MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree.

As was the case last year, this video features only the vintage trains in the sun room, running in a moderate tempo.  Feel free to enjoy them with a glass of hot tea, properly provided with a podstakannik, or a glass of mulled wine or perhaps egg-nog enlivened with a splash of bourbon or rum.

Rest assured, there are videos in preparation showing the scale model railroad rolling stock going through their paces, as well as showing tinplate trains chasing their tails at high speed the way children of all ages flock to see.

As was the case a year ago, I'm taking time away for a few football games, for a long winter's nap, for some tidying up around the house, and for some serious work down cellar.

Thank you for looking in.  Enjoy the Festive Season.  Posting will resume next year, some time after Three Kings.

SILVER BELLS ABOVE THE BUSTLE.

Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien correctly suggests, "Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown."

Well, yes.

Yes, with the kids making their list and checking it twice.  "Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant."  Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings, schoolteacher, school gift exchange, check, check, check.

My boyhood Christmas shopping was in downtown Milwaukee, after the streetcars. Mr O'Brien's Pittsburgh still had its Pennsylvania-gauge PCCs.

Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.

Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.

Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.

The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.

I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.

Milwaukee's Gimbel's had the same sort of narrower, wooden-step escalators on the upper two or three floors, including to the toy department on the top floor.  No overhead miniature train.  There was a kid-sized monorail orbiting above the Boston Store toy department.

LET THE GRADE-GRUBBING BEGIN.

Inside Higher Ed's Johanna Alonso compiled her favorite Festive Season greeting videos from assorted institutions of purportedly higher education.  My favorite is Louisiana at Monroe's Twelve Days of Finals.

I hope those twelve days of finals are finished before Festivus, which is 23 December, because once the grades are in comes the airing of grievances from students to faculty.  Yes, I could tell stories, but in the spirit of the Festive Season it might be better to say nothing a-tall.

Northern Illinois University conducted a contest, inviting students to submit designs for an official holiday card, to use their locution.  As far as I know, there's no greeting video, although headquarters put together the newsworthy moments of 2025.

The Inside Higher Ed compilation does not skew as woke as one might expect given the source.  Wellesley's compilers of student memories missed an opportunity, however: reunite surviving members of the Class of 1948 going sledding to do a send-up of a famous Amazon commercial.

IV. ADVENT.

Our first view of the Earth, live and in color, came Christmas Eve of a very difficult 1968.

That the view, and the astronauts' humility upon seeing it, might have inspired people to take better care of their environment is in its own way a blessing.  Good night to all of you on the good earth.

A STORY LINE TOO CRAZY FOR DOSTOYEVSKY.

On Saturday, we learned of an economics review session at Brown University that ended with shots fired.  When Cold Spring Shops resumed posting on Monday, law enforcement was still looking for their suspect or supects.  Providence authorities were not inspiring much confidence, at least among Militant Normals.

Sometimes it's prudent to hold off on any speculation until the evidence is in hand.  But Providence authorities are not doing much to clear the fog of war.  This story broke Saturday just after Navy sang second, with early reports of a "person of interest" questioned and released, and a second "person of interest" detained and questioned Sunday and ultimately released.  There was security camera tape available.  "The footage showed the gunman walking calmly down a street near campus, dressed in all black with his face covered."  The difficulties Providence authorities are having identifying the real suspect do not please Town Hall's Matt Vespa.

Monday evening came news of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion researcher sustaining a mortal wound, shot in the foyer of his condominium in Brookline, Massachusetts.  Dear reader, it is prudent to hold off on speculation, between the news networks and the internet were all sorts of assurances that the professor's murder had nothing to do with Brown or it might have been the jihad presenting itself and who knows what I might have missed paying attention to Aaron Rodgers doing Aaron Rodgers things on Monday Night Football.

FIRST WIN, THEN ATTEMPT TO GOVERN.

I had been hoping for most of this year to be able to put together some longer-focus stock-taking mini-dissertations on topics of more than passing interest to me that might be more durable than your typical social media fare.  Unfortunately, events have generally dictated otherwise.

One such topic has been the ongoing tussle between the communist and corporatist wings of the Democrats, particularly since one Donald Trump returned to the White House.  That the Jarrett regency took the White House under false pretenses and rubbed Normal noses in a Weimar freak show for four years might have had a lot to do with the second Trumpening.

Oh, expensive gasoline and the corona tyranny doubtless contributed.  The recriminations over the past year don't really call for a stock-taking post as those tussles have involved the usual suspects shouting from their usual corners, and the arguments of the past year are very much like the arguments that came to my attention more recently.

It was Regent Emeritus Barack Obama who offered the suggestion that inspired the title of this post.

Obama told the lawmakers to "focus" on winning back the Republican-controlled House in the 2026 midterm elections, indicating that after that the party could work more through those ideological divisions.

"Because I promise, when that gets done, we have enormous talent, and we are then going to be in a position, as the next presidential campaign ramps up, to sort through some of the differences," Obama said, according to excerpts of his remarks obtained by ABC News.

At best, we have gridlock, which might be the voters' preferred outcome, particularly when once noble-sounding words like "consensus" and "compromise" mean, respectively, the political class wins and the taxpayers get fleeced, and the faction requesting compromise gets three-fifths of what it wants.  What the former president wants might involve another political food fight.

He also told House Democrats that while the short-term goal is to win back the House, the longer-term goal is to "tell a story" to "bring [Democrats] back in." But, he added, they won’t be able to bring those people back in "if we don’t win the House of Representatives."

He's referring to voters who ticked the Trump box or stayed home.  The story to be told, though?

LIFE AT THE MARGIN.

In economics, does the concept of a "representative firm" in competitive market equilibrium make sense?  It's easy to draw up on the chalkboard, but in a world of identical firms and full information, thinking of all the price-taking firms as identical provides the class wiseacre with the opportunity to ask questions such as "in the case of a permanent adverse demand shock, which firm quits first?"  Thus, to the extent people teach the dynamics of competitive markets in any extended way, the idea of an "equilibrium firm," meaning one that under current conditions of supply and demand is indifferent between participating and not participating.  That leads to another set of opportunities for wiseacres, e.g. "why do the inframarginal firms have lower costs than the equilibrium firm, and what prevents the equilibrium firm from being more like an inframarginal firm?"  Good times.

