MARKING OFF.

Grades in, garden in, electronic mail autoresponse set to "Leave me alone", time to go off the grid for a few days.  Thanks for looking in.

TODAY'S COMMENCEMENT ADVICE.

First Lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at Bowie State University.

For generations, in many parts of this country, it was illegal for black people to get an education.  Slaves caught reading or writing could be beaten to within an inch of their lives.  Anyone -- black or white -- who dared to teach them could be fined or thrown into jail.  And yet, just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, this school was founded not just to educate African Americans, but to teach them how to educate others.  It was in many ways an act of defiance, an eloquent rebuttal to the idea that black people couldn’t or shouldn’t be educated. 

She juxtaposes this history with a contemporary idea that strongly requires rebutting.

Take a stand against the media that elevates today’s celebrity gossip instead of the serious issues of our time.  Take a stand against the culture that glorifies instant gratification instead of hard work and lasting success.

And as my husband has said often, please stand up and reject the slander that says a black child with a book is trying to act white.  Reject that.

Indeed.

I recall first encountering that slander during my final year in Detroit, and being dismayed by the rejection of all that was proper in the civil rights struggles that it entailed.

Thank you, Mrs Obama, for being a more effective messenger than I could ever hope to be.

INDEED.

With commencement season wrapping up, an encouraging story of a recent graduate who found something she enjoyed doing.

A transfer student from Highland Community College in Freeport, Ill., [Heather] Jurs said the decisions to major in geography and to transfer to NIU were clear choices.

“I had always loved geography, but I selected it as my major because I had two great teachers in my high school and community college that opened my eyes to the world around me. I chose NIU because of its great geography and teaching programs,” she says. “The transition from Highland to NIU was really smooth. All of my classes transferred easily, I was able to begin my major and teaching classes as soon as I transferred, and I was able to complete my degree in the same number of years it would have been if I had started as a freshman at NIU.”

There tend to be opportunities, even in difficult times, for determined people.  Our graduate has this concluding comment. “Pick your major based on what you love doing and don’t worry about what others think. I can’t tell you how many times I had to answer the question, ‘What are you going to do with a geography major?’”I propose that practical-minded people invert that question. It usually doesn't come up with business or engineering or programming majors, but perhaps it is those majors who should have to explain what they propose to do with that degree. "Be miserable, if well-paid, for the next 40 years" doesn't cut it.

GOVERNMENT FAILURE

Despite the best efforts of various Daleys, current mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the Illinois Democratic Party, Chicago is the kind of place that people decide it is good to be from, and there are fewer young people enrolling in the common schools. The logical thing for a school board to do is to consolidate and close a few schools, but to do so allows the Perpetually Aggrieved to express a multiplicity of grievances

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, who is [as is Chicago Public Schools superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett] African American, has called the planned closures “racist” and “classist.”

“What I cannot understand and what I will not accept is that the proposals I am offering are racist,” Byrd-Bennett said, prompting shouts of “They are!” from the often-raucous crowd.

“To refuse to challenge the status quo that is failing thousands of African American students, that’s what I call racist.”

Addressing safety concerns about children crossing gang lines to get to new schools, Byrd-Bennett said she has no patience for adults who use the “excuse of gangs to leave children trapped in failing schools.”

However, CPS itself considered the gang factor when it agreed with a school closings commission’s recommendation to keep high schools off the closing list out of concern for teens’ safety if gang territories were disrupted.

The government is that institution within a society that holds a monopoly on violence. Apparently the same government that can persuade the owner of a baseball team to back off on questioning Our President cannot maintain order in the bad neighborhoods, and the people within those neighborhoods have developed survival strategies to use in the absence of government control of the streets.

Most of the schools on the “hit” list are located in socio-economically depressed areas of our city. That is the root problem that needs to be addressed. WBEZ’s recent program on Harper High School recounts in stark terms how our children are suffering. For example, here’s a list of rules that the students recounted for how to survive in their neighborhoods located in gang territory:

1. Know your geography – you must always be aware of where you are and what gang controls that specific territory.
2. If you must go out, never walk alone because it makes you the target of a gang member; never walk with someone else either because that makes you appear to be a gang member. Walk with someone but separately so that you have each other’s back.
3. Don’t use the sidewalk, walk in the street to feel safer.
4. If you hear shots, don’t run, fall to the ground.
5. Watch what you say and do.  You can be shot for big and small reasons (boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, money owed, petty stuff, he said-she said, retaliation, off your block).
6. Never go outside if you don’t have to.
7. Stay at school as long as possible.

These students recognize their school as a safe haven.  We should celebrate and nurture that within our communities, not destroy it.  I would ask that you consider delaying the decision until you have had time to explore other solutions that affirm our city’s commitment to the poorest communities, support their schools and support them in their struggles for a better life.

(Emphasis in the original).  Apparently, walking in the street, risking being hit by a car, is safer than walking in the sidewalks.  Does it come as any surprise that people might be fleeing schools in such neighborhoods?

In an editorial, the Chicago Tribume first quotes approvingly and at length from the statement by the superintendent.

First, the overwhelming majority of students in the CPS system are children of color. Any significant change in the status quo is going to affect those children. That is not racist; that is a fact.

Second, the greatest population losses in our city over the past decade have taken place on the South and West sides. School underutilization in those areas is the result of demographic trends, not race.

Third, and most important, to refuse to challenge a status quo that is failing thousands of African-American students year after year — consigning them to a future with less opportunity than others — now that would be racist.

In the view of the editors, blaming the superintendent for the willingness of people to leave unsafe neighborhoods, and implicitly blaming the city government for failure to provide the proper environment, is a mistake.

