REPUTATIONALLY BANKRUPT.

Reap what you sow, higher education.  Count Jonathan Turley as among the disgruntled.

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students.

The pool of young people to recruit future matriculants from is smaller, the job market for symbolic analysts isn't what it once was, and the conversion of critical theories from potentially interesting ways to play with ideas into epistemically closed tight priors take their toll, don't they?  I'm not sure that looking for Republican-leaning faculty is necessarily the right way to identify epistemic closure: the relationship between the academy and the public policy complex probably strongly skews toward Applied Welfare Economics Paradigm.

PARTICULARISTIC INTERSECTIONALITY.

It's impossible to make stuff like this up.  "June and July are about queer joy and resilience. It’s crucial we use the month and its festivities to fight for liberation."  Wait, what, wasn't it only in the past few years that June went from being dairy month to being fairy month?  But one month is not enough.

June’s Pride Month and July’s Black Pride Month serve as more than a celebration. They are a necessary corrective to the nation’s revisionist history, selective memory, and deliberate attempts to erase the struggles, achievements, and contributions of LGBTQ+ people.

Pride is about more than a single day or month of celebration. Without a commitment to justice, restoration, and lasting social change, our celebrations risk becoming merely performative. While Pride is undeniably a celebration of our lives, resilience, and achievements, it has always also been a public declaration demanding equality and justice. For many, like myself, celebrating Pride and making a political statement are inseparable, because the freedoms we celebrate were won through activism and continue to require vigilance and advocacy.

But views on Pride are deeply divided—and not simply along the lines of race, class, gender, or sexual identity. Some LGBTQ+ Americans feel that activism, such as protests against police brutality and in support of Palestine, has made Pride too overtly “political,” and would prefer it serve primarily as a celebration where queer people can simply gather and enjoy themselves. Others, like religious conservatives and rightwing Republicans, see Pride as sinful and indecent behavior on public display. They dismiss Pride as a month-long bacchanalia of drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess, believing it desecrates the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and diminishes the political significance of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

I wonder if author Irene Monroe got a Minimal Publishable Unit out of that, or if The Progressive isn't peer reviewed enough to claim academic credit.

LIBERAL WEENIES COME FOR FOOTIE.

Seriously, Adam Kadlac?  "Should you feel guilty about rooting against the US in the World Cup?"

Every four years polite Americans pretend to be interested in men's footie.  Cold Spring Shops, not so much, with only 42 posts getting a "footie" label in going on two dozen years, and most of those professing benign neglect with a little snarking, e.g. "Ordinarily, that would be reason enough for Cold Spring Shops to continue its policy of benign neglect of the game popular with adolescent males in the third world and eight year old girls here."

The liberal weenies, though, make themselves figures of fun, starting with calls for a boycott of the Stateside games that prompted my "I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games. Where can I sell carbon offsets?"

ELITIST AND TRIVIAL.

Over the weekend Our President hosted a semiquincentennial cage match on the White House grounds, to the dismay of Excessively Earnest People everywhere.  I borrowed the title of this post from Paul Krugman's "The Theory of the Vulgar Class" that dreads "Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger."

CHANGING THE DIVERSITY THAT MERITS CELEBRATION?

In the (Not Detroit) Free Press, Maeve Halligan rains on the pride parade.

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.

Dear reader, I'm going to have to behave myself. Raining on parades?  Eating itself?

The movement has begun attacking its own. Consider the registered charity LGB Alliance—founded by two longtime left-wing lesbian activists whose sole aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. A murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations took the LGB Alliance to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.

That case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them. When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from.

And somewhere Riley Gaines takes a break from caring for her little girl and nods.

The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.

By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.

Then there are the children.

It's not as if the Militant Normals haven't been calling attention for years.

What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.

Those who disagree with this argument are not bad people. They have been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line—one in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalize gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is a girl.

None of this is activism. It’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, and regressive demands dressed up as virtue. And there are children—questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.

 It’s not bigotry to notice. It’s not cruelty to object. It’s not backward to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.

 Be brave. Question the narrative you’re being fed. Kindness that involves lying to and medicalizing kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard-fought rights, and threatening those who object is not kindness at all.

None of it ever was kindness.

MORE FAILURES OF RULES AND PERMISSIONS.

In "Look Back in Anger," Power Line's Scott Johnson embeds a recent Wall Street Journal clip, "The Lockdown Dissidents."  "This documentary performs a public service. In the war of memory against forgetting, it serves memory. The authorities who exercised tyrannical rule during the pandemic should be disgraced, yet they have gone on their merry way as though nothing happened. They all did inestimable harm."

