THE LATTE LIBERALS ARE STILL WITH US.

Victor Davis Hanson, who farms in the Imperial Valley and writes with the imprimatur of the Hoover Institute, notes that "if you're hip and liberal, your kids don't have to go to school with the gardener's kids."  But that may be the only compensation, the well-off are overextended in ways they wouldn't be in Chippewa Falls, or even in (horribile dictu) Naperville.

Beneath veneers of high-end living, there are lives of quiet 1-percent desperation. With new federal and California tax hikes, aggregate income-tax rates on dot.commers can easily exceed 50 percent of their gross income. And hip California 1 percenters do not enjoy superb roads and schools or a low-crime state in exchange for forking over half their income.

Housing gobbles much of the rest of their pay. A 1,300-square-foot cottage in Mountain View or Atherton can easily sell for $1.5 million, leaving the owners paying $5,000 to $6,000 on their mortgage and another $1,500 to $2,000 in property taxes each month. Add in the de rigueur Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus and the private-school tuition, and the apparently affluent turn out to have not all that much disposable income. A visitor from Mars might look at their relatively tiny houses, frenzied go-getter lifestyle, and leased BMWs, and deem them no better off materially than middle-class state employees three hours away in supposedly dismal Merced, who earn 20 percent as much, but live in a home twice as large, with only 10 percent of the monthly mortgage and tax costs.

Yes, but at least the moneyed tech people can maintain their enlightened attitudes by not mingling, let alone compelling their spawn, to mingle with Others. Diversity is a conceit, not a life experience.

About 25 percent of the Silicon Valley population is now Hispanic, representing a huge influx of service employees — to work in hotels and restaurants, as nannies and housecleaners, in landscaping and construction — and their presence has expanded beyond the old barrios of San Jose and Redwood City.

The result is that Silicon Valley liberals are apparently worried about the public schools, given that second-generation Hispanics are perceived to be disproportionately represented in statistics on gang activity, illegitimacy, and high-school dropout rates. In crude terms, would a Google executive really wish his child’s hard-driving college-prep curriculum or enlightened social calendar altered somewhat to accommodate second-language teenagers whose parents recently arrived illegally from Oaxaca?

Something similar happened in the Deep South in the 1960s, when court-mandated integration brought black students into formerly all-white enclaves, spurring a white flight to private academies. Upscale hip whites and Asians in Northern California, of course, do not have southern twangs and in theory are multiculturalists to the core. But they are no more invested in a truly diverse public-school experience for their children than southern separatists of the past.

When I suggest to my Silicon Valley friends that their fixation on academic achievement is misplaced and that the academic peer and institutional pressure that my own children might have lost out on by going to the almost exclusively Mexican and Mexican-American public schools of southern Fresno County was balanced by the “life experiences” of dealing with those of all classes, races, and attitudes, they think I am unhinged. Diversity, in other words, is a cosmic ideal of voting for Barack Obama, not a cross that a Stanford-bound kindergartener must bear in the here and now.

And perhaps that's the function of a Stanford, or the freakazoid hothouses of the east. Affirmative action is all about leavening the incoming class with the right kind of exotica ... the child of a politician or diplomat will have the right sensibilities and comportment to fit in, in a way that second-language teenager will not.  Mr Hanson's summation is spot on.

California is the epicenter of the new regressive progressive — a novel sort of hyper-reactionary but hip 1 percenter who shakes his fist at his image in the mirror.

That's not a bad description of the trustafarians mau-mauing the house-mother at Yale.

WHY DOING POLICY ANALYSIS IS HARD.

Frances Moore Lappé offers observations on political economy.  As the title of the piece is "Busting Six Free-Market Fictions, it's likely more about the indignation than the information.  Let's start with an instructive misconception.

If by "free market" we mean one unbounded by rules, it does not exist. All market economies are governed by rules. In ours, no one is allowed to sell babies, trade with terrorists, or sell liquor across the street from your kid's school.

Strip away the polemics, and there's a more important point. There can be no trade without rules of trading, which is to say ownership and contract are well-enough defined that buying and selling take place, with redress in the case of fraud or theft. Ms Lappé sort of gets this, but again, constructing some kind of straw man seems more important.

Think of the essentials to economic success that government provides, from legal structure to infrastructure. As for government being bad for business, this can hardly be true if in economies ranking among the world's most successful, government spending contributes a big part of the GDP.