This debate must recognize the population changes that Byrd-Bennett noted.  Chicago's African-American population declined by 181,000 people from 2000 to 2010. The schools slated for closing are largely in communities that saw significant population declines.

As a school's population dwindles, so does its ability to muster resources to educate kids. Students in half-empty schools are more likely than other CPS students to be in split-grade classrooms. Forcing CPS to spread its resources too thinly "makes it harder to ensure that kids have art, music, physical education, well-stocked libraries and well-maintained playgrounds," concluded the school closings commission that was chaired by civic leader Frank Clark.

Students who have to change will go to schools with new libraries, new computer labs, air-conditioning in every classroom. How is that racist?

CPS will face a challenge guaranteeing the safety of students going to new schools and ensuring they get a better education in those schools.

It's the failure of the government that I wish to address further. Not long after the Chicago school closings controversy erupted, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry made a foolish statement in a promotion for her network, which prompted Erick Erickson to fire back, "All your kids are belong to us."

This is amazingly stupid commentary. All of us who own property (real property, not children) pay property taxes to fund a public education system to educate our children. We have democratically elected school boards to make the decisions on how to collectively educate our kids to common, state approved standards.

It is failing spectacularly. And I suspect that the tangible efforts to improve it, from neutering teachers unions to giving parents choices in where to send their children, are opposed by Melissa Harris-Perry.

I never thought I’d see the day when self-styled progressives advocated the state owning the people.

National Review's Rich Lowry offers a less polemical reaction raising similar points.

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

The truth is that parents are one of society’s most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life’s lottery. You will reap untold benefits denied to children who aren’t so lucky. That the family is so essential to the well-being of children has to be a constant source of frustration to the egalitarian statist, a reminder of the limits of his power.

Precisely. Witness the response of Chicago parents who can get out of those unsafe neighborhoods.

In responding to her critics, Professor Harris-Perry concedes her critics' point, and inadvertently or not makes mine.

I believe wholeheartedly, and without apology, that we have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them. Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values. But they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together.

Well, yeah.  If the government has full responsibility, you get the south and west side of Chicago. If you grow up in Professor Harris-Perry's old neighborhood, you get parents involved in the life of their kids, and each other's kids. They're not absent or active in the gangs themselves or pinning their hopes on lottery tickets.

I don’t want your kids, but I want them to live in safe neighborhoods. I want them to learn in enriching and dynamic classrooms. I want them to be healthy and well and free from fear. I want them to grow up to agree or disagree with me or with you and to have all the freedom and tools they need to express what they believe.

But to do so, Conor Friedersdorf notes (via the old 11-D site), the village must work with, but not undermine, the family.

Mother and father are in fact responsible for getting baby her shots, strapping her into the car seat, childproofing the house, noticing her allergic reaction to peanuts, and enrolling her in primary school. If they fail to do these things, or to find someone who'll do them on their behalf, baby suffers. A kindly passerby won't peek through the living-room window, notice the child crying, and attend to it. I suspect that if a young couple leaving the hospital, newborn in arms, were to ask Harris-Perry for advice, she would not tell them, "Don't worry, this kid isn't all your responsibility." The fact that most parents feel this responsibility deep within them is literally indispensable to our civilization. Kids whose parents don't feel or ignore it are often seriously disadvantaged.

Recognizing that parents bear primary responsibility for their children's well-being isn't just important for most families. It is a collective necessity in any pluralistic society. Progressives are prone to talking as if optimal policies and methods can be agreed upon if only right-thinking people vest trust in appropriately enlightened technocrats. But outside the wonk bubble, Americans have deep, legitimate disagreements about what ought to happen. Child rearing is no exception. If kids belong to their families, some can spend their Saturdays taking piano lessons, others can mark the Jewish Sabbath, and still others can play baseball or attend Chinese or Korean school.

When the village doesn't care, it doesn't work well with duly constituted authority, and Chicago happens. When the village becomes too overweening, that's also trouble.

Maybe [Harris-Perry] merely is is inviting me to share my fatherly wisdom with America's children as if they were my own progeny. If that's the case I invite them to shut off the damn internet, finish their damn homework, and clean up those damn pigsties they call rooms.

It's really old stuff:

To the extent that policy wonks of varying persuasion sound the same message: the bourgeois habits have the potential to reduce poverty, there is the possibility of developing income policies, and school policies, that might reinforce rather than undermine those habits.

I'll give Dr. Ben Carson, in Henry Payne's column, the final word:

"There is your elite group of intellectuals who pass judgment on everything. They see the people who are on the lower end of society and they say 'you little poor thing' and they pat you on the head and say, 'we're going to take care of you,'" he says. "Of course, that just enables them to remain in that situation without real incentive to improve themselves. You need a lower class in order for you to be the elite intellectual."

And, to complete a recent train of thought, you may need a lower class to persist as a way of retaining your power.

KOCH'S COKE.

The New York Times publishes what may be an environmental report, although it appears to be more of an attempt to shore up its base.  Apparently river-front property in Detroit is so devoid of other commercial prospects that it becomes a cheap place to pile up petroleum coke for trans-shipment.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.

This coke doesn't have the strength to serve as reducing agent in a blast furnace, although it apparently can be used as fuel in Chinese and Mexican power plants.  Whether shipping the stuff to China rather than shipping Powder River or Crowsnest coal is on balance environmentally more friendly the story doesn't say.

The story, curiously, doesn't have as much to say about the third Koch brother.

One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles.

You'd think Times readers (the paper, after all, runs wedding announcements that David Brooks famously characterized as more like merger announcements or alliances among the 1% royalty) might want to be reminded that Bill, along with Buddy Melges, once defended an America's Cup.