It was supposed to be For Our Own Good.  We were all supposed to be better persons for it.  Didn't happen.

TWO WEEKS TO SLOW THE SPREAD WAS A LIE.

As May of 2020 gave way to June, pandemic mitigation, better understood as fashionable nonsense, was still what Officialdom Decreed.

Americans had been forced to confront the reality that "two weeks to slow the spread" was a lie. The two weeks had come and gone at the end of March, yet government health advisors had continued to pressure authorities at the federal, state, and local levels to maintain lockdowns, mask mandates, and prohibitions on social gatherings.

These policies were initially sold to the public as temporary measures that were necessary to give hospitals time to receive an influx of COVID-19 patients. By the start of the summer, it had become clear that public health experts would continue to insist on heavy-handed mitigation measures until either case counts crashed on their own or a vaccine became widely available. This meant that in Democratic-controlled municipalities, where it was fashionable to "trust the science," relevant policymakers would keep lockdowns in place, require masks in all public spaces, and discourage large gatherings—even outdoors.

Robby Soave correctly notes that a virtue signal exposed the lie. "When we speak of declining trust in experts, this is the sort of thing we're talking about:  Remember when scientists said protesting was OK but only if it was against racism?"

We understand that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.  Officialdom botched that, badly.  "In the aftermath, organized science and public health might have so discredited themselves that reducing the indirect cost return reimbursements and defunding the universities are an easier sell to the Militant Normals."

A REQUIEM FOR THE FATAL CONCEIT.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, Brian Rosenberg laments a brief moment of common sense at Yale.  "Narrowing the mission of the university is an unfortunate choice."

DOES ANYTHING GOOD COME FROM RUNNING A CORPSE?

You'd expect the creatives at The Babylon Bee to crack wise:  "DNC 2024 Election Autopsy Just Joe Biden's Actual Autopsy"

Democratic strategists vowed to learn from the 2024 autopsy report and never again repeat the same errors. "Next time around, the party is not going to 'suffer repetitive blunt trauma due to falling off a bicycle'," said political operative Derek Hanover. "Things are going to be different moving forward. I promise you, the final words on the 2028 report will not be 'cerebrovascular accident', I can tell you that right now."

That's almost as funny as a serious Richard Eskow essay, "The ‘Autopsy’ Written by a Corpse."

You come to expect such things from Common Dreams, and, dear reader, you will not be disappointed.  How can a Holy Document not have all the Woke Worship Words?

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

And the omissions kept on coming!

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation.

In the tussle between the corporatist and communist wings of the Democrat coalition, the communist wing clearly wants to double down on the soft-on-crime, weak-on-terrorism, education so inclusive nobody learns anything, punitive taxation policies.  At the margin, the Jarrett regency rubbing Normal noses in a Weimar freak show didn't help, but I submit that public money going to pretend hospices at tamale stands and pretend Quality Learing Centers antagonize voters who might be willing to let the crossers live and let live, as long as they're not medalling in girls' sports.

THE ROAD TRIP TRADITION.

Never mind those temporarily high motor fuel prices, "America's Love Affair With the Road Endures," according to Salena Zito.

Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east, and west is almost patriotic in concept.

Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery, and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local state park. One of the most interesting things we could do this summer is take a road trip, large or small, to experience the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ah, yes, the Lincoln Highway.  "Not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the first seedling mile of the Lincoln Highway, an attempt by early twentieth-century entrepreneurs to build a paved highway from coast to coast.  The effort was as much an attempt to lobby for federal funds as it was to improve the roads."

THE BEER THAT MADE MILT FAMY WALK US.

Poor Schlitz, for the past forty years an orphan brand.

Once upon a time, Schlitz sold Old Milwaukee at a lower price than "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Furious" as a subtle form of price discrimination.  A few locals were in on the secret.

More recently, Miller Coors leased excess capacity at some of their plants to produce all of the other Great Milwaukee beers: draft-brewed Blatz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and for all I know Meister Brau and Braumeister.  (Well, at least Old Milwaukee, see above, and Lone Star.)

It's now come down to Miller Makes It Wrong.  " Pabst Brewing Company and MillerCoors are going to trial, with hipster favorite Pabst contending that MillerCoors wants to put it out of business by ending a longstanding partnership through which it brews Pabst’s beers."

The dispute involves the profitability of Miller's excess capacity.

The mind boggles at a single company brewing Miller Lite (they took out a trademark on the mis-spelling) and Coors Light, which is academic at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, where Budweiser is for cooking whilst Sprecher or Spotted Cow or whoever's local Marzen is on offer is for drinking.