Yes, although we can still productively debate whether government spending on the legal system, or on infrastructure, or on air forces, is the best use of money. Just for fun, work out how much government activity is symbiotic to commercial activity, and how much is parasitic thereon.

Then, we have to work through the incentives, and get beyond the vulgar one-dollar, one-vote canard.

If true, the market serves human freedom only on one condition: that people have purchasing power to express their values in the market. Thus freedom, using Friedman's own definition, actually expands as societies set rules ensuring that wealth is widely and fairly spread. By the same logic, a market operating without rules to prevent wealth from amassing at the very top denies most individuals' "freedom to choose." And, in many societies that includes the freedom to choose to eat.

Really? What's preventing people from pursuing wealth by providing cheap food?

We cannot enter the kitchen and select the menu. For example, we don't get to say, "No, it's not more choices among processed foods that I want. I want more plentiful, and less expensive, fresh fruits and vegetables."

True, our supermarkets typically carry thirty thousand items. Wow. But without "menu making" power via democratic government providing citizens a voice in public decisions, my choices--including those protecting my family's health as well as healthy soil and water--are extremely limited.

Really? I guess that fresh lettuce all year, and Chilean peaches in the winter and Michigan peaches in summer are a mirage.

No, they're worse than a mirage, they're a waste.

[P]onder the extreme inefficiency of a world food economy in which only 3 percent of the calories in feed going to cattle end up returning to consumers in beef.

That's inefficient if the resources used to produce the calories in that slider aren't priced accurately. Perhaps somewhere in Diet for a Small Planet or her other books Ms Lappé engages that.  But figuring out the ways in which the absence of prices and the presence of subsidies doesn't make for populist froth.

So here we are, trapped in six dangerous fictions creating a highly unfree market, one that leaves many of us denied freedom, the freedom to realize our full potential on a healthy planet. They blind us from understanding that a well-functioning market—one able to end hunger—is impossible without democratic government. Ironically, the market-is-all-we-need dogma ends up destroying the very conditions necessary to realize the market's prized strengths—openness, competition, and transparency.

In large part as a consequence of this dogma, now spreading far and wide, one-quarter of humanity now suffers nutritional deprivation in world of vast food abundance. This is what I mean by "dangerous" fictions—ideas that are literally killing us that we can crack open and leave behind.

"Democratic government" is something other than "government captured by rent-seekers" or "government by the caliphate" or "government of crony capitalists."  But that's too subtle, and the commenters on the piece don't grasp the subtleties either.

DECLARE VICTORY AND GO HOME.

Sgt. Mom of Chicago Boyz appreciates the expanded labor force opportunities that accompanied second-wave feminism, and documents the vanguard going nuts afterwards.

Quite a good few of the women I knew in my first hitch were the first, or maybe the second women in their various military specialties, since all but a handful of the most direct combat related fields had been opened up to anyone – male or female – who could meet the physical requirements and score high enough on the ASVAB to qualify. It was a great time to be a feminist; the big battles for acceptance, for educational and economic quality had been fought and won, and women of my age could enjoy the fruits of victory.

And then feminism … or those females wholly identifying themselves as professional feminist activists developed a serious case of boredom, or maybe shriveled, bitter little man-hating and resentful souls, perhaps on realizing that all the big fights had been won already – and in some cases, won quite a while ago. The so-called feminist intellectuals also discovered that busy women, reveling in those new opportunities, those new-to-them professions, or perhaps even just reveling in being able to choose freely to be wives and mothers … didn’t always toe the line of acceptable feminist thought. I began to note – yes, I did subscribe to MS Magazine – that the editorial voice, and that of the contributing writers was increasingly snotty, exclusive and doctrinaire … it was as if you weren’t really a feminist in good standing unless you were a vegetarian, single-mother, a liberal, employed in the academic world, and for extra points, a lesbian of some color or other. For me, this reached an absolute nadir with the rubbishing of Sarah Palin by the establishment feminists; a woman who combined a successful marriage, active in her husband’s business, and launched a political career starting locally and moving up to the level of state governor without being the spouse or spawn of an establishment politician … this is just not sufficient to be considered a good feminist for the professional activists – whose class snobbery was nearly as vicious as their calculated scorn? That was about the final straw for me.