Race 5, May 16, 1992.

(Was that really 21 years ago???)

But, once the reminder that nasty limited-government types might be engaging in rent seeking in the energy sector is out there, the paper's mission is accomplished.  You probably wouldn't use an America's Cup-class sloop to fish for Midgaardsormen.

MISCHARACTERIZING DEMOCRACY.

Milwaukee's Palermo's Pizza (disclaimer: frequently purchased frozen at Jewel for the Cold Spring Shops commissary) have been involved in some sort of labor dispute.  Although the legalities are mostly behind us, the Perpetually Aggrieved never miss an opportunity to be aggrieved, here holding a stand-in at one of the Palermo pizza stands on the Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, and engaging in the usual semi-literate chanting.  Democracy looks like unwashed people desiring food not to be sold, apparently.  The stand-in gave some diversity hustler in the UWM administration a chance to show his solidarity with Occupy types by ordering the stand be closed, leading a Milwaukee observer to quip, "UWM will serve jello instead of Palermo's."  Or both.

Now, UWM officials are saying the school continues to offer Palermo’s Pizza products for sale on campus.

UWM officials said in a statement released Thursday: “What has changed in the past two days is the availability of the pizza in the Student Union food court where a long planned renovation project got underway this week.”

UWM officials say the school did not intend on closing the pizza stand on Tuesday — “but because of the presence of protesters in the kitchen preparation area, it was determined that the food in the stand would need to be discarded because it had potentially been contaminated.  As a result, UWM administrators and police announced the stand was being closed.”

Because the pizza stand had been scheduled to close for the summer at the end of business on May 8th due to the renovation project, UWM administrators made the decision not to open the stand for one additional day — and closed it on Tuesday.

Playing in the middle of the road is a good way to be hit by traffic going both ways. With final exams approaching, perhaps the Perpetually Aggrieved will take their victory, such as it is.  But with the job market for college graduates being what it is, we've probably not seen the last of the Palermo shuffle in Wisconsin.

The Madison campus continues to serve Palermo pizza, although with Paisan's available not far from campus, why would anyone bother?

GOVERNANCE IS FORCE.

An editorial in London's Telegraph urges the fanatics who see Richard Nixon and Watergate behind every Obama Administration abuse of power to back off.

The breaches of public trust not only threaten the bipartisan votes necessary to pass key second term legislation like immigration reform, they undercut the president's ability to make his larger legacy case that progressive governance can be efficient and effective.

There are several possible ways to proceed.

First, there's the Cafe Hayek claim that such governance can be neither.

Because the regulators have the same psychological foibles as the regulatees – yet face far less direct feedback on their decisions than do those whom they regulate – turning more decision-making power over to government increases the frequency of human error and amplifies its ill-effects.  Markets keep those errors less numerous and their effects more confined.

Human beings are not laboratory rats to be controlled and conditioned by some elite of their number who, somehow and without explanation, manage to become higher-order creatures simply by working for government and professing deep concern for the welfare of their lab animals.

It's a challenge for me to introduce the challenge to optimal taxation and targeted tax cuts and subsidies implied by that second paragraph.  Perhaps it's too flip to suggest that carefully crafted tax incentives turn humans into gerbils, but all the same.

There's a more troubling suggestion from John Kass.  Democratic politics are not about Herbert Croly and Promise, they're about Richard Daley and Clout.

Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off.

It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.

And now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected — America understands it too.

Clout works, as long as there are rents to be generated and dissipated. But large stretches of Chicago are starting to look more like Detroit -- the ultimate case of what happens when there's nobody productive yet to strike a deal with -- and Belmont Club issues a caution.

A lying president debases his own words and undermines his own ability to hold a coalition together. Nobody completely trusts reassurances from a double-crosser. Only a fool would accept a kiss from Judas. The day comes when not even the liberals can fail to notice.

A nation as large as the United States works only if trust in its institutions is maintained. Destroy that and it’s pay as you go and as-is-where-is. Once everything comes down to the caprice of one man, to basing contracts on the secret will of cabals, then it’s all over. It’s bad for business — whatever business you happen to be in.

Doesn't matter whether that cabal is of Democrat operatives in government, descendants of Long March parents in China's Communist Party, or bridge-playing Harvard graduates in finance. People will devote their effort to opting out.

IF EVERYTHING IS HARASSMENT, NOTHING IS.

Thus does Daniel Luzer summarize Our Rulers Latest Attempt to impose liberating tolerance on campus.

Minding the Campus compiles additional Bronx cheers.

I repeat a bit of advice from the shop floor: the way to demonstrate the folly of the rule is to comply with it.  Mr Luzer notes, "Enacting such a broad and absurd definition could well cause real sexual harassment to go unnoticed, since the policy would prove so difficult to enforce." Use that feature to get the policy changed.

THE PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE.

VIA Knowledge Problem, a reminder (with music) that if public choice theory didn't exist, somebody would have to think of it.

Public choice theory and history have shown that “benevolent” men set above others are subject to the same faults and selfishness as the rest of us, regardless of the good intentions with which their offices were created. As C.S. Lewis said, “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Sometimes, though, the tormentors reveal the limitations of their condition.

Contemporary progressivism depends upon faith in bureaucracy: to collect data, to manage daily affairs on the local and national levels, and to serve as an impartial arbiter of fairness. Many of the major initiatives of the Obama presidency — from Obamacare to his expansion of executive authority to comprehensive immigration reform — demand this bureaucratic faith.