There's an even more neglected actor in economics, namely the equilibrium consumer.  If we speak of an equilibrium of supply and demand, doesn't that suggest there is an equilibrium consumer, one who is, at the margin, indifferent between buying a little more of that good or not buying it?  We get so soon old and so late smart, the implications of being the equilibrium consumer dawned on me only after I took my pension.  "[Consider] a world that feels very much out of equilibrium, or one in which it appears that the equilibrium, thanks to returns to human capital and to smart machinery, feels more like Marx or Dickens than like the Treaty of Detroit."  And yes, academic economics has considered the way in which making decisions at the margin to do without present themselves.  I recall a line from one of my price theory texts in the Chicago or U.C.L.A. (motto: On! Wisconsin) tradition that goes something like "My wife says we need something and I respond 'Of course we need it.  What do we want to do without?'"  Yeah, that's likely to get you hauled before Student Affairs for some sæcular sin.  Or, less controversially, how many readers, particularly those of the Baby Boom era, recall asking for something only to hear Mom or Dad say "we can't afford that."  It's easier to instill the notion that stuff is expensive in youngsters than to get into a discourse about optimizing along margins and thinking through what, exactly, the kiddos would be willing to give up to have that Next Big Thing (which in the American High, involved more real dollars for fewer features than most of what's at Target or Best Buy these days).

All of that by way of a long prologue to a recent discussion, I think originating with Michael Green's "My Life Is a Lie," characterizing the national government's "poverty line" as "a broken benchmark" that "broke America."

This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.

That calculation seemed logical in 1963, when Henry Aaron was a rising star with the Milwaukee Braves.

The formula was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items, e.g. housing, if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line.

Orshansky was careful about what she was measuring. In her January 1965 article, she presented the poverty thresholds as a measure of income inadequacy, not income adequacy—”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”

She was drawing a floor. A line below which families were clearly in crisis.

For 1963, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income, as we’ve discussed. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage averaged $10/month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each other’s kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. With few luxury frills, the neighborhood kids in vo-tech could fix most problems when they did. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Retirement meant a pension income, not a pile of 401(k) assets you had to fund yourself.

There's all kinds of Cold Spring Shops material in that excerpt: restrictive zoning, increased labor force participation by married women, Medicare and Medicaid, student loans, frugal Depression babies, including those parents of Baby Boomers saying "we can't afford it."

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Regular order appropriations are the last thing Washington politicians want.  "It's as if nobody in Washington wants to be bothered with regular order appropriations."

VALUE ADDED AT THE CHECKOUT COUNTER.

I admit to preferring self-checkout at the grocery store, particularly when it works.  The incompetence tax I sometimes have to pay dealing with store cashier or takeout counter staffer reinforces that preference.  But when the self-checkout machinery doesn't work right, that makes working with it as difficult as dealing with the staffed checkout stations, which in principle are for dealing with more complicated transactions.

DONALD TRUMP, PRAGMATIST?

Yale historian Greg Grandin complains, "Trump Wants to Carve Up the World. It’s a Blueprint for Disaster."

One wonders what goes on in the minds of the architects of President Trump’s foreign policy. It seems as if they have all taken time to study the classic history books on the causes of the world wars — Margaret MacMillan’s “The War that Ended Peace,” or E.H. Carr’s “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” — and then said to themselves: That’s exactly where we want to take the world.

Mr. Trump, both in his first term and now during the first eleven months of his second, has made clear that the bipartisan post-Cold War consensus — by which the United States oversaw an economically integrated world order governed by common laws regulating property relations, trade and conflict — has outlived its usefulness. In its place the White House offers a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence.

This month, the White House issued its National Security Strategy report, which sought to codify this transition. The report hits all the notes associated with aggrieved America First nationalism: It denounces globalism, free trade and foreign aid, rejects nation-building, and calls on NATO members to spend a greater portion of their G.D.P. on defense spending. The United States, the report warns, will no longer “shoulder forever global burdens” that have no direct connection to its “national interest.”

The heart of the report is a pledge to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence.” In the past, militarists invoked the Monroe Doctrine largely out of habit, a recitation of a well-worn catchphrase. Here, though, it plays a more substantive role in defining what an America First future world order might look like.

For the uninitiated, the Monroe Doctrine is neither treaty nor law. It began life as a simple statement, issued by President James Monroe in 1823 recognizing the independence of Spanish American republics and warning Europe that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for “future colonization.”

Common Dreams stringer Brad Reed links to the article, quoting the juiciest Trump-bashing passages for the amusement and edification of his fellow moochers and sponges.

SIXTY YEARS AGO.

We didn't know it at the time, but the United States won the race to the Moon in earth orbit.  As kids, we commemorated the event using a plastic mosaic tile playset.

Gerhard "Everyman Commentary" Thielmann offers a more technical explanation of the importance of rendezvous and docking and how it worked.

Before Apollo could land on the lunar surface, several operations needed to be accomplished. Specifically, suits had to enable an astronaut to function beyond the spacecraft’s protective envelope, approach and docking had to be reliably performed, and tolerance of cramped confinement needed medical assessment in order to determine whether an arduous transit to lunar orbit and return could be feasible.

None of these were easy to carry off.  Project Gemini, using cramped spacecraft capable of extended time in space, and each mission worked on one or more of those operations.  Approach and docking?  That's not intuitive.  To catch up, you slow down and go low.  "Decades prior, yours truly sat utterly bewildered in a class on orbital mechanics—at least until the radial rate equations finally made some non-intuitive sense."

What we did with our play set looked like this in real life.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration photo retrieved from Everyman Commentary.

Physically docking two spacecraft came later.

Subsequent Gemini flights the following year eventually achieved docking, and further improved activities outside the spacecraft. These flights included Gemini missions VIII, X, XI and XII, together with multiple spacewalks. Malfunction of a substitute target cancelled the scheduled docking operation for Gemini IX-A, but still permitted the completion of other tasks. Together, the Gemini missions enabled America to refine spacecraft design and operations, thereby paving the way for more ambitious goals.

Although Moon expeditions have not taken place for over fifty years, rendezvous, docking, and extravehicular activity are regular practice transporting astronauts to the space station.

HOW LOW TRUST SOCIETIES UNRAVEL.

