective action and individual agency. It’s about respecting that not everyone brings equal capabilities or resources to the navigation of public health directives—considerations that were jettisoned with Covid.

Epidemiologists can do epidemiology. Public health experts can do public health. But none of these experts can do society or human nature any better than intellectuals from other disciplines or even “ordinary people.” No scientist has the legal or moral authority to tell someone they can’t sit next to a parent on their deathbed.

Letting people die alone may align with the goal of viral containment, but that doesn’t mean it serves the “greater good,” whatever the term means. Yale University philosopher Samantha Godwin made this point in 2021 Tweet: “We have collectively accepted, without meaningful debate, the ideological belief that the greater good can be equated with maximum COVID mitigation, without concern for or recognition of the collateral harms caused by these mitigation efforts.” I wrote the book to give pride of place to such insights, which the mainstream Covid narrative has summarily discounted.

There is no such thing as the, singular noun, greater good; although a reviewer of the longer book from which the conversation draws made an optimistic observation.

My book runs with the second story: attempting to eliminate all risk from Covid is a fool’s errand and carries too high a cost. “The world today is much closer to 2019 True Normal than it is to 2020 New Normal, and a lot of that is because what the Covidians wanted is both logistically and psychologically impossible,” says Heidi Buxton, the brilliant Colorado nurse and editor who reviewed my manuscript before publication. In other words, pandemic policies must respect biological realities and human nature—a point made by several people quoted in the book.

That might be, although in the course of relatively rare events, many of the lessons learned the hard way will be forgotten by the intervening generations.

YOU JUST CAN'T HAVE THOSE PESKY WORDS.

No, not George Carlin's infamous seven words you can't say on television.

If you're with the communications faculty of the University of Utah, there are apparently lots of words you can't say, including any of the department's purported antiracist code of conduct, which has apparently moped off in shame.  Perhaps that's what happens when the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression calls attention.

In Nov. 2020, department faculty voted to adopt the ARCC, which “impos[es] an affirmative obligation on all Departmental members to engage in anti-racist actions and support anti-racist Department institutions and norms.”

Those obligations include being “active bystanders” and “interrupt[ing] racism in all forms” by “eradicat[ing]” speech “that stereotype[s], inferentially identif[ies], culturally discriminate[s] against, or harm[s] people of color,” and “disrupt[ing] and dismantl[ing] racist learning and work environments created through White normativity and discriminatory actions such as microaggressions, microassaults, and microinsults.”

Isn't the very act of calling on scholars to drop whatever they're currently working on in order to comb out language that might "inferentially identify" something bad a microaggression or microinsult per se?

A TEMPORARY PARITY?

Twelve days ago, before a single whistle blew, a men's tournament round of eight comprising Virginia, North Carolina State; Duke, Michigan State, Houston, Xavier; and Kansas, Ukla would appear to be a respectable office pool submission, well cognizant of the "them that has gets" characteristic of the tournament's second weekend, by which the upstarts get their fifteen minutes of fame and shuffle off to the land of story-telling.  It would also be incapable of advancing further in the pool (one and done; round of sixteen and no more; ditto; ditto).  Is it parity, or are the new transfer rules contributing?  "This is the second time in three years that four of the top 'blue blood' programs — North Carolina, Kansas, Duke and Kentucky — are not in the Sweet 16. From 1980 to 2019, at least one of those teams got this far in every year's tournament."  Neither North Carolina nor Kentucky qualified.  North Carolina were a consensus high tournament seed before a sneaker was laced up in October, see also Bush, Jeb! or Hillary! circa 2008.  It's an occupational hazard at Kentucky to recruit the next crop of immediate professional basketball draft picks, ride them for a season, then there might be an off year or so to find the next cohort.

The transfer dynamic?  That's relatively new, and I submit its permanent effect is yet to be determined.

The NCAA changed its transfer portal system in April of 2021 to allow athletes to switch schools and play immediately. It's had a big impact on spreading talent: Last year, about 1,650 Division I men's college basketball players went into the portal.

Coaches and programs are still figuring out how to adjust — and how to retain top players.

The confounding effect of the corona tyranny remains to be identified.  Because the spring tournaments, including basketball and hockey, were cancelled in 2020 and competition in subsequent seasons has been disrupted by cancellations or empty arenas or the public health officials having brain farts, the Association granted players an extra year of eligibility.  That extra eligibility included a few extra athletic scholarships, but the scholarships are scarce resources, and that new talent, whether for a year, or for a full career, doesn't come for free.

ETHNOGRAPHY IN AND AROUND CAMBRIDGE.

Philip Greenspun is of the Harvard faculty but refreshingly not of the canonical Cambridge mindset.  Check out a recent travelog, "Maskachusetts trip report."

The unpleasant highways might be by design.

Traffic delays slowed all of my excursions around the Boston suburbs. The eight-lane I-95 ring highway was jammed at midday on Saturday. The main road that goes to Wayland would be four or six lanes in Florida, plus dedicated left and right turn lanes at intersections, but in Maskachusetts it is only two lanes and a single car wanting to turn left can create a mile-long backup.

The Florida stroads are as often unpleasant as those local roads in the Commonwealth.  I wonder if that Harvard affiliation is worth the aggro, though, to keep reading.

The locals nearly all profess faith in population growth via mass low-skill immigration. Yet the transportation infrastructure of Boston plainly cannot support even the current population. The road network is jammed and the locals who eagerly cowered in place are unwilling to ride public transit due to COVID risk.