And now, we have the current crop of toxic professional feminists; whining about guys looking at them, clumsily trying to flirt with them, making mildly risqué jokes between themselves, or wearing shirts with pictures of classic science fiction babes with blasters on it, complaining about near-to-invisible micro-aggressions, re-defining bad and later-regretted sex as rape, and about how a Catholic University not funding birth control is just the most unjust thing evah! Put a fork into current feminism, it’s done already. It’s poisonous … to men and women both … and dangerously counter-productive.

Whining, passive-aggressive, and vindictive indeed.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MULTICULTURALISM.

Roger Kimball quips, "politically correct stupidity is not a joke."  No, but watching the Perpetually Aggrieved turn on each other is amusing in its own way.  Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulis wonders if the cultural conservatives should even bother rescuing the overpriced hothouses for the freakazoid spawn of the 1%.

You’ll forgive me if I lack sympathy. Conservatives have warned for decades that the proliferation of women’s studies, colonial studies, gay studies, and an assortment of other oppression-studies courses would end in tears. We also warned you that campus speech codes were a bad idea.

It gets particularly precious when Eve Ensler's talkative cooch becomes problematic because in the fever swamps, not all women have vaginas. (I'm not making that up, just do your own research.)  But in John Hinderaker suggesting at Power Line that parents not let their children go to Yale is the strongest argument for rescuing the universities that are not hothouses.  It's simple, perhaps at the likes of Yale, and Wesleyan, and Oberlin, you find critical masses of coddled freakazoid spawn.  How dare that mean housemother Erika Christakis write "Toughen Up, Buttercup" in more words.

Students should be able to wear whatever they want, she wrote, even if they end up offending people.

An early childhood educator, she asked whether blond toddlers should be barred from being dressed as African-American or Asian characters from Disney films.

“Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” she wrote. “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”

Ms. Christakis’s email touched on a long-running debate over the balance between upholding free speech and protecting students from hurt feelings or personal offense. It also provoked a firestorm of condemnation from Yale students, hundreds of whom signed an open letter criticizing her argument that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offence” should take precedence over other considerations.

“To ask marginalized students to throw away their enjoyment of a holiday, in order to expend emotional, mental, and physical energy to explain why something is offensive, is — offensive,” the letter said. “To be a student of color on Yale’s campus is to exist in a space that was not created for you.”

Wait a minute, aren't the colored students attempting to appropriate Hallowe'en by so protesting?  Sometimes, keeping up with when oppressions intersect and when the so-called intersection is empty is hard.  Perhaps that's what makes the Perpetually Aggrieved so wild.

Someone suggests they can (not that they must or even should, mind you) wear Halloween costumes (Halloween costumes!) that someone else might find offensive, and these students become unhinged and melt down; they’re not eating, sleeping, or doing homework, and some are having “breakdowns.”  What is going to happen to these precious snowflakes when they leave college and face the real world?  Their delicate sensibilities and sense of perpetual victimhood and entitlement will not serve them well.

Yale’s president, however, is fostering their extended adolescence of self-indulgence and stompy-footed temper tantrums.  He’s not defending the faculty members but is instead expressing his sorrow that Yale administrators “failed” the students.

I wonder if the president, the provost, and the other deanlets will be as forward-thinking when it comes to the starving graduate assistants.

The Yale students are asking for recognition and for negotiations on issues including pay and benefits, mental health services and racial and gender equity among faculty and students.

"The argument that we're students and not employees falls flat for me when I think of how much time I spend teaching," said Michelle Morgan, a graduate student in American studies and a single mother who said she was hurt by a pay cut last year for upper-year teaching assistants. "My students see me very much as a teacher."

A Yale spokesman, Tom Conroy, said that the university provides some of the most generous support in the country, including full tuition fellowships, stipends and benefits, and that graduate students already have a voice in university affairs through student assemblies.

"Yale's longstanding position is that graduate students are students, not employees, and it would not be in the best interests of the students, the faculty, or the educational process to change the teacher-student relationship to a manager-employee relationship," he said.

It's a disguised form of adjunctification.  At least the regional comprehensives and community colleges are up-front about their personnel policies.