The investigation of Saturday's campus shooting at Brown University, where authorities are still looking for whoever pulled the trigger, is doing little to close the credibility gaps government officials are so good at creating, let alone to polish the tarnish off the Ivy League's notorious safety school.

It’s a horror show. That’s all I can think of right now. Every time the authorities get in front of the cameras to give an update on the Brown University shooting, it becomes another episode of Keystone Cops. This heinous crime is tragic—two people were killed. It’s also become a textbook case in how not to address the media or handle a crisis.

And no, you don’t need years of experience to know that when you have zero answers, maybe you shouldn’t hold a press conference.

“I don’t know” isn’t the phrase anyone wants to hear, and yet that’s what Brown University president Christian Paxson said when asked a basic question about what was happening inside the building where the school’s engineering classes are held. That was six hours after the attack. Then, a suspect was in custody, but that was corrected, only to be followed by the arrest of a person of interest who was later released. There’s no usable camera footage of the suspect.

Police also have no idea how the shooter entered the building.

Contrast that with the prompt response by senior administrators including the president, dean of liberal arts, and campus police chief  the evening of February 14, 2008.  The only second-guessing I will offer here is that on a Saturday during exam week, buildings are likely to be unlocked; that is, unless entry to campus buildings is for authorized (keycard holding) students, staff, and faculty at all times.  But, Matt Margolis continues, holding press conferences with no information forthcoming is of a piece with issuing weekly body counts and claiming to be winning in Vietnam.

No suspect. No arrest. No leads. No clue how he got inside the building. What about motive?

Well, witnesses heard the shooter yell “Allahu Akbar,” though Brown and local police are rather cagey about that angle of the story, refusing to comment on it. Hey, Democrats and media, the conspiracy theories you rail about; this is how they get spawned. And now, after the person of interest was released, there are reports of local law enforcement throwing the FBI under the bus.

What a mess. Even more of a reason not to go in front of the cameras, right?

I’ll tell you this, the shooter has had quite the head start, and he’s likely out of the area.

Law enforcement communications regularly leave details out of public statements in order to verify the veracity of witnesses or to catch suspects in a lie.  Perhaps saying nothing about key-card records or jihadi war-whoops is of that protocol.  But the absence of any comments about details that are circulating widely is only giving people who don't have much regard for officialdom or the Ivies material that might disrupt more lives.

IF YOU CAN'T SAY ANYTHING NICE.

Don't say anything a-tall.  I'm looking at you, Mr President.  As are the editors of The (Not Detroit) Free Press.  "Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead."

In his 50-plus years as a top American entertainer, Reiner—like most major Hollywood figures—was a liberal. And like a solid percentage of the country, he did not care for Trump. But there is no indication this was an act of political violence, and it is obscene for the president to try to make it into one.

Many Americans have come to expect the president to be petulant and self-centered. We’ve become inured to his wild social media ramblings. Yet he still finds ways to shock us on occasion; his statement on Reiner is exceptionally beneath the office he holds. Rob Reiner was not a political figure. He was merely an outspoken supporter of liberal causes, which of course was his right.

After a horrific weekend that included a lethal shooting at Brown University, the killing of three Americans by ISIS in Syria, and the slaughter of 16 people celebrating Hanukkah on a beach in Australia, the leader of the free world should be looking to unite Americans and condemn bigotry and violence wherever they take place in the world. Instead, he is kicking the corpse of someone who made movies that brought Americans together.

We're in the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome (many keyboard warriors refer to a cold civil war) and it's likely the nastiness will go on.

Trump almost certainly won’t walk it back, and the usual suspects will find some rhetorical contortions with which to defend this outburst. But there is no point in anyone defending this. It should be widely opposed—particularly by those who otherwise support him.

Yes, it's easy enough to find "the usual suspects" online, with the usual these-are-the-rules-you-made battle cries.  On the same services, though, are the likes of Derek Hunter, with a stronger rendition of "if you can't say anything nice."  "It’s Not Hard to NOT Be a Jerk."  

REALITY DECONSTRUCTS BROWN UNIVERSITY.

In April 2007, a mentally disturbed student took out his frustrations on fellow Virginia Tech students.  We withheld commentary on the day's events until the fog of war dissipated.  Mat "Dean Dad" Reed, posting anonymously on his Blogger platform, noted the vulnerability of campuses.

They're open, they're highly populated, they're lightly patrolled (if at all), and they're full of stressed-out people. In a way, they're almost naive, if it's possible for institutions to be naive. As I've mentioned before, they really aren't built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.

My reaction to the events of that day, watching Virginia Tech's students respond, was "That could be us," referring to Northern Illinois.  Our students might have intuited the same thing.  Those stressed-out people?  More so during exam week, and in December of 2007, a combination of potentially racially-motivated threats and immoderate weather led university administrators to revise the final examination schedule.  We got through exam week without any gunplay.  I don't know if any internal investigations after the fact learned anything about the seriousness of the threats.  Valentine's Day of 2008 might have pre-empted any such investigations.  We regrouped, and our students of the era had a new bond with their contemporaries at Virginia Tech.

III. ADVENT.

The late Charlie Kirk's last book offered advice on opting out of the rat race.

It was the culmination of a period that began in 2021, when Charlie, on the advice of Dennis Prager, first began observing the Sabbath, turning off his phone for a period of time every week. Initially, he managed only an hour. But as he discovered that it unlocked a completely elevated version of himself, he began to expand the time, until he was offline from sundown Friday to mid-morning Saturday—and later, until as late as Sunday morning. My phone would be on in case of an emergency, but people knew not to contact me unless there was a catastrophe that couldn’t wait for 24 hours.

During that time, we would rest. I’d let him sleep in on the weekends. The babies and I would go out for a walk in the morning, and I’d have coffee ready for him when he woke. The television stayed off, except for a football game here and there. Mostly, we spent the day praying, going for hikes, sitting in the sun, journaling, detaching from the noise.

Some people have words they use to get them into a specific mind-set. For Charlie, that was Shabbat Shalom. Even at the beginning, even when it was for just an hour, he would begin the Sabbath with that phrase. He was verbalizing something vital: I am committing to a definitive moment in time. Shabbat Shalom. And with that, his weekly mental health vacation would begin.

Yes, that's of a piece with not checking electronic mail in the morning or understanding the distinction between what is important and what somebody else thinks is urgent.  The validity, or not, of "getting and spending we lay waste our powers" has long mattered in the ordinary business of life.