Thus he chooses, the weather outside being frightful, to nip into a few bookstores, which are about as one might expect.  Then it was time for a snack.  "How about the new higher minimum wage? Shake Shack in Harvard Square has responded by eliminating the order-taker jobs. You order and pay at a touchscreen. How’s the labor quality now that higher wages are being paid? Some of my fries were still frozen."

The inclusive ethos at those Cambridge parties doesn't encourage, either.

In conversations with white native-born progressives, none seem to have adapted to the fact that 85 million Americans are either immigrants or children of immigrants. The dominant conflict between groups in the U.S. is white vs. Black and if this conflict can be solved, e.g., via reparations or Black Lives Matter banners, Americans will all live together in harmony. They can’t understand why recent immigrants from India, China, or Honduras don’t share their enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter, allocating places in colleges or in jobs to those who identify as Black, etc. At a dinner event where most of the guests were either from India or were children of Indian immigrants, the current American race-based system was decried. “We’re ‘brown’ if we try to get into country clubs,” one professor said, “but we’re considered ‘off-white’ when we apply for jobs or to college.”

Maybe that's why new thinking about the Pythagorean Theorem comes from St. Mary's in New Orleans rather than Cambridge Rindge and Latin.

THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY.

There are multiple ways to establish the Pythagorean Theorem ab initio.  At least one President of the United States is credited with a proof.  No less an authority than Rene Descartes, however, has cautioned us that the field of trigonometry uses Pythagoras as foundational, and so has mathematics education ever after.  "And since that particular field of study was discovered, mathematicians have maintained that any alleged proof of the Pythagorean theorem which uses trigonometry constitutes a logical fallacy known as circular reasoning, a term used when someone tries to validate an idea with the idea itself."  Put another way, without Pythagoras being true a priori, no trigonometry.  "Because the theorem underpins trigonometry, experts have thought it impossible to prove [using trigonometry], since you can't use trigonometry without already accepting that the theorem is correct."

Not so fast.

In the 2000 years since trigonometry was discovered it's always been assumed that any alleged proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem based on trigonometry must be circular. In fact, in the book containing the largest known collection of proofs (The Pythagorean Proposition by Elisha Loomis) the author flatly states that “There are no trigonometric proofs, because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem.” But that isn’t quite true: in our lecture we present a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity \sin^2x + \cos^2x = 1.

The authors? Two seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans.  High school seniors.  "When the American Mathematical Society met in Georgia last week, [Calcea] Johnson and [Ne'Kiya] Jackson were the only high schoolers at the meeting, according to New Orleans television news station WWL."

We'll let the philosophers quibble over whether it is possible to speak of "opposite," "adjacent" and "hypotenuse" without implicitly creating a continuum of Pythagorean triples.  The high-schoolers were encouraged by participants in the academic conference to send their results out for peer review.  That's how it works, present your working paper at a conference, get some discussant comments, send it out for publication.

Good.  It is not yet time to abandon hope.  "Alluding to how St Mary’s slogan is 'No excellence without hard labor,' the two students credited their teachers at the all-girls school in New Orleans’s Plum Orchard neighborhood for challenging them to accomplish something which mathematicians thought was not possible."  Let us be grateful that the teachers at St. Mary, an institution apparently with some civil rights chops, didn't buy the nonsense about classical mathematics perpetuating privilege, and might be a high school properly preparing its graduates for college.

ROLLING OUT THE TRAINS.

The March Meet has concluded, and with it the layout tours.  I had a sequence of trains staged to have something moving whenever things got quiet, although layout visitors were of a mood to swap stories, and a few wheels didn't turn.

Even with a limited amount of the track available for running trains, there were plenty of switching opportunities, which are excerpted in the video.

The upper level display track also got a workout, and the Special Projects Office showed off its work.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  The best in the west, the heck with the east.  "The WCHA continued to dominate the Women's Frozen Four."

2.  Work is what we do when the deanlets leave us alone.  "For many professors, a 'vacation' is a day when they can get some writing and professional reading done without constant interruptions of meetings and emails."

3. If they aren't mugged by reality, what will happen to the wokies?  "Zealotry is impervious to science, let alone plain-to-see reality. Try convincing today’s woke believers that defunding the police, destroying the nuclear family, and undermining traditional gender roles guarantee disaster." Sometimes the "science" is the zealotry, isn't it?

4.  The enemy of my enemy?  "If the liberal center-left doesn’t stand up to antiliberal progressivism and refuse to capitulate to its demands within institutions, then those who disdain its influence will have nowhere to turn besides the right."  There are limits to your experiments against reality.  "The enemy of the LGBTQ community is cisnormative values and assumptions; that is, believing that your gender matching your sex is 'normal.'"  They spent the whole night in a horrible fight over who would do what to whom.

5.  Buckle in.  "The discount window is where desperate banks go when nobody else will lend, like a junkie selling the TV."

6.  Wisdom from Irving Howe.  “Some turned to blacks, some to Asian and African peasantries, some to the intelligentsia, some to homosexuals and — in the last, mad days of the Weathermen — even high school students. Revolution was ripped out of historical context, becoming a mere function of sacrifice and daring, all now dependent on the will of a self-chosen vanguard.”  That led to a Republican Senate majority for the first time in decades, and Ronald Reagan winning 49 states.  Let there be mugging by reality.

7.  The man of system, a damn fool.  "And insofar as he or she is taken seriously by politicians, also a dangerous one."

8.  Lesson learned?  “I don’t think I should have been allowed to change my sex before I could legally consent to have sex.”