So every scandal that reveals a bureaucracy’s capacity for corruption deals a methodological wound to this centralizing enterprise. While the president might deride those who fear the subversion of a free republic into a less-than-free state, these sorts of scandals — whatever their outcomes — reveal that such fears are hardly misplaced. After all, we now know that federal tax-collection authorities systematically targeted opponents of the reigning ideology. We now know that federal agents could blithely monitor the phone calls of journalists. Those are not the figments of tea-party paranoia; as far as we can tell, they are facts.

The way it looks at the moment, there are two possible impulses behind these scandals: malice or incompetence. Neither one bears good tidings for bureaucratic progressivism. Obviously, the notion that high-level political actors would use the mechanisms of a bureaucratic empire to target their political enemies would be a very unpleasant idea. Right now, there is no evidence that such high-level actors did abuse their power in this way; it is possible that only a few rogue individuals abused or misused their authority. Media reports seem to indicate that the IRS scandal, at least, involves complicated technicalities and managerial disputes.

But incompetence is not exactly a winning defense for the case of centralized bureaucracies. The lack of approval, and the extent of the abuses, would show a bureaucracy out of control, with a broken chain of command and administrative rules. If the right hand truly does not know what the left hand does — if the brain of authority does not know what its administrative limbs do — how can we place blind faith in any supreme bureaucracy?

You're depending on the conscience of the pencil-pushers, and that conscience might be smugly confident that the pencils are being Pushed For The Greater Good.  George Will elaborates.

Liberalism’s agenda has been constant since long before liberals, having given their name a bad name, stopped calling themselves liberals and resumed calling themselves progressives, which they will call themselves until they finish giving that name a bad name. The agenda always is: Concentrate more power in Washington, more Washington power in the executive branch and more executive power in agencies run by experts. Then trust the experts to be disinterested and prudent with their myriad intrusions into, and minute regulations of, Americans’ lives. Obama’s presidency may yet be, on balance, a net plus for the public good if it shatters Americans’ trust in the regulatory state’s motives.

On the other hand, Our President may be campaigning rather than governing, precisely to head that off.

SECOND SECTION.  Ben Domenech outlines a Fourth Turning scenario.

Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is. Making this about him is a short term boost to the pleasure center of the conservative brain. Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.

The point is that these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama’s ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government. As technological capabilities advance and the scope of government expands, the types of domestic scandals we’re seeing here are only going to increase in frequency and invasiveness, with personal information shared more frequently, easier for even low level bureaucrats to acquire and manipulate. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical and cynical about their public institutions, with their trust in the federal government at historic lows. They distrust the agencies and bureaucrats even as the politicians of our age are investing more and more power in them.

Today, the media, the Obama administration, and David Axelrod are undertaking the task that conservatives could not: illustrating with each passing day that the progressive approach to modern governance and policy is inherently flawed and that vast governments are ripe for abuse. What we are seeing from the IRS and the DOJ is not something new, nor does it represent a perverse approach to benign bureaucracy: it is the inevitable consequence of an approach which puts mechanisms in place and then assumes they will not be used for ill. You should expect government to go as far as it can, whenever it can, in any ways that it can, toward the full exploitation of the power made available to it. Expecting government to behave otherwise is to expect the scorpion not to sting the frog.

The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.

When this period of scandal draws to a close, if the idea still survives that a more competent and ethical president would be able to effectively govern a $4 trillion bureaucracy, it will be a sign Republicans have failed. They can succeed by ignoring the tempting bait of making this about the president they despise, and focusing instead on the false philosophy of expansive government which represents the true danger to the American experiment. Doing so will require them to go against their own short-term viewpoint, so prevalent in recent years, and look instead to the long game.

Put another way, another layer of management simply creates an additional source of rents to seek, generate, and dissipate.

A NATIONAL WARD-HEELER POLITICIAN.

Rush Limbaugh comes close to getting it.

The way that Obama gets away with this is to be disengaged, or to appear to be, and ultimately not responsible for it.  That's the key to this.  He's sitting pretty. He's not in any trouble, not with the people that elected him.  And that's what you have to understand.  With the people that elected Obama, he's not in any trouble at all.  This is all somebody else's doing, and the government is so big that not even the most competent, brilliant president ever can control it and therefore he can't possibly be to blame for it.  It can't possibly be his fault.

He's reacting to the commentariat, and the commentariat, so marinated in the Eastern Liberal Establishment's vision of Activist Presidents Promoting The Common Good in order to be able to devote Sunday mornings to mutual admiration with High Government Officials under pictures of the Capitol Dome, seem surprised that Our President is campaigning, rather than governing.  Read the full transcript, which summarizes the failings of Activist Government as seen by the ditto-heads.

The key to Our President remaining popular despite disappointing the commentariat by a lack of activism is in this passage.

You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that's been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you'll see an utter disaster. You've got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It's not just Obama. This is who liberals are.

More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate.  There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

THE CASE FOR BOURGEOIS MANNERS.

Being punctual and attentive might be so old school, but it still works as an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Younger workers believe they can multitask and remain productive, the human-resources people told the York researchers. Thirty-eight percent of respondents blamed multitasking for the lack of “focus” among younger workers. The authors of the study explained that the younger generation “believes that it is possible to multi-task effectively” and that using social media, for example, is an efficient way to communicate. In interviews, the applicants check their phones for texts and calls, dress inappropriately and overrate their talents.

The article offers a mixed evaluation of the role of the education system in enabling irresponsible behavior.

Let’s agree that everyone is at fault, more or less. The burden falls heaviest on the workplace. High-school teachers have few direct incentives to toughen up their classrooms. The steady drag of uninterested students and school bureaucracy beats them down to the point where using higher grades and lax discipline are the easiest ways to make it through the week.