What ever happened to Mark Twain's hobbyist carriage drivers? To refresh your memory: offer them wages and they would give up the hobby. Tom Sawyer.

Next comes Daniel Hamermesh, formerly of Michigan State, now with Texas and Royal Holloway, with a properly Hamermeshian formulation. “It’s unfair if highly paid workaholics force their hours on others.” Yes, that's the traditional problem with free competition, perhaps the workaholics obtain their high pay by outworking everyone else. "By imposing their own long hours on others, highly paid people can end up forcing their subordinates to work harder than is fair. Perhaps this is a good argument for higher tax rates on very high earners – a sin tax to discourage them from working excessively long hours."

The weekly sabbatical (yes, the Hebrew for "seven" and "sabbath" share a common root) might help damp down the workplace stress that all that secular advice attempts to moderate.

Charlie wanted to heal the country, and he saw his conversations with students on campus as a piece of the puzzle. But when he was on campus, if someone was screaming at him, he knew they weren’t actually listening. When you’re constantly combative and fighting, you have no time to treat other people like human beings. Charlie genuinely felt that if the world had a weekly day of rest, just one, it would be the ultimate game changer.

The call to action here is very important. People will say, “Okay, this sounds great in theory, but how do I do it?” The answer is, it will look different for everyone. Charlie didn’t observe the Sabbath perfectly. There were times when he was traveling and he couldn’t do a traditional Friday to Sunday morning. So he’d have to adjust. But the Sabbath is the one commandment that if you choose not to do it, you are the one who’s missing out on the blessing. Not God. Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have to rest.

Put another way, it is more important to make the effort to be good to yourself, even if you sometimes fall short.  You do not have to feel guilty about disconnecting from the hubbub.  You have time: time management is work.  Outworking everyone else is hazardous to your health.  That breathing spell you're hoping for isn't going to happen.  Per corollary, it's easy enough to think you have to be on all weekend.  Those sports your kids are playing in?  Enjoy their efforts, put the electronic shackles away.

Yes, the Kirks couch their essay in sacred terms.

One day, your children will tell their children how you lived. What will they say? That you were always busy, always stressed, always distracted? Or will they say, “My father knew how to stop. My mother knew how to delight. They made time for joy. They protected space for God.”

Better that than "As I hung up the 'phone it occurred to me, my boy was just like me."

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The early snows are good reason to go down cellar and work on the railroad.  Fortunately, I was able to mow the yard and give it a Thanksgiving Milorganite feeding before the snow fell.

Contemporary model railroading practice treats the layout as a stage upon which a cast of scripted performers (the timetabled and extra trains) perform.  Thus, track plans include provisions for staging the trains awaiting their cue.  Many of the photos and videos from our documentation of construction show the staging along the west wall, which is under Rockport at the north end.  Here comes a staging peninsula that will be under West Gloucester and Gloucester in the center of the basement.

We're looking toward the northeast corner of the basement.  Four staging tracks are already in place about halfway around the peninsula.  In the background is the steel plant that has also featured in several posts.

Looking southeast, the four staging tracks will narrow to one.  Yes, the peninsula goes around the workshop.  A post from a year ago looks at what is in place between the steel works and the staging peninsula.

Yes, that's still a cluttered workshop.  And yes, that is a gap in the benchwork.  The four tracks narrow to one where they do in order to cross a single, lift-out track permitting easier ingress to and egress from the workshop.  I'm not as flexible as my younger self was.

SPONSORED RESEARCH IS RISK-AVERSE AND UNIMAGINATIVE.

That's been my position for years.

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Peter Savodnik suggests it's worse than that.  "For years, those who questioned the calamity of climate change were treated like pariahs. Now, their day of vindication has come."

QUINTESSENTIAL BLUDGEONSPEAK.

An infusion of printed money during the corona tyranny was so tempting to Minnesota officials that even New York's Times had to notice.  "Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration."  It's possible that the grift began long before the state's Democrat governor did what Democrat governors did when Tony Fauci panicked.

In July 2019, Minnesota state officials spotted early signs of fraud that would eventually siphon away more than $1 billion in taxpayer money, but they quickly faced pressure from leaders of the charitable group Feeding Our Future to stop asking questions, according to multiple former employees at the Minnesota Department of Education.

The scandal, which has already led to 61 convictions, has widely been viewed as a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland called it "the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme" in the United States.

Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick said those convicted "took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to carry out a massive fraud scheme that stole money meant to feed children."

But state officials say the schemes aimed at diverting federal dollars meant for people who are poor, food insecure or disabled, actually started far sooner, months after Minnesota's Democratic Gov. Tim Walz took office in 2019. In its early stages, members of the charitable group Feeding Our Future billed the state for some $3.4 million.

By 2021, however, that number ballooned. Before it was finally halted, Feeding Our Future had falsely claimed to have served 91 million meals, for which the group received nearly $250 million in federal funds, according to federal prosecutors. That money did not go to feed kids, federal officials said. Instead it was used to fund lavish lifestyles.

Another day, another manifestation of rent-seeking.  It's pretty standard stuff.  It is the reaction of the editorial board of the Star-Tribune up where there are no Lombardi trophies that interests me.  "Trump’s anti-Somali rampage thrusts Minnesota into the national spotlight."  Let the bludgeonspeak commence.  "The president’s racist, divisive rhetoric will do nothing to actually prevent fraud."  It gets better from there.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

That final sentence contains one nugget of truth: undoubtedly there are Somali immigrants who are in the United States seeking a better life, who migrated because where they used to live is not a pleasant place, who might be won over to voting for less crazy Democrats not to mention Republicans with the right sort of message, whose children and grandchildren will lose the headscarves.  Otherwise, though, the editorial is an exercise in shaming the deplorables.

OPPRESSION OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE.

As part of the American Semiquincentennial, footie's World Cup will take place in the Americas, with some games scheduled to take place in Seattle.  In June, which cheeseheads grew up understanding as Dairy Month, but of late, the alphabet people have made it an occasion for shedding of inhibitions.

BLUDGEONSPEAK.

Six weeks ago we noted that self-styled progressives were so used to scolding and shaming people that they would often dispense with making an argument.  Eric S. Raymond now describes that conduct as bludgeonspeak.