9.  The understatement of the week?  "Remove, say, adultery from art and literature, and you miss a lot. Relevance can cover some pretty bracing things."

10.  The Normals' Creed?  "Since every college announcement begins with the rote incantation of the DEI Nicene Creed ('X institution is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. . .') I suggest every non-woke institution begin every job ad or other official announcement with, 'X institution is committed to truth, justice, and the American way.'"  For no extra fare, a sample land acknowledgement!

11.  Laughter might be the best medicine.  "Western culture has come to be dominated by bullies who are ever eager to force conformity on others and to validate their status as 'the elite.' They get a sick thrill from being free to intimidate anyone who doesn’t agree with their narrative to the point they control them."

12.  Give yourself no powers ... "The fact that progressive politics has already corrupted academia is not a justification for conservative politics to do the same. The rot must be fought by other means."

13.  Tear down those guardrails at your own risk!  "Most of us recognize, that given enough liberty to do so, some women behave just as badly as men. Isn’t that part of what feminism fought for? The freedom of women to make the same reckless, consequence-free decisions as their husbands and brothers?"

14.  Deconstruct norms at your own risk!  "Holding people accountable is a good thing – people should pay for what they broke. But cancel culture demands unreasonable and cruel social ostracisation without the ability to seek redemption."

15.  Swift of foot is Hiawatha.  "The trip from Sturtevant to Chicago Union Station was exactly an hour, which is twice as fast as we could’ve driven into downtown Chicago from our home."  On a good driving day, that is.

16.  The Government Must. Do. Something.  This is something.  "In some ways, the Railway Safety Act looks like the kinds of bills that get batted around in the aftermath of mass shootings. Those proposals often aim to place more restrictions on legal and law-abiding gun owners or prohibit cosmetic upgrades that anti-gun activists dislike, but rarely (if ever) do they address the circumstances that led directly to a tragic event."

17.  Reality audits the balance sheet.  "Since money and banking are subject to the laws of physics, we are going to get the ultimate payback for messing with reality."

18.  The best form of Do. Something. might be to not.  "Decades of Subsidies Have Made the Essentials of Middle-Class Life Increasingly Difficult To Afford."

19.  Wait, what, a health services staffing problem in Europe?  "As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, our health workers are tired, overburdened and often under-paid."

20.  Ignorance is strength.  "So, limiting government power in favor of individual rights is ‘fascist’. Good to know."

CHOKE ON THE SMUG.

In rarified Minnesota metrofexual circles, one has to say an Act of Contrition and three Hail Hiawathas before calling attention to the obvious.

I wish I weren’t writing this. But even more than that, I wish that folks could ride the Blue or Green Line light rail trains with confidence. Without fear of being pushed down the stairs at the Lake Street Midtown Station. Without being exposed to secondhand smoke — often from substances so novel that the study of exposure risk probably doesn’t exist. I am here to tell you: Things on transit, particularly the Metro Transit system of rapid buses and light rail, are not great right now.

It's ben almost six years since I checked out the Cities' new commuter rail service and both light rail lines, which connect with the commuter trains, serve several sports arenas and stadia, and the Mall of America.

In the intervening years, though, Minnesota's feral classes have taken control of the Cities, much of the Lake Avenue business district has become Detroit with more ice, and according to Max Singer it's a thought crime to call attention to crime on the trolleys.

I’ll give you all the reasons to tune me out: I’m a young white man. I am not regularly harassed by police (nor by the antisocial or ill-intentioned folks who’ve established themselves on light rail). I come from a comfortable, mostly stable family and so I would have things to fall back on if I gave up on transit or got stabbed on the train. You can question or impugn my background. You can argue that my identity lacks credibility to opine about crime. But I am confident writing this story because I have credibility where it counts.

He's a straphanger. Have our Credentialed Elite become so besotted with Privilege Shaming that lived experience is only valid when it's the proper kind of lived experience from the proper sort of person? Egad.

After a ramble through policy thickets, he finally acknowledges that reality will reclaim transit for civilization, or claim your money and your electronics.

Minnesota state government is under unified Democratic control. Progressives have a lot of leeway to enact policy. Many of them take it as a matter of faith that progressive crime prevention policies are always right, regardless of the results. I won’t mock that faith. But riding transit and talking to other transit riders about their experiences, I know that most people want to see results. Folks riding transit are unwilling to be policy guinea pigs.

Results matter. Seeing progress — or, at minimum, change — matters. If folks want to maintain their elected power or informal influence, the people they serve need to see that they’re not sacrificing efficacy for the sake of ideology. Transit riders cannot wait on upstream social programs to end crime and other antisocial behaviors. Places with more robust social safety nets still have mechanisms for enforcing laws. Enforcement may be a dirty word, but at least it’s not a euphemism. We can add layers and layers of euphemisms upon reality, but it won’t solve the problems that everyday transit riders face.

Touchingly, he concludes his essay with a plea to his brain-brothers.

I’m prepared for this article to elicit controversy. It sits at intersections of race and policing, two open wounds in our cities, state and country. I don’t raise these opinions in certain rooms, because I am deeply enmeshed in the progressive ecosystem of belief, and have adapted to those spaces for much of my life.

But what I hear discussed in those spaces is increasingly disconnected with what’s happening when I ride the train. Ideology is for people who sit in comfortable rooms. I sit on the plastic light rail seats, watching as the burn marks multiply from errant lighters and heated foil. I’m interested in efficacy.

Please, please don't cancel me!  Urban transit weblogs are notorious for their purity tests and the sissy aesthetics of the participants, aren't they?