In addition, at many of those institutions, there is a critical mass of normal students who treat the indoctrination by the Perpetually Aggrieved as something to be ignored, or mocked.  The only thing that's worse to the freakazoids than being offended by something is to be ignored.  Perhaps the overpriced hothouses will turn into their safe (and occupied) space, and life can go on elsewhere.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

In a Washington Post column, Ted Dintersmith argues the schools are doing anything but.  He's primarily taking on the teach-to-the-test obsession that turns young people into morons (in the old clinical sense) incapable of handling any challenge that isn't presented as bubbles to fill in.

Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh, in “We’re Losing Our Minds,” conclude that far too many college graduates can’t “think critically and creatively, speak and write cogently and clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers.”

The debate about the purpose of education ignores the elephant in the classroom. We have wrapped up our schools in rote memorization, low-level testing, and misguided accountability — preventing them from achieving any real purpose. It’s a fool’s errand to debate whether students are better off memorizing and forgetting Plato’s categorization of the three parts of a human’s soul, the quadratic equation, or the definition of the Cost of Goods Sold.

Let's be careful how we proceed, people.  Essays comprise paragraphs made up of sentences using words.  Thus the rules of construction matter.  Mechanisms are aggregations of simple machines organized purposefully.  Thus the rules of construction matter.  And I keep going on and on about football being blocking and tackling, and music being intervals, chords, sequences.

Thus, yes, teaching only to the test, when the test is a dumbed-down test, is a recipe for quashing inventiveness.  But inventiveness without structure isn't productive either.  Dear reader, spot the neglected actor in the following passage.

For the most part, life preparation occurs through experiences outside the classroom. Kids learn social skills by being around other kids. They develop passions and competencies through an after-school club or program.  They learn the value of teamwork and dedication through athletics. Or they get encouragement from an adult who believes in them, and elevates their aspirations.

We used to call that developing the habits of the middle class.

PRAVDA STILL PUSHES COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA.

Nearly a quarter century since the Soviet Union went out of business, but 98 years after the Great October Socialist Revolution, Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey still believes.

The Russian Revolution was an exercise in power to the people, implementing democracy, freeing serfs, creating the proletariat, freeing women and giving them the vote, taking children out of the mines, creating Trade Unions which defended workers' rights against the hegemonistic tendencies of societies controlled by Capitalists.

Yes, better to have mines worked by enemies of the people who don't eat if they don't make norm.

It was an exercise in a universal movement of goodwill, brotherly and sisterly relations being favored over differences in race, in creed, in ethnicity, in color; it was an exercise in the implementation of social leaning programs worldwide. Whole societies and countries were freed from the yoke of imperialism, colonies were disbanded, people were educated, people were empowered, women were given universal rights, universally.

Yes, and if you believe that, I have real estate in Buryat Autonomous Region or Birobidzhan to exile you to.

Perhaps, though, Mr Bancroft-Hinchey is angling for a billet as chief diversity officer somewhere.

He has spent the last two decades in humanitarian projects, connecting communities, working to document and catalog disappearing languages, cultures, traditions, working to network with the LGBT communities helping to set up shelters for abused or frightened victims and as Media Partner with UN Women, working to foster the UN Women project to fight against gender violence and to strive for an end to sexism, racism and homophobia. A Vegan, he is also a Media Partner of Humane Society International, fighting for animal rights.

It's got to pay better than editing the Portuguese edition of Pravda, plus there will still be phesbian leminists, vegetarians, and all the other freakazoids to hang out with.

THE EVOLUTION OF A CONCEPT.

A year ago, I took a picture of an early articulated split-level coach in the collection of the DB Museum in Nürnberg.  The descriptions on the museum grounds had some subtleties not yet in my German vocabulary.

The coach dates from the middle 1930s.  It was built for the Lübeck-Büchener Eisenbahn, a private railroad that became part of the state railroad in 1938.  (More about Lübeck-Büchener Eisenbahn, two sites auf Deutsch.)   What I couldn't figure out there, but have since learned, is that it was fitted with remote controls in order for the engineer to be able to control the speed of a steam locomotive pushing on the hind end.  The remote control of a steam locomotive from the far end of a coach in order to obviate run-around moves was established railroad practice, in Britain these were called motor-fitted trains, and sometimes the steam locomotive would be placed between two such coaches, the linkage being too imprecise to be set up with anything other than the locomotive adjacent to the coach.