College professors, too, have no direct incentive to raise the bar on behavior, given the influence of student ratings of their performance and pressure from administrators and parents. Most of all, poor behavior by students doesn’t immediately threaten the livelihood of teachers.

A bad worker, however, jeopardizes a whole unit’s productivity, and a manager can’t simply pass a low performer to the next level. Teachers who allow delinquent students to slide merely compromise their own integrity. Dereliction in the workplace puts profits at risk.

This, then, is the real transition into adulthood in the U.S. today -- not graduating from high school, leaving home or learning how to succeed in college, but performing full-time work for bosses who can’t compromise, and all too often must say, “Your work isn’t up to par, you’re not as great as you think, and if you don’t improve, you’re fired.”

There's another dimension of the school dynamic that might reward careful study. Is there more than anecdotal evidence of coaches, whether in high school or college, seeking special treatment for academically marginal yet athletically talented people? The coach gets to screen for focus, for proper performance, and doesn't have to negotiate standards.  Why not apply that model more generally?

TOM SWIFT AND HIS ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE.

Amtrak's order of the latest attempt to replace the GG-1 is rolling out, and the greenies are enthusiastic about regenerative braking.

Each engine centers on a regenerative braking system that can recover up to 5MW of energy, much of which goes back to the power grid. The machinery is smarter, too: it can self-diagnose problems and mitigate the impact until repairs are possible. Commuters won't immediately notice the difference when ACS-64 trains reach the rails between this fall and 2016, but there should be important behind-the-scenes savings.

With a simple enough locomotive, sufficient instrumentation, and a competent engineer, you can cut out the misbehaving circuits and roll on. Regeneration is a simple flick of a switch.

Contemporary control circuitry, with a.c. transmission and thyristors, achieves results that the traction pioneers could only dream about.

You put all that technology over fewer wheels and less unsprung weight.

On the other hand, that Bi-Polar is more distinctive than the beefed-up Class 87 profile of Amtrak's latest power.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE AT WORK.

Ron Radosh suggests that the use of liberating tolerance might be too subtle for the Internal Revenue Service.

If you criticize Obama Care, by Marcuse’s logic, you are what the Soviets called “an enemy of the people,” and the full power of government should be put into place to stop you. And were he still with us, he would be penning an op-ed praising the IRS for its clever action in denying conservative groups non-profit status.

Who would make that judgment? Perhaps it would be the people’s courts, the revolutionary assemblies, or the left-wing professoriate, which is acting on behalf of the people before they realize their duty to develop revolutionary consciousness.

Let me end on a serious note. The IRS personnel are probably not smart enough to read or even know about Herbert Marcuse. But they have acted in a way he would have been proud of, having obtained an understanding of how to act against conservatives all on their own. And, it seems, they have an unknowing ally who lives in the executive mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It strikes me as rash to suggest what position a mid-twentieth century intellectual might take on a contemporary policy issue, particularly a mid-twentieth century intellectual who late in life had to deal with the pushback his epigones engendered.

I also suspect that the practitioners of liberating tolerance have more than an unknowing ally in the Executive Mansion.

[T]he Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private.

The letter states that "sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as 'any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature'" including "verbal conduct" (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an "objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation"—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.

Apparently the efforts of Student Affairs to develop a revolutionary consciousness in their students haven't been good enough.

The way to demonstrate the folly of this rule, though, is to comply with it.  Rather than make a federal case out of the law, overwhelm the enforcers in the administration with complaints.  There's a good list of complaints to consider right at the post commenting on the policy.

PULLING UP THE LADDERS?

In recent weeks, labor unions and Occupy-inspired protesters have organized one-day strikes of fast-food workers as a way of securing either increases in the minimum wage, local living wage ordinances, or union contracts for the workers.  One such strike just took place in Milwaukee.  The usual interests take the usual positions.

"The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO is proud to stand in solidarity with striking fast food workers whose actions today are calling attention to income inequality, worker exploitation, and the right to a living wage and to a union," said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.

Scott DeFife, executive vice president for policy and government affairs for the National Restaurant Association, said the organizing campaigns in Milwaukee and other cities were targeting an industry that "has not been heavily unionized."

"Restaurants care about their employees, and the restaurant industry provides opportunities for millions of Americans, women and men from all backgrounds, to move up the ladder and succeed. In addition to providing more than 13 million job opportunities, the industry is one of the best paths to achieving the American dream, with 80% of owners and managers having started their careers in entry-level positions," DeFife said.

According to the Milwaukee Workers Organizing Committee, the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs has forced workers to rely on low-paying jobs in fast food and retail. The group cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says seven out of 10 growth occupations are considered low-wage.

Hidden among the usual give and take of the talking points is a reality in which fast-food is no longer an entry level job.

Some restaurants have said they'll trim the hours of employees this year to get below the 30-hour threshold that will make them pay health insurance, starting next January, under the new health law.

Until recently, there had been no efforts to unionize fast-food employees because the industry has been beset by high turnover and largely populated by teens and young adults working in part-time or seasonal jobs. The recession and sluggish recovery, however, has given rise to a new class of adult fast-food worker who can't find other employment.

"It's a job for adults supporting families," says Tsedeye Gebreselassie, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project.

The ranks of limited-service restaurant workers have increased 11.5% to 3.8 million since the job market hit bottom in February 2010, nearly twice the rate of all private employees.