It's refreshing for Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg: "Hope springs eternal, I suppose. But that would involve admitting there’s a problem – and what the causes of those problems actually are."

DOING LESS WITH LESS LIQUIDATES THE BUSINESS.

I sound off about that so much I should figure out a way to monetize the advice.

Norfolk Southern's stockholders are acting on their loss of shareholder value in the legal way.

Norfolk Southern, already facing suits from the state of Ohio and a number of individuals and businesses over the East Palestine derailment, is now the target of multiple lawsuits from or on behalf of its stockholders.

At least three such lawsuits have now been filed.

Bragar Eagle & Squire, which describes itself as “a nationally recognized stockholder rights law firm,” was first to announce a class-action suit against the railroad over losses suffered by stockholders — essentially arguing that the railroad’s investor-driven Precision Scheduled Railroading strategy to reduce costs has proven to have negative consequences for investors.

Good. For want of a spike, the switch was lost, for want of a switch, the carload was lost, for want of a carload the train was lost, for want of a train, the railroad was lost, and all for the want of a spike.

A FREE STATE TO MY WEST.

Iowa's governor, Kim Reynolds, was not as lockdown-happy as her counterparts in Minnesota, Illinois, or Wisconsin.  She, too, was re-elected, and the political realignment that has taken place in Iowa provokes some Official Washington chin-pulling that somehow doesn't once mention that sort of freedom.

During last year’s midterm elections, Iowa bucked the national trend and delivered a commanding victory for Republicans — reelecting Reynolds, flipping the one remaining House seat held by Democrats, winning all statewide offices save one and widening GOP majorities in both the state House and Senate.br>
Political analysts in the state say that Iowa’s swing has solidified over the past seven years as reliably Democratic working-class voters abandoned the party in favor of Donald Trump’s message, and the state’s large percentage of independent voters also moved toward the Republicans.

It gets better. Did you know, dear reader, that party discipline is a form of dictatorship?

Reynolds, who was reelected to her second full term in November with Trump’s endorsement, has helped drive the state’s rightward tilt, shifting to focus on culture-war issues, gun rights and limits on abortion access. Critics accuse her of using her agenda to burnish her conservative credentials for the national stage in 2024, although she has so far said she has no intention of leaving Iowa.

At a February appearance at a raucous town hall co-sponsored by Moms for Liberty — the Florida-based group that has campaigned for book bans across the country — Reynolds celebrated her school choice victory and portrayed herself both as a grandma of 11 and a warrior against the “radical left.”

“They think patriotism is racist and pornographic library books are education,” Reynolds said, speaking over shouting protesters and supporters chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” “They believe that the content of our character is less important than the color of our skin. They believe that children should be encouraged to pick their gender and the parents, well, they’re just in the way.”

Reynolds, 63, the former lieutenant governor, was elevated to governor in 2017 when business-oriented conservative Terry Branstad was named Trump’s ambassador to China.

A prime example of her activist approach is seen in education measures. She had long pushed for a school voucher program as the centerpiece of her agenda as governor. But two earlier bills failed to make it out of the Iowa House, over objections of Republicans whose constituents have no access to private schools in rural areas and where consolidation remains a constant threat. About 40 percent of Iowa counties have no accredited nonpublic schools, according to a state report.

So last year Reynolds took matters into her own hands, supporting a half-dozen primary opponents of recalcitrant Republicans, including the chairman of the House’s education committee, Dustin Hite, who, along with others, lost to a more conservative candidate.

With a new school-choice-friendly majority in place, an expanded version of the legislation passed easily in January. When fully implemented, it will allow all Iowa families to use taxpayer-funded “education savings accounts” for private school tuition, costing the state $345 million a year, according to a state analysis.

Such interference by a sitting governor was “unprecedented” in Iowa, said Melissa Peterson, the legislative and policy director for the Iowa State Education Association.

“That’s a red flag when your head of government is primarying her own party. It is an indication that the ideologies are becoming more extreme,” said Kelly Shaw, the former nonpartisan mayor of the town of Indianola who now teaches political science at Iowa State University. “The governor has effectively removed her opposition, and that is pretty extraordinary.”

The loyal opposition is supposed to come from opposition parties, not from within the governor's own legislative caucus.  If the party establishment is imposing unreasonable purity tests, doesn't that give the other party opportunities to go after disaffected voters?  Or are we concealing the narrative that the Iowa Democrats are in microcosm the same sort of freak show that the national Democrats have become?

“My own personal feeling is that we’re moving from a purple [state] because the message the Democrats are using is not the message the average Iowans want to hear,” said state Rep. John H. Wills (R), who helped shepherd the governor’s school choice bill through the legislature. “I think in general Iowans support all Iowans but not teaching those types of things in third grade and having underage people doing transition surgeries and taking hormone blockers. We’re trying to be supportive of all Iowans but the other side is happy to promote the most egregious, far-left agenda and that is where we are at.”

Iowa, in common with several other Big Ten states, is a net exporter of people with college degrees, and some deep thinkers are sounding the alarm that the state is becoming less friendly to university graduates with metrofexual sensibilites.  I suppose that's a possibility, and yet, your rainbow culture environment might come bundled with hobo jungles.

DOWN AND OUT IN PHOENIX.

A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City and an American Crisis.

Cities across the West had been transformed by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis and an opioid epidemic, all of which landed at the doorsteps of small businesses already reaching a breaking point because of the pandemic. In Phoenix, where the number of people living on the streets had more than tripled since 2016, businesses had begun hiring private security firms to guard their property and lawyers to file a lawsuit against the city for failing to manage “a great humanitarian crisis.”