The mind also boggles at Pabst being located in San Antonio, which used to be where Pearl Brewery switched its works with a home-built flat car motor.  As close as Miller was to Cold Spring Shops, they never had an in-house plant railway, relying on The Milwaukee Road, as did Schlitz, which had rail-served facilities at both the Chestnut Street and the North Milwaukee end of the Beer Line.  But I digress.

STOP ENABLING IRRESPONSIBILITY, YOU'LL GET LESS OF IT.

In Minding the Campus, Rebekah Wanic complains, "Too Many Dogs Are Eating Too Much Homework."  Nothing has changed in the twelve years (and counting) since I quit, and until the deanlets develop a spine, it will not get better.

Training students in learned helplessness, though, is how things now go on campus.

In a meeting last week, faculty members insisted that students today have more to contend with than any generation before them. I asked what they thought life was like for most Americans during World War II. The question was not well received.

The delusion must end. Expectations must rise if higher education is to remain relevant in preparing young people for life beyond graduation.

Well, of course her question went over about as well in faculty meeting as "Go Cubs Go" would on Chicago's South Side, and in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, Jennie Young of Wisconsin at Green Bay argues that flexible expectations are best practice.

If I were to categorize the totality of student complaints I have heard and mediated over the years, I would estimate that nearly 90 percent are due to something other than the professor’s efficacy: The student misunderstood typical workload expectations, for example, or had biases that are manifesting as complaints. (Accent discrimination, for example, is a real thing.) For the remaining 10 percent of valid complaints, I believe 90 percent could have been prevented by following the 10 tips I’ve listed.

Among those ten tips? "Stop saying 'It's in the syllabus.'"  Good grief.  Generations of deanlets have recommended or mandated additional content that converts a straightforward schedule of topics and readings into a cluster of technicalities that would embarrass a transportation company explaining that booking a passage through the Strait of Hormuz comes with risks.  And now Jennie Young looks out on the world's largest fjord and says "never mind."

CIVILIZATION, LOST.

Derek Thompson asks, "If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?"  My parents were born in the era of Coolidge Prosperity popularly known as the "Roaring Twenties," which perhaps were even better because the likes of William Shirer and George Gershwin thought the times so benighted they lit off for the Continent.  This century has featured what he, with an assist from Sam Peltzman (yes, he of the Peltzman Effect), calls the "Tragic Twenties."

Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.

His essay continues by suggesting that there's more than a little crying with your mouth full in that response.

But the moral might be more important than the material.

In the last 40 years, Americans have come to expect and prize affordability without even having to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, including housing, have increased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; meanwhile, full employment has put upward pressure on the cost of services. The US public has responded by not only screaming at pollsters about their misery but also by rushing to the polls to vote out every incumbent who failed to do something about the “affordability” crisis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone.

If civilization advances by expanding the set of things people can do without having to think about it, when that set shrinks, we might be looking at one civilization being lost, or perhaps at the saecular order fracturing.

It’s not just that Americans have lost trust in august, faraway institutions. Their faith in one another has suffered even more dramatic declines. For decades, the General Social Survey has asked Americans the same basic question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that other people are more or less trustworthy. That confidence in strangers has plummeted since 2020, according to Peltzman. The share of respondents who say other people are “fair” has declined by even more than overall happiness.

Those grey swans are circling.

American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

Will that saecular entropy be reversed?  Fourth Turning types say no.  If not, what comes first, ekpyrosis or the return of the twelfth imam, or perhaps Barbarossa's beard winding around the table?

WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?

Earth Day always brings out the sort of people who would like to scold us for being prosperous.  Carbon Outfront! by Lloyd Alter identifies those things we most deserve to be spanked for.  "Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows."  The author confesses to "spitballing."  Read his conclusions though, and ask yourself whether he wants the ongoing energy crunch to continue or not.

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.

Then I suppose we'll all live like it's 1825.

FOR "SENSITIVE ISSUES," READ "SACRED PRIORS."

It is the custom of college newspapers to recognize Conrail Day, er, sorry, April Fools' Day, for those of you in Cucamonga, with stories too crazy to be true.  For example, "NIU scraps Mountain West plans, pivots to Big Ten," which came with the disclaimer, "This story is entirely satire."

YOU CAN NEVER UNDERESTIMATE HOW MESSED UP HIGHER EDUCATION IS.

Indiana game theorist Eric Rasmusen, who has an academic reputation stronger than mine and a healthy contrarian streak, is back in the news.

Eric Rasmusen, a well-known professor of economics at Indiana University, recently said he was denied his application for emeritus status.