Identifying the causal responsibility for the disappearance of manufacturing jobs is a bigger challenge than I can hope to rise to in a brief post.  There may be researchers able to investigate the refractory evidence in future, that is, if there are any careers for academic researchers in the future.  It can't help, though, that public policies include incentives for employers to reduce working hours rather than pay additional fringe benefits (that in itself a reversal of the incentives) at the same time that working adults whether out of desperation or as more sympathetic individuals to union organization are making careers out of what used to be entry-level jobs.  Not a good time to be a young person.

NO LONGER ACTING LIKE THE PALACE GUARD?

It's easier, dear reader, to keep current with the Opposition's calling out of Senator Present, er, President Obama, by going to the usual sources.  It's what Our President's defenders in the entertainment business are doing that's telling.  Margery Eagan -- apparently sympathetic to the Democrats -- sees something different at MSNBC.

You know the worm has turned when even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow hold their noses at the stench from Barack Obama’s scandals — when so many stories from the so-called liberal press now describe the erstwhile Messiah as “aloof,” “arrogant” and “holier than thou.”

The best Mr Matthews could do this evening, just before I switched to the hockey game, was suggest that Senator Present acted decisively, for once, discharging the acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue (who may or may not have accelerated the date at which he decided to stop acting).

The Chicago Black Hawks took the first game from the Detroit Red Wings, who have played 800 games with the Hawks since 1926, and who will now require close to 300 years to play the next 800, under the screwy conference-heavy scheduling the National Hockey League uses.  Ten games with Nashville or Colorado, and two each with Boston or Detroit, let alone Montreal?  I suppose that's a first-world problem, and the third-world politics, otherwise, business as usual in Chicago, are more important.

It may also be significant that Jon Stewart, providing the heavy sarcasm for younger voters who might not get the more subtle sarcasm of their indoctrinators area studies professors, is also breaking bad on Our President.

THE OLYMPICS HEAD FURTHER DOWNSCALE.

The barons of the Olympics, in order to achieve something, propose to drop wrestling.  The governing body for Olympic wrestling proposes to become more like All Star Wrestling (sans The Crusher and the Vachon brothers) or, in the quintessence of prole drift, emulate Mixed Martial Arts.

"We need to think about ways to change how the stage is presented," [world champion Bill] Scherr said. "They compete in an octagon and we compete on a mat. We don't have to compete on a mat. We can compete in sand, we can compete in grass and we can compete on a mat or an octagon. I don't know. We can get survey groups together and see what looks best."

Scherr said MMA officials have helped from the public relations perspective and partnerships may be explored in the future. However, that doesn't mean the ancient sport is going to go the way of the arm bar and head kick. "The non-violent perspective of wrestling is not going to change," Scherr said.

Olympic champion Jordan Burroughs is all for adding some flair to his sport. "In face-offs it would be good to have something cool other than two guys walking on to the mat, shaking hands, wrestling, then walking off. It shows great sportsmanship but not very good showmanship."

Not that anyone is going to ask me, but I vote for Gorgeous Bobby Heenan throwing a chair onto the mat, or into the octagon.

GOVERNMENT IS FORCE.

THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES will argue that government is in a position to be a force for The Good, facilitating Improvements in the Human (pronounced youman) Condition.

Every so often, though, they rediscover what happens when you strike "in a position to be a", and ask what is the good.

Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done.

Particularly instructive:

To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.

Yes, Insta Pundit and Reason and National Review and Rush Limbaugh and the like are all over Chicago Democrats behaving like Chicago Democrats. It's so g*****n refreshing to see writers at Common Dreams maybe, just maybe, discovering that Chicago Democrats behave like Chicago Democrats.

So refreshing, indeed, to find a second one on the same day.

And you'd have to be a toddler or a fool to believe that Eric Holder could go off on his own and take as politically volatile a step as this. But, let us take the White House at its word. Eric Holder did this by himself. He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic. Nobody likes the press, I will grant you that, but the administration is soft if it thinks the public distrusts the press that much. And to have this genuinely chilling revelation emerge simultaneously with the Benghazi, Benghazi!,BENGHAZI! mummery and the IRS dumbassery is pretty much a full broadside below the water line of this administration's credibility. Good god, this is going to be one long-ass summer.

And Egil Krogh and the Plumbers come up, repeatedly.

Does it really come as any surprise to people who push for more Presidential Power because Electing The Right Democrat President Is Good leads to the Mifufe of Prefidential Power?

SECOND SECTION.  Much more at Betsy's Page.  In particular, check out Chris Cillizza.

 Group Benghazi, the IRS and the AP into a single narrative and it reads something like this: The government knows better than you. As a result, the government can do whatever it likes.

It's not malice, it's not stupidity, it's simply believing that Acting For The Greater Good is Licenfe to Do Whatever.  Politico co-authors draw the proper inference.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.

After National Greatness Conservatism comes a cropper in nation building where the concept of nation is still too modern, and after Liberating Tolerance shows itself for what it is, perhaps all that remains is to try something more modest.

TEASING MIDGAARDSORMEN OUT OF ITS LAIR.

Bryan Caplan of Econ Log issues a call for papers, or perhaps for noodling around with a spreadsheet.

What happens if you regress annual global temperature 1880-2011 on CO2, linear trend, and other stuff trending positively or negative over this era?  The list of regressors should ideally include not just other climatological variables, but placebo variables like church attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per capita, etc.

Key question: Does CO2 really dominate in such a regression?

Dig further into the comments and into a follow-up post, and all the standard econometricks reveal themselves: cointegration, unit roots, autocorrelation, multiple causes.  It's representative of the state of the empirical art in economics these days, in which the technique often crowds out the story itself.