Bludgeonspeak is the use of invented terminology, or historical terminology that has been hijacked and corrupted, and then emptied of all meaning except as an attempt at moral blackmail.

Here are some notable bludgeonspeak items in 2025: "racist", "fascist", "homophobe", "transphobe", "islamophobe", "far-right". Also, the term "genocide" might not be quite there yet, but it's being pushed in that direction pretty hard.

At ¡No Pasarán!, a site popular with the Militant Normals of Pajamas Media, comes advice on how best to deal with bludgeonspeak.  Be like Maggie Thatcher.  "I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."  Which means the imagined -isms and phony -phobias get the respect they deserve, which is none-a-tall.

You don't hate women, you miserable misogynist, do you? Correct? Not anymore than you're frightened of gays, you wretched homophobe, are you? Or of Muslims, you wicked Islamophobe? You just don't want to be shamed endlessly in order to be silenced when those groups' wishes are used to become the epitome of national (or local) policy. All the while having those allegedly oppressed victims and martyrs, along with the country's politicians, believe the worst of you.

Put another way, refuse to be shamed because someone accuses you of committing a meaningless sæcular sin.

THE POVERTY OF POVERTY STUDIES.

If you see a big house and a lot of little houses, does it suffice to complain about how big the big house is?  In the potted political economy popular with Common Dreams types, the answer is probably yes.

A landmark report on global inequality published Wednesday shows that the chasm between the richest slice of humanity and everyone else continued to expand this year, leaving the top 0.001%—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires—with three times more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population combined.

The global wealth gap has become so staggering, and its impact on economies and democratic institutions so corrosive, that policymakers should treat it as an emergency, argues the third edition of the World Inequality Report, a comprehensive analysis that draws on the work of hundreds of scholars worldwide. Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, a researcher at the World Inequality Lab, is the report’s lead author.

“Inequality has long been a defining feature of the global economy, but by 2025, it has reached levels that demand urgent attention,” reads the new report. “The benefits of globalization and economic growth have flowed disproportionately to a small minority, while much of the world’s population still face difficulties in achieving stable livelihoods. These divides are not inevitable. They are the outcome of political and institutional choices.”

The richest 10% of the global population, according to the latest data, own three-quarters of the world’s wealth and capture more income than the rest of humanity. Within most countries, it is rare for the bottom 50% to control more than 5% of national wealth.

“This concentration is not only persistent, but it is also accelerating,” the report observes. “Since the 1990s, the wealth of billionaires and centimillionaires has grown at approximately 8% annually, nearly twice the rate of growth experienced by the bottom half of the population. The poorest have made modest gains, but these are overshadowed by the extraordinary accumulation at the very top.”

“The result,” the report adds, “is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability.”

Ah, yes, would you rather be Adam Gimbel or Sam Walton, making your money by reducing the price those billions pay for their staples, or Louis Faberge, jeweller to the Tsars?  Market processes reduce poverty and lift up middle classes.  World poverty has declined in the first quarter of this century.  That is something to hail.  Indeed, we might have Trumpian populism and the trade protectionism that infects both major U.S. political parties as a consequence of that nasty neoliberalism.  "In India and China, the past three decades of freer markets have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat the previous three decades of left-leaning development economics had singularly failed to accomplish."

OPTING OUT OF YET ANOTHER CARTEL?

Very interesting.  "Notre Dame opts to skip postseason entirely after being left out of College Football Playoff."  Why?

The Fighting Irish played in last season's national championship game but were on the playoff bubble this fall after a 10-2 record, including an opening-week loss at Miami. Notre Dame was ranked in the top 10 of every ranking by the playoff selection committee until Sunday's final rankings, when it fell to 11th and was the first team left out. Meanwhile Miami (10-2) earned the final at-large berth.

The Fighting Irish had won 10 consecutive games and were idle Saturday but fell anyway. Athletic director Pete Bevacqua called the previous rankings a “farce and total waste of time” to ESPN.

How the committee would view Miami and Notre Dame had been a subplot all season. The committee’s chairman, Hunter Yurachek, had said Miami’s head-to-head win wasn’t a significant factor — until Sunday, when BYU’s drop in the rankings after its loss in the Big 12 championship moved Miami up, creating a head-to-head comparison between the schools.

Notre Dame joined Iowa State and Kansas State in declining bowl bids despite being eligible, although the circumstances were far different; the Cyclones and the Wildcats are each going through coaching transitions. The Big 12 Conference fined both schools $500,000 for saying no to the postseason.

Last year, an early season loss to Northern Illinois didn't keep Notre Dame out of the playoffs.  That year's Northern Illinois team ended its season with a bowl victory.

WHICH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT DOES THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE EXTEND?

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Slaughter ostensibly focusing on the powers a president has to fire supposedly nonpartisan experts in government agencies.  The case offers lots of material for a student of the independent regulatory commissions, not that I'm going to come out of retirement and do so.  Power Line's John Hinderaker, a lawyer, summarizes as "The case tests the constitutionality of the 'independent agencies' that Congress has established over the years–independent, because their commissioners are not under the control of the president."

WRITE THE BOOK, MATT!

A column about serendipity during college noting, "Early-career breaks are largely accidental; you’re likelier to be accident-prone if you’re where the action is. An otherwise-wonderful school in the middle of nowhere won’t have the same sorts of accidental opportunities as one in or near a major city." that might be as much about the importance of a core curriculum to help students figure out their strengths and weaknesses as it is about agglomeration economies at large universities includes one of Matt Reed's pet parenthetical asides that might be an advertisement for a survey course about Western Civilization.  "(Someday, somewhere, I’ll get the chance to teach my dream course: Money, Sex and Power: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. If you can’t find anything interesting among those three topics, I really don’t know what to tell you.)"

Well, yes, if you didn't already know it, economics has no boundaries.  I prefer the formulation "sex, death, and why the lines are longest at the roller coaster," but yes, you can probably work either my formulation or his into any of the traditional social sciences.  Well, "relentless combination of mischief and logic" might also work.  But you can't let the Critical Theory types who destroyed English anywhere near such a course.

LET'S JUST SAY WE REMEMBERED.

I've maintained that the Packers might do better if they have to work to win their division.  It helps that the Bears field a good team; it helps even more to beat the Bears.

The Packers, though, have to win.