The Faillaces had signed onto the lawsuit as plaintiffs along with about a dozen other nearby property owners. They also bought an extra mop to clean up the daily flow of human waste, replaced eight shattered windows with plexiglass, installed a wrought-iron fence around their property and continued opening their doors at exactly 8 each morning to greet the first customer of the day.

The sandwich shop owners had a history of being charitable to the transients, there always being a few in that neighborhood, until that became untenable.

Over the years, Joe and Debbie came to know many by name and listened to their stories of eviction, medical debt, mental illness and addiction, and together they agreed that it was their job to offer not only compassion but help.

They had given out water, opened their bathroom to the public and cashed unemployment and disability checks at no extra cost. They hired a sandwich maker who was homeless and had lost his teeth after years of addiction; a dishwasher who lived in the women’s shelter and first came to the restaurant for lunch with her parole officer; a cleaner who slept a few blocks away on a wooden pallet and washed up in the bathroom before her shift.

But the homeless population in Phoenix continued to grow. Soon there were hundreds of people sleeping within a few blocks of Old Station, most of them with mental illness or substance abuse issues. They slept on Joe and Debbie’s outdoor tables, defecated behind their back porch, smoked methamphetamine in their parking lot, washed clothes in their bathroom sink, pilfered bread from their delivery trucks, had sex on their patio, masturbated within view of their employees and lit fires that burned down trees and scared away customers. Finally, Joe and Debbie could think of nothing else to do but to start calling police.

Within a half-mile of their restaurant, police had been called to an average of eight incidents a day in 2022. There were at least 1,097 calls for emergency medical help, 573 fights or assaults, 236 incidents of trespassing, 185 fires, 140 thefts, 125 armed robberies, 13 sexual assaults and four homicides. The remains of a 20- to 24-week-old fetus were burned and left next to a dumpster in November. Two people were stabbed to death in their tents. Sixteen others were found dead from overdoses, suicides, hypothermia or excessive heat.

And we find out the pecking order of civil liberties.  It's not the foot traffic of prospective paying customers being "terrorized" and "displaced."

The city had tried to begin more extensive cleaning of the encampment, but advocates for people without housing protested that it was inhumane and in December the American Civil Liberties Union successfully filed a federal lawsuit to keep people on the street from being “terrorized” and “displaced.”

The sandwich shop is for sale, although few buyers are interested, even at distress prices.

NEW HORIZONS FOR HOME AIRCRAFT BUILDERS.

How many among us might have mocked up an airplane that the kit manufacturers didn't offer out of cardboard?  Now those projects might be going to war.  "Australian cardboard drones already performing battlefield missions in Ukraine."  You read that right, "Australian cardboard drones."  With remote control capabilities developed as they are, why not?  "They are delivered in the form of blanks, which are flat sheets of cardboard that can be used to assemble the UAV." Just like those sheet balsa gliders of years ago, separate the parts from the fret and assemble. The kits are pre-treated to fly in all weathers. "To prevent the fuselage from collapsing and failing during wet weather, the sturdy cardboard is coated with wax."

THE SEPPUKU OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT.

Power Line's Steven Hayward reads the Hopkins summer course catalog so you don't have to.

Here’s a current summer course offering from Johns Hopkins University:

Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation – AS.060.186

This course will examine the relationship between capitalist accumulation, the climate crisis, and contemporary climate fiction. What is capitalist accumulation? How has this process led to the contemporary climate crisis? What ideas constitute its ideological apparatus? How do contemporary climate fictions critique and/or amplify these ideas? With these questions as our point of departure, we will read a selection of contemporary climate fiction alongside excerpted works of history, climate science, and critical theory. Through this examination, we will develop an understanding of how contemporary climate fictions participate in climate change discourse, politics, and the social struggles that both underpin and are exacerbated by climate change. By the end of the course, students will be able to define capitalist accumulation, its politics, and its ideas, as well as climate fiction. Students will analyze how climate fictions critique and amplify capitalist ideology and politics. Students will develop insights into how climate fictions perform this work at the levels of both content and form. Finally, through critical and creative writing projects that engage, reconsider, and respond to the course readings, students will refine critical thinking and writing skills.

And people wonder why students are avoiding English literature.

It's a five week online course in late summer, with no reading list currently available for viewing.  I doubt very much whether there will be close reading of Chapter XXII, Volume I of Das Kapital, which lays out Marx's notion of the general principle of capitalist accumulation, let alone Kenneth Boulding and the cowboy economy.

I wish I didn't have to keep calling attention to this sort of foolishness, but that's not my lot in life.

It's the latest manifestation of the soft bigotry of low expectations, notes Richard L. Cravatts, guest posting at Minding the Campus.

When did it become necessary for an English department in a public university to make as a central feature of its teaching social issues? This is not a social justice department, or a black studies department, or an institute or program that focuses on race, social issues, and activism. So the letter’s stated intention that the English Department will “stand with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement . . . create and promote an anti-racist environment . . . and . . . contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community” seems wildly inconsistent with what is, and should be, the role of an English department.

Not content with making a course in African-American literature a requirement in the English curriculum, every aspect of the pedagogy and instruction must be suffused with layers of obsessive victimology and racism, including sponsorship of workshops that seek to “cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice.”

Particularly because we'd hope the professors and instructors of composition ought be conversant with topics such as close reading or point of view, and that might get in the way of getting the kind of deep understanding of political economy or sociology or even the martial arts.  Students will have even more reason to think of composition as simply another meeting of compulsory chapel to read from the Gospel of Intersectionality, and their understanding of Holy Writ might well be that of Tom Sawyer's knowledge of the apostles.