But the Germans modified some 2-6-0 tank locomotives into 2-4-2 tank locomotives (although the 2-4-2 is not the most stable wheel arrangement, having a steering axle at each end is helpful on a locomotive that runs in reverse half the time) and put a streamlined casing on it.

The railroad's fans have set up a Facebook page, from whence I retrieved this image of a train, here in pull mode, crossing an Autobahn.  Looks a little like U.S. 41 in the Chicago area.  (Nose around on the page and you'll see an image of two such coaches, with a diesel marshalled in the middle.)  That allowed the railroad, in its publicity, to brag on their commuter streamliners.

And here I thought the original push-pull bilevel commuter streamliner looked like this.

That's at the Illinois Railway Museum, a somewhat easier trip than to Nürnberg.  It's simpler to run the control lines for a diesel through multiple coaches.  The museum is able to roll out a three-car rake (all seats required for Thomas weekends) whilst Metra run up to twelve car trains at rush hour.  Meanwhile, the Germans have created up to quint-articulated split-level coaches for their regional trains.

IT'S ALL CHILD ABUSE.

The world we live in.  A rambunctious boy risks being screened for "hyperactivity" and being drugged.  An inquisitive boy  capable of staying on task risks being screened for autism spectrum and whatever follows next.  A boy who thinks he's a girl joins a protected class.  It's too much for Camille Paglia, perhaps the most Tory of the transgressives.

Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait until they are of an informed age of consent.

I wonder if this is progress ... that which used to be normal is now a disorder of some kind, and that which used to be a disorder is now a kind of normal.

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

The Cold Spring Shops position, twelve years ago.

SYNCHRONIZE STOPLIGHTS, REDUCE CONGESTION AND ROAD RAGE.

The interim city engineer in DeKalb is thinking right thoughts.

At a meeting Monday, the DeKalb City Council is scheduled to discuss a $1.3 million project to better coordinate traffic lights in the city to make driving in and around town more efficient. It also could cut down on pollution, with less fuel burned by drivers idling at red lights, said John Laskowski, DeKalb’s interim public works director and city engineer.

“This project would get our traffic signals to communicate better and have them better timed for more efficiency,” Laskowski said.

Because in downtown DeKalb is a crossing of two state highways that is crossed by the two main tracks of The Overland Route, the state and Union Pacific will be involved.  Yes, a slow train on that crossing is going to have downtown tied up, and the cycles might have to be modified once the train clears.  But one way to keep downtown more pedestrian friendly is to time the traffic lights to 25 mph; a similar approach with the lights timed to 30 mph in the university area would cut down on the people jackrabbiting from one light to the next to get through.

And perhaps some of the signalled intersections might be converted to simple rotaries or equipped with the flashing yellow arrow for left turns, rather than the rigid "left on green arrow only" currently in use.

LET'S PLAY SPOT THE LOSERS.

Surak constructs an index of quality of life based on nine publicly-available series.  I wish he had provided additional links to his sources, and the method by which he scaled each series and weighted them to create the index.  (That's the scut-work side of social science, and I've been there and done that and it's good practice.)  Here's what it maps to, country by country, with the red end being lowest and the violet end highest.

Retrieved from American Thinker.

He goes on to further aggregate, using something called cluster analysis, the countries.  There's a strong correlation between Western institutions, relatively transparent governments, and higher quality of life.  I'm sure there are other ways to interpret the data, and cases to be made for adding or removing series from the index, and that's a reason to be more explicit about the methods used to construct the axis.  And that, dear reader, is why we call it research.

YOU HAVE TO GIVE THE VOTERS SOMETHING?

The Wall Street Journal (via Betsy Newmark) suggests that Tuesday's by-election results, which were generally not favorable to the grievance lobby and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, turn the latest public benefit into an "albatross."

The Democratic Party has prospered for decades by promising voters entitlements in return for Election Day loyalty. It worked with Social Security and Medicare, and so it was supposed to work for ObamaCare: Pass it and they will come. Instead the Affordable Care Act has become a recurring political catastrophe for Democrats, most recently on Tuesday in Kentucky.

Here's the next step.

Let's scrutinize the links between insufficient commercial activity and generations of young people rendered unemployable by government schools and the minimum wage. Let's understand the effects of fifty years of urban renewal and Model Cities and the War on Poverty in creating a cohort of voters dependent on Democrat policies that somehow never lift people up.

Time.  Patience.  Logic and content.