That photo is from eleven years ago.  It's representative of conditions on the ground here today.  That stringy little maple seedling has grown some since.

AS THE WORLD TURNS.

It takes forty-eight hours for a calendar day to be ticked off all the world's calendar pages, from 12.01 am immediately west of the International Date Line to 11.59 pm immediately east of that line.  The Santa Tracker we hear about at Christmas only has to be active for twenty-four hours, as Santa is delivering those toys in the midnight hours of each time zone.

Historian Stanley Weintraub uses that concept, and borrows from Eugene O'Neill to create Long Day's Journey into War: December 7, 1941.  Yes, Book Review N^o. 9 might have better been offered yesterday, but per his logic, it was already December 8 in Tokyo when the first air strikes reached Oahu.

THAT UNDENIABLE TRUTH.

I refer, dear reader, to the late Rush Limbaugh's Undeniable Truth of Life N^o. 24, "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream."  That's been useful in a variety of ways, including some sort of squabble among the intersectional wokies over the way male-to-female crossers generally present themselves as well as some sort of Theorized argument about why working out is an oppressive regime.  Recently, Marie Claire offered its own twist on "the personal is political" with "The MAGA Beauty Aesthetic Tells the Story of America Today."

II. ADVENT.

And in those days a decree went out from Gavin Newsom that all the rich be taxed.  Warned by the Magi, they fled to Texas.

California was once known as the destination for anyone seeking a fortune, from the Gold Rush to Hollywood. The image of a line of wagon trains heading West has now been replaced by a line of U-Hauls heading anywhere but California. Unable to stem the exodus, California is again toying with retroactive taxes — targeting the wealthy regardless of whether they flee the state. Welcome to Hotel California, “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

California democrats have long faced the same dilemma of constantly tapping the wealthy to cover their deficit spending: these individuals and their wealth are mobile. They can simply leave and many are doing so.

Herod had no authority in Egypt, but California's taxing authorities seek the powers of Cæsar Himself to hunt down inconvenient exiles anywhere.  The political economy of inequality and taxation has long been material for Cold Spring Shops meditations.

English language translations of Luke sometimes have Caesar's subjects being enrolled, and sometimes they're taxed.  Does it therefore follow that when we journey to the county clerk to enroll as voters, or when the census-taker knocks on our door, in order that seats in the House of Representatives or the Illinois Legislature be properly apportioned, that we are Governor Pritzker's cattle or Donald Trump's sheep?

No, dear reader, it is that we have moral authority as humans, whether that comes from our very existence or as an endowment from Divine Providence, to exercise control over the situation.  Furthermore, the concept of "possession" requires concepts of ownership and accounting that Luke, the apostles, or Great Caesar himself did not grasp.  As an exercise, work out how unequal wealth ownership was in the days when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.

Today's lesson draws on an observation by Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux in The Daily Economy.

Evidence of social unrest in pre-industrial and nonmarket societies doesn’t count. Economic arrangements in such societies are fundamentally different than in our own. And unlike in our market economy, the amount of wealth in nonmarket economies is largely fixed. Therefore, in nonmarket economies, more wealth for some people does indeed mean less wealth for other people. Our economy differs categorically: Because the amount of wealth in market economies isn’t fixed, people get rich by creating more wealth rather than by seizing the wealth of others. In market economies, more wealth for rich people means, not less, but more wealth for other people.

When I'm feeling puckish I'll challenge people to find a passage in Scripture that has anything positive to say about a tax collector.  The corrupt thee shall always have.  So, too, shall ye have conscience-cowboys who hold a zero-sum view of wealth or judge all of contemporary life by the fictional stylings of Charles Dickens.

IT IS DECEMBER, AND IT IS BEARS WEEK.

How many times must I remind readers that the weather weenies love to scare people?  "Triple polar vortex sends temperatures plunging in central and eastern U.S. as 1st Arctic cold blast moves in."

Oh, please.

The first of three rounds of cold Arctic air from a shifting polar vortex has sent temperatures plunging across the central and eastern U.S., threatening centuries-old record lows in cities and towns from Iowa to Maine.

And meteorologists forecast two more blasts of frigid temperatures for millions of people over the next two weeks.

“The week will end with some of the coldest air of the season so far, as a front advances from the Midwest into the Northeast and mid-Atlantic,” said Renee Duff, AccuWeather senior meteorologist.

“A displacement of the polar vortex is allowing Arctic air to seep into the central and eastern U.S.,” Duff said. “A second cold outbreak is in the forecast next week, and a third round of frigid air is likely during the middle of the month.”

Which raises the possibility of a White Christmas at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, just like the ones we used to know.

Right in time for professional football's title drive.  The Packers host Chicago, play at Denver, then play Saturday evening at Chicago, and after Christmas host Baltimore (the former Browns, not the Colts).  Foul weather cities with outdoor stadiums all.

WHY HIGHER ED GETS MORE TURNING POINT CHAPTERS.

Defending a student who gets zero points for writing a bad answer might not be the hill to die on.

On the other hand, the woke parody of the Consciousness Revolution never fails to provoke Normals.

An a cappella group at Kent State University in Ohio allegedly banned white students from auditioning for certain solos and disciplined a longtime member for questioning the race-based policy.

Emails obtained by Campus Reform display how Vocal Intensity A Cappella limited certain solos to “people of color,” claiming white students would be engaging in “cultural appropriation” if they were to perform them.

The article is from two days ago and as we publish there have been no responses from Kent State's deanlets.  In the Oppression Olympics, there are no medalists.  Everybody loses.

THE PROFESSOR'S JOB IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

Outside the Beltway contributor Steven Taylor, who has both classroom and administrative experience, weighs in on the Oklahoma grading controversy, with a professional judgement that matches my impressions of the "reaction paper."

In simple terms, the student received a poor grade not because of her beliefs, but because she didn’t answer the question that was asked and did not fulfill any of the stated criteria. The assignment was to react to a specific article. Apart from making a few references to “the article,” there is almost nothing about the article’s content (the closest specific appears to be the student disagreeing with the article by endorsing children teasing other children over gender issues, which the article criticized). There is therefore no clear link back to the article (worth 10 points), nor is there a specific reaction to the content of the article (worth 10 points). The piece is just a rumination, in super vague terms I would note, about the student’s views, and so I can see why the instructor took off the 5 points for clarity. I could make a case to give the essay maybe a 3 to 5 instead of 0 (there is some tenuous connection to the general topic of the article, with one very weak reference and her point is clear, to a point), but the 0 is perfectly defensible. This is, after all, a reaction paper with very little direct reaction taking place.