I'm not sure what sort of critical thinking skills are going to be strengthened in a summer month, but, then, I never served on a Hopkins curriculum committee.

PLEASE REFER TO US AS NORMALS.

A Hot Air contributor rejects the "cisgender" locution.

Many people have recently become accustomed to using the term “cisgender,” but the term was originally coined by sexologist Volkmar Sigusch who sympathized with pedophiles and agreed with Woody Allen’s sex philosophy.

The increasing popularity of the transgender movement has resulted in non-trans people being widely labeled as cisgender. We’ve been told that if we identify with the sex that was “assigned to us at birth,” we are cisgender. Many find this definition to be absurd, though, as it suggests our biological sex is not something we’re born with, but rather something that doctors “assign” to us, sometimes incorrectly.

The contribution leads to a post at what appears to be an advice column, although there's a link in the advice column to what appears to be peer-reviewed research.

The affluent societies of the Western world have witnessed a tremendous cultural and social transformation of sexuality during the 1980s and 1990s, a process I refer to as the neosexual revolution. Up to now, this recoding and reassessment of sexuality has proceeded rather slowly and quietly. Yet both its real and its symbolic effects may indeed be more consequential than those brought about in the course of the rapid, noisy sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The neosexual revolution is dismantling the old patterns of sexuality and reassembling them anew. In the process, dimensions, intimate relationships, preferences, and sexual fragments emerge, many of which had been submerged, were unnamed, or simply did not exist before. In general, sexuality has lost much of its symbolic meaning as a cultural phenomenon. Sexuality is no longer the great metaphor for pleasure and happiness, nor is it so greatly overestimated as it was during the sexual revolution. It is now widely taken for granted, much like egotism or motility. Whereas sex was once mystified in a positive sense--as ecstasy and transgression, it has now taken on a negative mystification characterized by abuse, violence, and deadly infection. While the old sexuality was based primarily upon sexual instinct, orgasm, and the heterosexual couple, neosexualities revolve predominantly around gender difference, thrills, self-gratification, and prosthetic substitution. From the vast number of interrelated processes from which neosexualities emerge, three empirically observable phenomena have been selected for discussion here: the dissociation of the sexual sphere, the dispersion of sexual fragments, and the diversification of intimate relationships. These processes go hand in hand with the commercialization and banalization of sexuality. They are looked upon as being controlled individually through the mechanisms of a fundamentally egotistical consensus morality. In conformity with the general principles at work in society, the outcome of the neosexual revolution could be described as self-disciplined and self-optimized lean sexuality.

I look through that abstract in vain for any marshalling of empirical evidence.  It almost reads like a Sokal Hoax, and a bad one at that, as in the past quarter century, all of three scholars have cited it, one of those being a self-citation.

That "absurd definition" often comes bundled with pejorative content.  "Push back against such usage. Don't refer to me in a way I don't want to be referred to as a prelude to shaming me for doing nothing wrong."

ENJOY YOUR PARTICIPATION TROPHY.

Northern Illinois University's women's basketball team got off to a good start last November, and despite reverting to their usual form during conference play received an invitation to a tournament held at Transylvania University in Kentucky, where they lost three games.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,788.

From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health."  More hazardous than the latest coronavirus variant, which, apparently, more readily evades the latest vaccines, but appears to have mutated into something that doesn't "appear to be more serious" than the earlier mutations.

Three years into fifteen days to slow the spread, health policy analyst Scott Atlas, M.D. is not pleased with what has happened.  "We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America's children."  The big increases in the Pritzker Body Count came early in the shutdowns, when the contagion got loose in the care homes, all the closed schools, churches, restaurants, and bars notwithstanding.  Preach it, Dr. Atlas.  "History's biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise."

Specifically, notes Power Line's John Hinderaker, "The bottom line is a point I have made more than once: covid shutdowns, at best–i.e., not in states like New York and Minnesota where infected old people were sent into nursing homes–delayed the inevitable for some of the already-sick elderly, at great cost to the rest of us, and especially at appalling cost to young people. It was a terrible bargain."

The tyranny extended beyond the bars and the churches.

The government shut down dissent. They shut down free speech, our most sacred right behind the right to life. They colluded with Big Tech to punish those who questioned the measures being taken, questioned the origin of the virus, and eventually questioned the efficacy of masks and an experimental vaccine that was suddenly mandated as a condition to participate in American life. We are only now seeing the extent to which that hellish partnership actually operated, with the release of the Twitter Files.

Regime media, however, would prefer that the potbellied dictator and the cadre of unelected experts retain their authority.

Because this “analysis” with its “experts” and whatnot effectively boils down to “unelected government bureaucrats need to bypass the legislatures and force people to wear masks, force schools to shut down, and force the public to abide by “‘protective measures.'” How can America survive without a vast government bureaucracy dictating what is and isn’t good for us?

State legislatures stripping governors of emergency powers! What do those legislators think this is, a constitutional republic?  The horror, the horror!  "When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccine or testing mandates to thwart its march."

That's probably for the good.  "Over the past three years, we’ve seen authoritarianism rear its ugly head in response to the virus, and we should be doing everything we can to ensure that this type of government interference in our daily lives never happens again."

Dementia Joe has teased an end to the federal state of emergency in May.  We'll see. The emergency decrees for the United States taken together, as well as Illinois, remain in effect.  Illinoisans voted to return the potbellied dictator to Springfield, and by next month's survey we'll see what Chicago has voted for.