Perhaps I'm an antique, but is anyone else as troubled as I by the use of the expression "tease out" as description of a research strategy?  Here's the usual dynamics: investigator proposes a testable implication, investigator downloads from a public source some information that proxies reasonably well for the causes and the effects, investigator does the recommended laundering of the data (sorry, all this talk about filtering and screening is too much to resist), investigator runs the recommended regression package and comes up with a bunch of estimates lacking statistical significance, let alone the  correct sign.  Resulting seminar becomes a collection of suggestions for using additional scrubbing techniques or adding explanatory variables (often under the rubric of "controlling for") so as to get confirmation of the prior, rather than looking for possible reasons the prior is incorrect.

So might it be with rising global temperatures.  Until someone obtains the signature of Midgaardsormen, the carbon content hypothesis may be provisional at best.

HOW THE 1% DOES DISNEY.

Purchasing the priority boarding pass isn't good enough for some of the well-off and well-connected.

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

Via Newmark's Door.

Boy, does that make research on the incentive-compatibility of priority pricing more difficult.

Yes, I suppose one can argue that hiring an invalid at a premium simply extends the incentives of priority pricing to a higher willingness to pay cohort.

I'm hard pressed to view the behavior as anything other than the tackiness of New Money, or perhaps the tackiness of Money in a era of No Guardrails.  Perhaps, though, Old Nick will someday put these people at the head of the line to board the Cyclone Inferno, a large wooden roller coaster that legend has making midnight appearances in the Rust Belt during the summer.

THANK YOU FOR LOOKING IN.

Here's the traffic report for the past year.

Site Meter monthly visits and page views.

I'm not sure how accurate the Site Meter count is, and there's no longer as assiduous a production schedule for Cold Spring Shops, as other projects are either more urgent or more interesting.  Summer may be for standing down.

But while the spirit moves me, I'll be keeping up the fight.

MIDGAARDSORMEN IS AGITATED.

I'd referred to Peter Freuchen's Book of the Seven Seas to see if any of the events in Vikings had some versimilitude.  (Sort of.  Check the comments.)

But before returning the book to the library (you'll see its resting place, two shelves below the S-1, left end) I flipped to a couple of other chapters, and turned up additional quaint and forgotten lore.

Here's a passage from page 44.  Keep in mind, this book dates to 1957, at a time when anthropogenic carbon dioxide accumulation was esoterica from the seminar room.

One, which many scientists think is going on now and could accelerate in the not too distant future, is the almost complete liquidation of the last ice age.  A lot of the earth's water is tied up in glaciers, enough that even the melting of a substantial part would cause the oceans to rise about 100 feet.  If it all turned to water -- a very remote possibility -- it has been estimated that the sea level might rise as much as 500 or 600 feet.

Alternatively, though, the Ice Age could return, and the sea level would fall.  Three paragraphs at page 46 summarize.

With the great ocean extending its warm waters nearer to the poles and the refrigerating effects of huge ice masses gone, almost all the world would have the equable climate we associate now with the tropics.  Fruits and vegetables would grow in soil which now has only tundra.  It takes a large land mass to create the extreme changes of temperature we know in the temperate zone, and there would be no more land masses big enough to maintain the sort of weather we now have.

On the other hand, a new ice age would cover with glaciers much of the territory on which people live, and the rest would have to take lessons from the Eskimos on getting along with cold.  Caribou would return to the shores of the Mediterranean, where relics of primitive man show that these animals once thrived in an earlier ice age.

Neither of these glacial extremes is altogether fanciful.  In fact, both have happened four times in the last million years or so, in the Pleistocene age.  While most scientists believe that the earth is in a period of melting glaciers, and that this must go much further before another ice age descends, there is no certainty.

That's the extremely long run.  Starting at page 284 is a discussion of work by Swedish oceanographer Otto Pettersson, who proposes an 1800 year cycle of tidal magnitudes, influenced by the combined gravitational pulls of Moon and Sun.

At the margin, are time and tide beyond the power of our Industrial Age fuels to add or to detract?

MAKING THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY.

The editorial board at the Erie (Penn.) Times-News uses a reporter's favorable experience with Amtrak to take up the Cold Spring Shops cause.

"Long Distance Trains: A Foundation for National Mobility," a new white paper by the Midwest High Speed Rail Association and the National Association of Railroad Passengers, recommends investing in long-distance routes such as the Lake Shore Limited. Such train service becomes more economically efficient when the routes travel greater distances, connect more cities and add more passengers, according to Brian Pitzer, executive director of All Aboard Erie.

Ridership on long-distance trains has grown rapidly since 2000, the report says, and more growth could occur by making train routes longer; increasing frequency of service; improving tracks, signals and stations to shorten trips and improve on-time performance; and procuring high-performance, modern equipment, Pitzer said. You can read the white paper by visiting www.narprail.org.

When your community has fewer trains than Penn Central operated on the eve of Amtrak, there has to be a lot of upside potential. Had Penn Central implemented the same sort of corridor concept from Buffalo to Cleveland and Toledo that it was implementing east of Buffalo, residents of Erie might already have more trains. As it is, people in Mendota, Illinois, Lynchburg, Virginia, or Sturtevant, Wisconsin, enjoy more frequency and connectivity than do residents of Erie, or, for that matter, Cleveland.

A VICTORY WE CAN LIVE WITH.

Last week, I took issue with some silly commentary by Tom Engelhardt.

What would the commentariat say about a hyperpower that put an end to the insurgencies in the most brutal and final way, never mind the collateral damage?  And would that commentariat welcome the same sort of governmental ruthlessness, if applied to sharing the wealth or rebuilding the roads or making the trucking and airline companies pay more for their roads and airports, or imposing party discipline on the Congress?