Exactly.

EMERGENCE IN REAL TIME?

Some years ago, the fishapod, Tiktaalik roseae, had its fifteen minutes of fame as the possible missing link between sea and land animals, as well as being the spittin' image of those Darwin badges people put on their tailgates.

Now consider those scary giant Asian hornets of a few years ago.  Snack time for the right kind of Japanese frog.

Researchers expected danger when they watched the frog hunt, bracing for stings and preparing for drama. Instead, the frog cannonballed the hornet without panic or a second of hesitation, behaving like a regular at a diner who has ordered the same spicy dish for 20 years and sees no reason to act surprised now.

Soon, the scientists learned the frog doesn't worry because it carries a natural resistance to the hornet's venom. Generations of frogs living near hornet nests built that skill the same way old towns build traditions: slowly, quietly, and without sending anyone a memo.

David Manney quips,

It helps to remember that nature has a sense of humor that humans rarely match. A creature no larger than a handful of change solved a problem that once filled many search bars with fear. Somewhere, a committee still plans meetings, while the frog ate the threat and called it a day.

All of which is true, although that's not good news for people who like the idea of Intelligent Design when the Design is a consequence of Their Intelligence.

Closer to home, urban trash pandas are also adapting to their environment.

Studying photos of raccoons from crowdsourced wildlife platforms, scientists noticed that city animals had shorter snouts, a trait often seen in species that learn to live near people.

Shorter snouts, calmer behavior, more curiosity, and fewer jitters around humans. When garbage trucks roar past, you can nearly hear raccoons shrug.

People living in larger cities might not need a paper to confirm that theory. That animal that once ran from porch lights now stares back like a teenager who knows you can't make him leave.

Don't plan on a new sort of house pet any time soon, though.  Mutation, selection, and adaptation still take place in geologic time.

Raccoons may continue down this path, with faces that may shorten further. Behavior may mellow, while curiosity may sharpen. None of that means raccoons line up for bath time or belly rubs. Evolution moves like a slow train, while urban life may nudge raccoons toward something tame in a different century.

Right now, though, the raccoon you meet near the trash cans still belongs to the wild.

Admire the wit, respect the claws, and, for all that's holy, close the lids.

David Manney concludes that post with, "The messy world people built created smarter scavengers.  The scary part?  We shaped them without meaning to."

Let that be a caution to the Men of System who mean to shape reality.

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.

It's instructive, and sometimes scary, to look at the stencils on railroad tank cars or to become familiar with what those numbers on the placards mean.  But Maine Central safety supervisor Geoffrey Doughty gets a different sort of fish story to tell.  First, though, he shares the experience that comes with being the FNG.

Frequently the job involved hazardous materials, and every call made me wish I had paid greater attention to my high school chemistry teacher. Any time a car containing hazmat derailed the safety department became involved. One of my first experiences was in early May when a tank car of liquefied petroleum gas derailed near Twin Mountain, N.H. As it was morning, my more experienced partner said he’d go up and suggested I follow in the afternoon so he could go home. I was the low man on the seniority list, so I had no reason to object. It was a lovely day in Portland; the sun was out and it was a balmy afternoon in the high 70s as I drove north. By the time I arrived in the White Mountains (near the famed Mt. Washington Hotel), the temperature was hovering around 35 degrees and snowflakes were falling. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a light jacket.

Lesson of the day: Have warm clothes in the trunk of your car. Although there was no spill or leak, I still had to babysit the scene until the car was back on the rails. By dusk, it was sent on its way.

On other occasions, the 3 am phone call involves biological, not chemical, spills.  “We just dumped 10,000 gallons of fish oil in the Penobscot River. What do you want to do about it?”  After business hours, the Coast Guard are the controlling authority.

Fish were processed at a facility in Eastport, Maine, at the far end of Maine Central on the soon-to-be abandoned Eastport Branch. Tank cars of fish oil were filled there and shipped to some other plant that used it in fertilizer.

“Why did we dump 10,000 gallons of fish oil in the Penobscot?” I asked.

Apparently, the spill occurred in Bangor Yard during switching moves. The cap on the bottom of the car wasn’t seated properly and came off, dumping the smelly fluid on the ground, into a sewer, and into the adjacent river.

“Let’s see,” I said groggily. “It’s not really hazardous, although the smell could start a stampede … [sleepy pause] … It’s only going back where it came from … [another sleepy pause] … Call the Coast Guard and ask if there’s anything we have to do.”

From the Penobscot to the Atlantic ... “Coast Guard says that it’s only going back to where it came from. Good night!”

MIDDLE SCHOOL REINFORCES SOCIAL STRATIFICATION.

Another day, another post featuring commonplace observations becoming controversial.  Today, the commonplace comes from an academic abstract, "Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence," from the June 2013 issue of Social Development.

The current study examines whether being high in gender typicality is associated with popularity, whether being low in gender typicality is associated with rejection/teasing, and whether teasing due to low gender typicality mediates the association with negative mental health. Middle school children (34 boys and 50 girls) described hypothetical popular and rejected/teased peers, and completed self-report measures about their own gender typicality, experiences with gender-based teasing, depressive symptoms, anxiety, self-esteem, and body image. Participants also completed measures about their peers' gender typicality, popularity, and likeability. Results indicated that popular youth were described as more gender typical than rejected/teased youth. Further, being typical for one's gender significantly predicted being rated as popular by peers, and this relationship was moderated by gender. Finally, low gender typicality predicted more negative mental health outcomes for boys. These relationships were, at times, mediated by experiences with gender-based teasing, suggesting that negative mental health outcomes may be a result of the social repercussions of being low in gender typicality rather than a direct result of low typicality.

It's reassuring, I suppose, to have peer-reviewed research confirming what those of us who survived middle school or junior high have long known.

I do know that a middle school is a toxic environment in which kids try to recalibrate their place in the social hierarchy. Almost everywhere, the kids who have athletic potential might head it up. There might be cliques, with all the sometimes nasty dynamics of insiders and hangers-on, taking shape. There might be opportunities, somewhere, but not universally, for kids who show some kind of academic talent, or perhaps promise in the performing arts.