BOOTLEGGERS AND BAPTISTS ON GREEK ROW?

Any change in public policy, any new regulation, will be "relief for some and a burden for others."  Here's Jason Willick on how that dynamic is playing out in Student Affairs, where the women of the fevered brow are all about denying men due process of law.

You won’t hear them admit it, but one of the primary reasons campus rape activists are loath to create a larger role for law enforcement in campus rape cases is that they correctly perceive that the legal system would summarily dismiss many if not most of the cases that lead to disciplinary sanctions in campus courts.

As I have recently been pointing out in re Patrick Kane. Because he's subject to proper civil procedure, the barfly's flimsy case has been officially dropped. Let's drop the puck.

Mr Willick continues, "This is also the reason, by the way, that fraternities are so enthusiastic about the Safe Campus Act." That's where the Bootlegger and Baptist dynamic starts.

So conservatives pushing the Safe Campus Act should aim not to be champions of the frat boys, but as champions of pragmatism, liberty, and the belief that people can change their culture without heavy-handed intervention from the authorities.

Watch the upcoming battle over the Safe Campus Act closely. It’s about more than reporting technicalities; it’s about an ongoing culture war that will resonate for a generation.

The tussle involves more than the women of the fevered brow and the party boys. Administrators, particularly at enrollment-challenged not-too-selective institutions, create the sub-prime party school environment to bring in students, whilst offering employment to third-rate graduates of victim studies disciplines in order to tick the diversity boxes on the way up.  Here's a previous, not-bylined American Interest article on what happens.

 Partly as a result of feminist-inspired social change, partly for other reasons, we’ve created an environment where young people have virtually unrestricted access to intoxicating substances ranging from alcohol to ecstasy, we’ve removed traditional prohibitions on premarital sex, and we’ve demolished traditional restraints on sexually adventurous behavior by both young men and young women. Yet somehow the sexual utopia has failed to arrive. Instead of creating a gender-blind paradise of sexual bliss, we seem to have constructed an arena of sexual competition that advantages—men.

This is the paradox helping to drive the sex wars on campus: “liberated” sex often works out better for young men than for young women, so efforts to free women from so-called repressive sexual norms sometimes reinforce male privilege rather than challenging it.

I've been raising this point for twelve years. It's encouraging to see others catching on.

In the meantime, though, it looks as if the big winners of the sexual revolution are the hordes of shallow, privileged men swiping through scantily-clad women on iPhone dating apps. This is not, it seems safe to say, what Betty Friedan had in mind.

Probably not, and the new dispensation does little to quell the understandable rage of women, or of nebbishes.

ADVERSE SELECTION.

Another day, another gripe about the failure of the common schools to inculcate the habits of the middle class, which I contend is a major source of the unequal labor market incomes the Concerned fret about.  Here's Daniel Luzer, in The Washington Monthly, with the usual sort of fretting.

Indeed, education performance doesn’t always track income directly, but there’s probably something here. How many more different education reforms do we have to try, and find wanting, before we figure out it might be time to address inequality?

It's not about Common Core or bilingual education or student-centeredness or any of the other usual fads. Adverse selection in the labor market is often driven by the lack of those bourgeois skills.  Another Daniel Luzer essay notes that the government schools exist to serve the poor, and that's who they serve.

Graphic based on Southern Education Foundation research retrieved from Washington Monthly.

Here's Mr Luzer's assessment of the challenge facing the government schools. "And with trends indicating more and more public schools in America are composed of poor kids, the future of school reform is really all about how this country will educate its poor." It cuts two ways.  To the extent that the government schools are increasingly dominated by low income students, the government schools likely are going to have fewer pupils who have acquired the life management skills of the middle class at home.  And schools full of that sort of student are not likely to be attractive to parents who would like school to reinforce those life management skills.  Thus, the high-achieving schools are likely to be private, or government schools in neighborhoods with lots of granite counter-tops.

Meanwhile, the failure of the government schools to inculcate either academic or life management skills bites their graduates.

When Wal-Mart opened on the West Side [of Chicago] in 2006, it had 17,000 applicants to choose from. It had committed to hire from the troubled neighborhood. Its managers had worked in urban environments. In some cases, though not all, the challenge was harder than Wal-Mart expected. Some applicants lacked basic reading, writing and math skills. Lapses in public transit and child care meant that even associates eager to work weren't showing up. Attitudes toward work were a problem too: When income tax refund checks arrived, providing cash to pay bills for a time, some employees never showed up again. Workers had to be taught how to make a good public impression by dressing appropriately and speaking politely.