These posts will continue until the emergency decrees end.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

The latest report from Sweden counts 2,700,231 infections, an increase of 4,063 over last month, and 23,785 deaths, a change of 251 from the preceding report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 4,092,259 infections, an increase of 52,120 over last month and 41,573 deaths, adding 291 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.    The winter spike we observed in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 has not appeared in Illinois, or Sweden.

The most recent tally of vaccinations continues to report around 26.5 million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of today.  The state also appears to have ended their count of the scary variants, with the current link noting the most recent update in late December.

At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 17,728.

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 18,068.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week has been growing only slowly.  The details from the end of 2022 to the beginning of this reckoning in 2020 are on page 2.

PLEASE REFER TO US AS NORMALS.

There can't be Polite Society without some tone policing, which might mean etiquette books or Manuals of Style, and there might even be room for some of those "Instead of this say this" guides that have given us more reason to mock higher education these days.

Such style guides, however, ought be responsive to feedback from the people who are being asked to comply with the guides.  Consider the history of what the Manual of Style once dictated to properly describe people with lots of melanin.  The polite word was "Negro," adopted from the Spanish, and always capitalized.  These days, we mostly encounter that word in the title of the United Negro College Fund, or in reference to a class of religious songs called Negro spirituals.  There are other sorts of spiritual songs, although, unless you're a choir director or a musicologist, you're heading for your favorite search engine to fact-check me.

During the push for equal procedural rights of the 1950s and 1960s, the style manuals changed, in part at the urging of people who would rather prefer to be described differently from what the Guardians of Style prescribed.  Thus, there was Black Power, and Afro-American, and African-American, and after all those changes, the current manuals of style translate from the Spanish, with the uppercase, as Black.  Fine.  People have agency over what they would like to be called, or how they would be described.

All that prologue by way of getting to a provocative suggestion.  I'm not sure what to make of Matt Walsh.  On the one hand, he's read and understood a lot of the culture-studies foolishness in order that you don't have to.  On the other hand, he's a highbrow provocateur in the style of Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter.  And he's not to be confused with Michael Walsh or Matt Welch.

He now has a radio show that I stumbled upon a few nights ago, and he was having some fun with somebody who checks all sorts of diversity boxes, trans-this and non-that, and "neuroatypical."  The point of the ensuing rant was to ask when Normals consented to being referred to as "cisgender" or "neurotypical."  You no doubt recognize, dear reader, the sort of faculty lounge circumlocutions depressingly common these days.  Yes, there might be good reason for transvestite to give way to trans-sexual to transgender, although I think the "crosser" locution is less fraught, but who gave writers of the manual of style the right to use "cisgender?"  It's an erudite-sounding construction redolent of chemistry class, or perhaps the Swiss railway timetable, but he didn't want it applied to him.

Per corollary to the disappearance of "Negro" from ordinary usage, people who object to being described in some way requesting a different locution is within their rights.  I'm inclined to extend Mr Walsh's arguments, particularly because that "cis-" often comes bundled with some sort of reason to scold people, such as for "cisheteropatriarchy" or "cissexism."  Push back against such usage.  Don't refer to me in a way I don't want to be referred to as a prelude to shaming me for doing nothing wrong.  Please refer to us as Normals.

Likewise, in mental health circles, "neurodivergent" or "neuroatypical" might have better effect in getting people to go to their therapist or use their medications, in preference to diagnosing insanity or paranoia or something.  That's within clinical settings.  I can't wait for the first defendant to plead not guilty by reason of neurodivergence, though.  (In the manner of Antonio orating over Caesar's corpse, the possibility of mocking the clinical terms, with or without finger quotes, also suggests itself.)  Outside clinical settings, referring to people as "neurotypical" as a prelude to a guilt trip is also nyekulturny.  Please refer to us as Normals.

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH.

At the University of Wisconsin, seven hockey titles are historic.

As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would have it, those are the headlines, these are the details.

The national championship is coming home.

The Wisconsin women’s hockey team scored a 1-0 victory over Ohio State in the NCAA Division I championship game Sunday afternoon at AMSOIL Arena.

The victory capped a tournament run that include victories over the tournament’s top three seeds. The Badgers (29-10-2) defeated No. 3 Colgate in the regional final, No. 2 Minnesota in the national semifinal and finally the defending national champion Buckeyes.

Freshman Kirsten Simms’ goal at the 13:28 mark of the first period was the lone score of the game.

Senior goalie Cami Kronish did the rest. She turned away 31 shots and was named the most valuable player of the Frozen Four.

The championship raised UW's all-time total to seven, the best of any program. It also marked the third championship for seniors Kronish, Nicole LaMantia, Sophie Shirley, Natalie Buchbinder and Britta Curl.

The men's team?  Six national titles, four of those forty to fifty years ago, the most recent in 2006, and conducting a coaching search.

The best in the West, the heck with the East.  Let's Go Red!

NOTES ON AN OLD TIMETABLE.

Today in visionary transportation thinking?

Take the train to Montreal? It could happen. The Bangor Daily News reported that there could be a train that goes from Montreal to Boston if they get the money for it. It would go from Montreal to Sherbrooke (in Quebec) and then cross over into Vermont. Then it heads into New Hampshire and will go through Bethel, Auburn, Portland, and Old Orchard Beach. Then off to Boston.

It would take 14 hours and it's an overnight train where you would have dinner and be entertained. If you don't want to drive, what a great option. One way would cost around $212, but that also includes overnight accommodations.  It's cheaper than flying according to the Montreal Gazette. But as they pointed out, it's the comfort of not having to drive.