Then there are the kids who ... well, are none of the above.

Adolescence is like that, and the junior high pecking order might persist all the way to fraternity and sorority rush.

Today, though, it's an upper-division reaction essay out of the University of Oklahoma, rather than a correction or clarification about the world of greasers, freaks, jocks, and nerds that makes the commonplace observation controversial.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S SOCIALIST REALISM.

Common Dreams contributor John Murphy, deacon of the Church of Government, sounds the alarm.  "We Must Save the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal’ From Trump Destruction."

No, we're not talking about a chamber where Cardinal Electors assemble in conclave, rather, we're talking about a superfluous nest for bureaucrats.

Painted figures haunt an empty building. A boy leaning on a pair of crutches. A father and son wandering a barren railroad track. A nuclear family at a picnic table. These poignant scenes were painted by two of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, Ben Shahn and Philip Guston. No one is around to see them. They are on the walls of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building in Washington, DC, one of forty-five federal properties currently earmarked for sale. The staff who worked in the building have been mostly fired, furloughed, or relocated. Only the murals remain—and perhaps not for long.

The Cohen Building has been called the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” for its ambitious mural cycles. Shahn and Guston, as well as Seymour Fogel and Ethel and Jenne Magafan, gave indelible form to New Deal tenets: the dignity of labor, the benefit of public works, and the need for a social safety net. A detail of Fogel’s Wealth of the Nation, painted for the lobby, is on the cover of my survey of New Deal art: it crystallizes the period belief in the mutual power of mind and muscle to secure a prosperous future. If the Cohen building is sold, these masterpieces of public art will be in peril. As Timothy Noah has reported, a private developer is unlikely to bear the cost of renovating and maintaining the building, much less the murals. It would be cheaper to tear the whole thing down.

Our President's efforts to drain the swamp and hive off superfluous bureaucrats and buildings are more symbolic than substantive as long as rent-seekers covet real estate along the National Mall, such as the Cohen Building along Independence Avenue.

THE RECEIVERS ARE THAT GOOD.

The true professional concentrates on eliminating errors.

One of the referees from the Thanksgiving game between the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions had an intriguing explanation for wide receiver Dontayvion Wicks’ touchdown play.

The highlight took place early into the second quarter. Wicks caught a 22-yard pass from quarterback Jordan Love as he had a great contest from the Lions defender. He maintained his balance while keeping his feet inside the end zone, preventing them from going out of bounds.

Lions reporter Colton Pouncy interviewed the NFL’s Vice President of Instant Replay Mark Butterworth after the game. One of the topics involved Wicks’ touchdown, which the referee explained why they upheld the call.

“What did you see on the second quarter touchdown to Dontayvion Wicks that led you to confirm he had possession of the ball and both feet in bounds?” Pouncy asked.

“The ruling on the field was a touchdown. We saw control with his right foot down and his left down in the end zone and then a third step out of the end zone,” Butterworth answered.

“Was there any discussion about a bobble?” Pouncy followed up.

“No. These receivers are that good. He controls the ball with his hand. But with his hands or arm above his body, while pulling it down, by rule, he can actually pull that ball into his body as he completes the process of a catch,” Butterworth replied.

Yes, on Thanksgiving, and Lion defenders can still get away with pass interference.

There is enough in the definition of a "catch," particularly that "completing the process" part that the next spectacular catch you see might not, after review, be a catch. A well-executed sideline catch with both feet inbounds and the receiver promptly going out of bounds can, by rule, be not a catch because the receiver has not made a proper football move.  Watch for something like that to present between now and the end of the Super Bowl.

NOT ALL MOSLEMS.

I told you I could post all week using only commonplace observations becoming controversial.  Today's example comes from Common Dreams.  “Exploiting a single incident to cast suspicion on Afghans—people who have already endured decades of displacement and America’s forever wars—is both irresponsible and cruel.”  The "single incident" involved an Afghan man formerly involved in Operation Enduring Freedom who was brought to the United States during Dementia Joe's bug-out and who is accused of killing one National Guard troop and seriously injuring another in the Federal Capital.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY.

Oh, did the North Atlantic hurricane season end Sunday?  Sorry, we were otherwise occupied.

That's the most snow recorded in one storm in DeKalb in November, courtesy of what the Weather Channel referred to as "Bellamy."  "Chan" is now churning up the Atlantic Coast, with ripples of annoying snow in here midafternoon, that after the consensus was for it all to have been done last night.

THE CROSS-BORDER RIVALRY FROM JANESVILLE TO WOODRUFF.

Pajamas Media's David Manney contemplates "Wisconsin's Greatest Football Feuds."

People growing up in western Wisconsin carry a unique brand of irritation towards Minnesota. Families near Eau Claire, Altoona, Hudson, and La Crosse feel the Vikings' rivalry more intensely because purple jerseys appear in grocery aisles, fishing docks, and workplace break rooms.

Folks living near Milwaukee, Racine, and Green Bay feel a stronger pull towards the Bears' rivalry.

Proximity dictates which fans get under your skin, except for a very close friend of mine who lives in Green Bay, a Vikings fan surrounded by a sea of green and gold.

Writers who've covered the rivalries for years, framing the battles, rarely capture how Wisconsin geography carves fans into two camps: one rolling its eyes at Minnesota pride, while the other spars with Chicago fans who NEVER whisper.

He didn't mention Marinette and Menominee, perhaps because the other rivalry of the Black and Blue Division comes into play somewhere along a line between Manistique and Marquette, along the old time zone divider, where the radios west of that line are tuned to Brewer and Packer broadcasts.

WHEN COMMONPLACES BECOME CONTROVERSIAL.

Reason's Jacob Sullum offers an example.  Six elected officials recently reminded citizens in military or intelligence service that they do not have to follow illegal orders.

The implication, of course, is that members of the armed forces might face situations in which they have to choose between following orders and adhering to the law. But the video does not get into specifics, and it never mentions Trump or anyone else by name, let alone refer to an official with "contemptuous words."

Under normal circumstances, each of the participants in that reminder could have demurred by noting they were offering a commonplace.  I could probably post for a week or two solely on such commonplaces turning into controversies owing to the context in which people offer them.