Rasmusen retired in 2021, but decided not to apply for emeritus status until last year when the university stopped offering free access to online journal subscriptions for faculty who were retired but not emeritus, Rasmusen wrote recently on his substack.

“If I continue to be denied access, I will accept that,” he told The College Fix in a recent interview. “It isn’t fair, but I can ask friends at Indiana University and elsewhere to look up scholarly articles if I need them.”

Typically, professors who retire in good status are awarded the title “emeritus,” but Rasmusen said he was not. He believes the answer to this question goes back to 2019 and a controversial social media post about men and IQ.

When asked if he has considered taking legal action, Rasmusen said he does not plan to.

Legal action might be less effective than letting Indiana's Militant Normal politicians do their thing, or right-populist influencers influence the mockery.

Rasmusen said he prefers the approach of publicity or “an appeal to their better nature.”

The College Fix also contacted Indiana University’s media relations office, Board of Trustees, and Faculty Council twice over the past two weeks, asking what the university policy is for granting emeritus status, if the timing of a request is typically a criterion in determination of emeritus status, and whether there is a process for appealing the decision, as well as about Rasmusen. None responded.

Meanwhile, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood told The Fix that denial of emeritus status is uncommon because “conferring such status on a retiring professor is essentially costless.”

Wood said in a recent email that “the only reason to deny it” would be “the danger of reputational damage” such as “credible accusations of plagiarism, research fraud, rape, or other criminal felonies …”

“An argument might also be made that a college or university that is in the midst of attempting to raise its academic profile might want to withhold emeritus status from faculty who are conspicuously lacking in academic merit,” Wood said.

Rasmusen, however, has not faced such accusations nor, as he pointed out, is he lacking in academic prowess.

Peter Wood might be my favorite former academic administrator, but clearly he missed the switch in "reputational damage" including the criminal felony of challenging the woke dispensation.

HOW IT'S GOING.

The B-52s were on their way to Iran when Our President announced something along the lines of a cease-fire over Iran and pending negotiations in Pakistan.  According to Juan Cole, Iran won the war.

It did not win as in, scoring a knockout. It won in the sense that if I went 12 rounds with Deontay Wilder and was still standing up at the end of it, it would count as a win.

The Israeli-US attempt to decapitate the government failed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with family members, but the 88-member clerical Assembly of Experts simply elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. The civilian minister of defense was killed, which is probably a war crime. President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed IRGC General Majid Ebnelreza as acting minister of defense. The pragmatic civilian Secretary of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani was assassinated, likely another war crime. He was succeeded by hard liner Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC general. In essence, Trump and Netanyahu made an internal coup against Iran’s centrist pragmatists in government, ensuring that they were replaced by far right hard liners.

Going into the war, the Iranian government had just committed a massacre of thousands of protesters and was without a friend in the world. Trump and Netanyahu committed breathtaking war crimes on Iran and acted and spoke so monstrously that many countries ended up at least rhetorically supporting Iran, or at least opposing the war on it. Israel comes out of the war a pariah. The US is too rich, big and powerful to be a pariah but its standing has certainly plummeted and it can expect much less cooperation going forward.

Iran likely inflicted billion dollars worth of damage on the 13 US military bases in the Middle East, most of which are largely destroyed. It used cheap little drones to take out radar installations in Kuwait and elsewhere worth hundreds of millions of dollars, blinding the US to its missile barrages and allowing some deadly strikes, as on Dimona in Israel. Iran demonstrated that having a US military base does not protect the host country but rather exposes it to greater danger. Most US military personnel appear to have had to flee the bases, relocating to local hotels. Iranian intelligence in the Gulf is good enough so that some of those hotels were attacked by drones. Some personnel arrived back in Washington D.C. with only the clothes on their back and Pete Hegseth doesn’t seem to have helped them much.

That might elicit earnest nods in an Ann Arbor common room, but it might be that eliminating as many Iranian government officials as the allies have has fractured the unity among what's left of the government's leaders, and that might have led to Pakistan suggesting private peace feelers that are distinct from what the mullahs are offering for their subjects' edification.  Read on , and discover that even Mr Cole might see the Iranian victory as pyrrhic.

Iran has seen important research institutes, university programs, steel mills, petrochemical complexes, and other economic and infrastructural sites destroyed. It is likely, however, that these can be rebuilt if Iran has convinced Israel that it has the means of deterrence. It is likely that Russia and China will help with the rebuilding, behind the scenes, because a strong Iran able to stand up to the US and its Israeli proxy is in their interests.