It's a long time in the making. If they do get the money and backing, the first leg would go between Montreal and Sherbrooke and that alone would cost $100 million.

It's being touted as a train from Montreal to Boston, but the stops in Maine would be popular too! What Canadian can resist Old Orchard Beach which already has a train station near the water? According to WMUR this is not on a fast track. It would be at least two years before this becomes a reality, and that's being optimistic.

Inevitably, it takes longer and is wicked expensive to put back that which you once had.  As late as the summer of 1954, the Grand Trunk Railroad (meaning Canadian National's lines in New England; the Grand Trunk Western was the Lake Huron to Chicago with a carferry to Milwaukee) laid on an all-stops franchise train that left Montreal or Portland at 8 a.m. and reached its destination at just past six in the evening.  In those days, the Boston and Maine, still running passenger trains in the grand manner, offered two-hour timings onward to Portland, although the fastest of those trains did not call at Old Orchard Beach.

As late as the mid-1930s, Grand Trunk and Boston and Maine cooperated on a weekends-only, overnight service with sleeping cars linking Montreal with Old Orchard Beach, still the Quebec Riviera.

After what we thought was "progress" turned out not to be (I did not envy motorists looking for places to park at the beach, the bid-rent curve was as steep as the Fed's recent balance sheet activity) we'll end up replacing a lot of the stuff that worked, and spending a lot more for a replacement that won't be as good.  I should be grateful nobody is dreaming of a French style high-speed line through the Presidential Range.

CONGESTION TODAY, CONGESTION TOMORROW, CONGESTION FOREVER.

Some of Chicago's Kennedy Expressway is so old it was built as the Northwest Expressway, and it's wearing out.  It seems like there's news of some sort of delay-lengthening crash, or ordinary congestion, in any drive-time traffic report.

The way to deal with that congestion is ... to take two lanes out of service, meaning no reversal to outbound of the express lanes for over a year.

Traffic on the Kennedy Expressway is about to become a whole new world of hurt for commuters come Monday night, as workers begin a lengthy construction project.

The Illinois Department of Transportation said the Kennedy will be under construction for three years.

The first phase, beginning March 20, involves a major overhaul of the inbound lanes between where the Kennedy and Edens expressways merge all the way south to Ohio Street.

"Rehabilitating the decks is going to make that a much smoother commute," IDOT District 1 bureau chief of construction Jon Schumacher said.

When the man said "much smoother" he meant fewer delays thanks to chuckholes eating tires. Motorists will not bounce along as they're all "brake, accelerator, brake, accelerator, pound your fist against the dashboard," to quote a radio spot for the Chicago and North Western Commuter Streamliners of years ago.

It won't be any faster.  Nor would it be any faster if the highway authority took those lanes out of service to provide space for more lanes.  It would take nerves of titanium, though, for anyone to propose that the Edens and the Kennedy and all the other expressways lakeside of the Tri-State Tollway be tolled.

THAT GRIM STRATEGY EQUILIBRIUM.

Word reaches Cold Spring Shops of a Chicago area bakery that has run afoul of cancel culture.

UpRising Bakery & Café in Lake in the Hills announced Friday that it plans to go out of business at the end of the month due to "horrific attacks" and "endless harassment" for its support of the LGBTQ+ community.

In a news release Friday, owner Corinna Sac reported that her "dream of an inclusive bakery to feed the community has since become a nightmare no businessperson could have anticipated" – and thus, she is closing the bakery on March 31.

That's right, this is a bakery in an upscale suburb catering to socially progressive elements.  Bear with me dear reader, cancel culture isn't just something for socially progressive elements.

"Closing our doors is the direct result of the horrific attacks, endless harassment, and unrelenting negative misinformation about our establishment in the last eight months," Sac said in a news release. "From an award-winning bakery that donates to local organizations and supports diversity and inclusion, we have been rebranded by misinformation as 'gay only' and 'pedophiles.' Local customers no longer come here because of the perceived threat that tarnished our good name and the fears of their license plates are photographed, and they are harassed."

UpRising Bakery & Café first opened in 2021. Sac said she had hoped to make difference by serving delicious food for all – including vegan and gluten-free options – and also by making wedding cakes for those in the LGBTQ+ community.

"Seeing gluten-free and vegan products sold with 350% markup saddened me. My heart broke reading emails from same-sex couples seeking a bakery for their wedding cake. People in this community need us," Sac said in the release.

Is anyone surprised that when bourgeois norms break down, get woke go broke is a symptom of a broader malaise?

[O]nce cooperation breaks down, and everybody is playing their grim strategy, finding a way back to a rationally cooperative equilibrium is hard. "Put another way, the majority-minority or more diverse or whatever nation the United States is likely to become will benefit more rather than less from a common set of norms."

In the case of the bakery, a boycott of the form they're facing is predictable.  It doesn't matter who unleashed the first cancel mob, it does matter that when people seek to cancel a bakery for not wanting to bake a same-sex wedding cake or cater a same-sex wedding reception, other people have the opportunity to seek to cancel a bakery that might know how to decorate such a cake or might be able to recommend a sympathetic caterer?  As a simple business proposition, couldn't the religious owner of a bakery who would rather do the traditional wedding cakes be in a better place being able to recommend the likes of Uprising to a client?  Or, for that matter, wouldn't the proprietor of Uprising be in a better place having the opportunity to refer provocative traditionalist customers to that more religious proprietor?

Taken together, cancellation begets cancellation, and cooperation breaks down.