Jim Lacey takes the occasion of the removal of the last U.S. tanks from Germany to elaborate.

It is worth noting that our problems crushing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not a result of insufficient American power to do the job. Rather, they were the consequences of that almost uniquely American trait of rarely using all the power at our disposal. First off, we fought both wars with only a fraction of our latent power. More importantly, we fought them in a manner that few armies have ever shown a willingness to do.

There is a formula for winning against insurgents. It is harsh, brutal, and often immoral. For examples, look at how civilized countries conducted earlier wars — how Britain won the Boer War, or how Belgium crushed rebels in the Congo, or what France attempted in Algeria. America eschewed those methods in favor of treating the population humanely, rebuilding nations and societies, and doing everything possible to keep our military power squarely focused on armed enemies. Were mistakes made? Yes; war is never as clean, as simple, or as antiseptic as we would like. Still, when the final histories of our involvement in the Middle East are written I am certain they will demonstrate levels of restraint and morality no other power would have troubled itself with.

In this brief interlude, while the United States remains a global hyperpower, no one in the world goes to bed fearful that America will misuse its power to dictate to other nations. More often the opposite is true. We live in a world where small pariah regimes (North Korea, Iran) feel free to continuously threaten the global peace, sure in the knowledge that our ire is slow to rise.

I'm intrigued, though, by a passage in the essay in which President Lincoln secures the withdrawal of French forces from Maximilian's Mexico with a warning that Grant and some of the Army of the Potomac might be headed that way.  President Lincoln lived only a week beyond Lee's surrender, and Johnston's surrender to Sherman happened after that.  Must.  Conduct.  Further.  Research.

THE 1% AT LEISURE.

There's this annoying phenomenon called "scanner lag" with digital cameras.  With a high-end-enough camera, though, automatic mode captures the moment.

[USA Today sports photographer Steve] Mitchell was busy transmitting photos to his editors when [Chicago Bull center Joakim] Noah got thrown out of Game 2 Wednesday night. He said he didn’t even see the play, but once the commotion started, he grabbed his camera and started shooting.

“I see him arguing with the refs, so I quickly jump up and grab my Nikon 600 mm lens,” Mitchell said. “I see him get ejected and I see him walking and I’m just taking pictures, and as I’m taking these pictures, the shutter, which is a Digital SLR, is going so fast I can’t see her hand. I see him walking and I thought she was just trying to touch him.”

The back-story to the spectator caught behaving like a typical courtside basketball fan might be a parable of life among the noveaux riches.

So who is the woman behind the finger?

She's the 47-year-old widow of a hedge fund owner who, under mysterious circumstances, was found dead five years ago in the pool of the couple's mansion. It was her fourth husband.

Sounds like quite the piece of work.  The highlights, or lowlights, are enough to make a Marxist giggle.

In the documents, Filomena Tobias described herself as a "housewife" who spent $47,000 in expenses a month, including $4,400 for clothes, $1,500 for beauty salons and $5,000 for the upkeep of her Porsche and Range Rover, according to a 2007 Sun Sentinel article.

On Thursday, reacting to the backlash from Tobias' finger waving, her grown daughter told the Sun Sentinel in a phone interview that her mother "was having fun just like any other fan."

Victoria Racanati said her mother had this to say to her critics: "People need to get a life."

We've come a long way, though, from the adventures of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. Lawyers and hedge fund managers as exes are so declasse.

PEOPLE TAKE NOTES, THEY TAKE TESTS, AND THEY TAKE OFF.

Thus is life at a college catering to commuters, non-traditional students, returning adults, yes, all the Sacred Causes.  But verily, such students ought to have the option, indeed their colleges ought to offer the preferential option of a chance to deal with a faculty member who has a meaningful stake in the institution.

It’s not surprising, then, to learn that community colleges that rely heavily on part-time faculty have higher attrition rates and lower graduation rates — part-time faculty have (even) fewer opportunities to engage with students. In short, student engagement with other students and faculty on a community college campus promotes retention and academic success.

One of my students described the importance of classroom-based interaction in a course evaluation. “My mindset was that it was just going to be another English class, and I was not going to try my hardest or get much out of it.  I was taking it as a class that I needed to get out of the way for my program of interest.  As time went on I realized how into teaching you were and that the people in the classroom really wanted to learn and to get something out of the class.  I then decided that maybe I should apply myself and that was the best choice I made the whole semester.”

It’s highly unlikely this student would have had a similar realization in an online course that offered no face-to-face interaction.

There is, apparently, a frontier beyond which attempts to appear customer-friendly, or student-centered, becomes counter-productive.

Community college students often state they take courses online for the sake of convenience and/or because of a harried life -- two reasons accepted without debate -- in order to get done with school as quickly as possible. The course becomes merely an obstacle on the path to accumulating credits.

And community colleges -- driven by convenience, economics, and, ironically enough, the completion agenda -- are quick to respond to “customer demand” by offering more and more online courses.

But instead of promoting an online model of education, community colleges should be doing more to keep faculty and students on campus and to foster a classroom and campus-based culture built upon a sense of academic engagement and community.  That may sound outdated and unfashionable, but it’s a model of education that, as research supports, actually increases community college students’ chances of being academically successful.

Put another way, higher education involves effort on the part of both the student and the professor, and to neglect the role of either is to fail to educate.  It's particularly encouraging to read an essay originating from a community college, as the lowering of standards at the comprehensives and mid-majors has too often been in a misguided attempt to mimic the convenience of the for-profits and the most retention-obsessed two-year colleges.