Predictable stuff from a long-time suck-up to the jihad.

CLASSIC RAILROADING ENDED WITH CONRAIL.

Fifty years ago, your tax dollars paid for the founding of the Consolidated Rail Corporation, which sought to stem the liquidation of freight railroad capacity by putting federal money behind a rebuilding of the freight railroads of the Official Region out of the most useful bits of Penn Central, primarily their Water Level Route along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers and Lake Erie, with a few pieces of The Pennsylvania Railroad kept in the Pittsburgh area and from Indianapolis to St. Louis, and lesser parts of Erie-Lackawanna in the southern tier counties of New York as well as a Reading and Lehigh Valley line east from Harrisburg to New York to avoid sharing tracks with Amtrak.

Subsequently, regulatory reforms plus privatization of Conrail led to a freight railroad network that has been profitable enough to avoid further raids on the Treasury, if not imaginative enough to solicit the sort of traffic the classic railroads used to handle as a matter of course.

It was during the decline of the classic railroads from the mid-1960s until the Penn Central bankruptcy, with passenger train discontinuances, abandonments of branch lines and secondary main lines, and deteriorating labor relations and physical plant, that ferroequinologists came to refer to E-T-T-S.

WHY THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE HAPPENS.

In a commentary on a recent Supreme Court ruling staying Our President's punitive taxes (thanks, Don!) tariffs, Outside the Beltway's James Joyner observes,

Forcing Congress to do its damn job is the obvious Constitutional solution to balancing that power.

Alas, that institution has become stultified in recent decades, partly because it has delegated so much power to Executive agencies. I have little confidence that it will actually function again anytime soon.

Indeed not.  With Easter and Passover travels about to begin and airport security still relying on the goodwill of workers hoping for a paycheck,  the House and Senate got into another pissing contest.

Sadly, we dive into the chaos of procedures, party disputes, and institutional rivalries. The Senate approved a funding measure by voice vote to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, except for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The frontline troops are financed through the big, impressive bill. Its civilian staff is not. The Senate passed this around 3 am and then left town. They aren't expected to return until April 13.

Meanwhile, House members were outraged that they were not consulted, believing that the partial funding of DHS, one of 12 key appropriations measures each year, shouldn’t be managed this way. They are relying on a 60-day continuing resolution, which means the DHS shutdown will continue for at least another two weeks. The good news is that TSA agents will be paid, thanks to President Trump signing an order permitting reserve monies from last year's tax cut bill to be released.

Pray that Judge Boasberg will be on his spring break rather than doing his usual job playing at being the president.  Shutdown theater is what Congress does, though, to get what it wants.  "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.'"

Yes, Matt Vespa writes for Town Hall and his column has the obligatory harrumphing about Schumer shutdowns, but there might be poison pills in that continuing resolution in the form of language fully funding all homeland security functions including immigration and border enforcement.

How many times do I have to carry on about the absence of regular order appropriations being Congress's preferred way of doing things?

INFRASTRUCTURE IS THEIR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

In Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno asks, "This Congress is focused on how federal dollars go out the door in the next surface transportation reauthorization, and it looks like states might win big time. But with a track record like theirs, why shouldn’t Congress consider who else might use their money better?"

Nobody?

With the vast majority of funding flowing directly to them, State DOTs are, in effect, in charge of the federal highway program. If they are to claim credit for successes, they need to be held accountable for their failures. While local-led planning and project delivery could get things wrong just as much as state DOTs do today, they may also end up being more accountable to the priorities and nuances of communities, based purely on their proximity. When your city or county misspends money or fails to take care of obvious needs, it’s a lot easier to hold them accountable than a faceless, faraway, typically unelected state transportation agency.

As an indication of just how far away they are from thinking about outcomes, one of AASHTO’s top talking points revolves around how good they are at spending other people’s money quickly.  Obligation rates, meaning simply the speed at which federal dollars are spent by a recipient, do not imply any measurement of success based on outcomes. If anything, the use of obligation rates as a metric should be scrutinized. What are you getting for that spending? Are results improving at unprecedented rates? Or are DOTs just prioritizing funding any investment as fast as possible?

In the manner of anything governmental, one requires a list of acronyms. "DOT" refers to state departments of transportation.  "AASHTO" refers to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  That "and transportation" is a recent addition, as the acronym used to be "AASHO" which offers opportunities for all sorts of mischief.

None of which matters.  County road commissioners and state departments of road building are competing to get federal matching funds, which is to say, the local rent-seekers get to wet their beaks and future generations are on the hook to repair or replace it, which means hoping some future Member of Congress will write that project into some future porkulus.