The people who object to excessive testing and Common Core and the rest of the deaducational fads are almost surely correct.  But there's more damage being done to young people in rough neighborhoods by well-meaning, self-despising multiculturalists who let the bad habits slide under some lunatic notion of authenticity.

Here's Joanne Jacobs.  Disorder hurts low-income strivers.  Current Enlightened Policy seeks to achieve "suspension equity" (or something similarly silly) and that makes it more difficult for the youngsters who would like to, oh, learn something, achieve their goals.  Current Enlightened Policy is wrong.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION.

Here's Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast, writing two years ago, anticipating a challenge to both major political parties from the left.  That certainly appears to be playing out among the Democrats.  He bases his argument on the growing plurality of millennial voters, who have been hard done by in education and then in the job market, which doesn't necessarily make them Republican voters.

If a Republican presidential candidate could match his Democratic opponent as a champion of economic security and yet do so in a way that required less faith in Washington’s competence and benevolence, he might boost the GOP with young voters in a way no number of pop-culture references ever could.

In 2013, nobody anticipated Donald Trump, but those "we're being governed by very stupid people" and "I'll bring back jobs" applause lines are not inconsistent with Mr Beinart's thesis.  That, and Mr Trump is a pop culture reference.  But the redistributionist impulse that appears to be present particularly in Democratic circles is reason, Robert Samuelson argues, to limit the leftward shift.

Growing income inequality has intensified pressures to raise taxes on the rich and near-rich, however defined, to support the middle class and poor. The massive transfers from workers to retirees are starting to sow a backlash among the young, who wonder whether all the elderly's benefits are justified.

Most Americans seem indifferent as to how they get ahead, whether by wealth creation or redistribution. The choice seems abstract. Fair enough. But for the country, the choice matters enormously. The appeal of the affluent society was that one group's gains didn't have to come at the expense of others'. The promise of economic growth was oversold, but it had the healthy effect of encouraging an expansive and inclusive vision of America.

What's emerging today is more self-interested and self-destructive. The dilemma of a rich society is that its prospects can be undermined by its very abundance. Countries preoccupied by distributional wars are distracted from production. The ambitions of many of its most talented members can be satisfied not by adding to the total output but simply by subtracting from someone else's. They are merely rearranging economic assets among themselves. If taken too far, this promises more political division and economic decline.

On the other hand, Chris Hedges suggests the current rearranging of assets is already antagonizing people.

The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt.

That infrastructure has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans or the Sunday shows.  That appears to be Ron Fournier's message in National Journal, which brings us back to Millennials and the lousy economy and culture they are coming of age in.

I con­cluded that their re­volu­tion­ary view of gov­ern­ment and polit­ics points to­ward two pos­sible out­comes. One is that they might opt out of Wash­ing­ton, which leads us to some dark places. The second and more likely out­come is they will blow up Wash­ing­ton (“dis­rup­tion” is the tech-in­spired term they use), and build something bet­ter out­side the cur­rent two-party dys­func­tion.

Mil­len­ni­als don’t fit neatly in­to either the Demo­crat­ic or Re­pub­lic­an parties. They are highly em­powered, im­pa­tient, and dis­gus­ted with polit­ics today.

One year to run to the general election. It's unlikely that the outcome alone will bring anything close to consensus or comity.

ANOTHER PICTURE SURFACES.

I thought my research files had all the existing photographs of the ill-fated Soviet 4-14-4.  Here, from The Guild of Equestrian Railroaders, is another that some intrepid soul found on the Russian archive Yaplakal.com.

Unattributed Yaplakal.com image retrieved from fimfiction.net.

The locomotive does not appear to be in steam, perhaps this is its delivery to the Shcherbinka test track.  All the wheels appear to be on the rails, so I wonder what all the men are paying attention to.  The viewing angle helps with the modelling.

That was December, 2009, with snow on steppe, and the engine truck off the rails.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S PATHETIC WEENIES.

Laura Hollis, writing for Town Hall, is less than impressed with the overpriced hothouses for the freakazoid spawn of the priviligentsia.

Apparently, the very same demographic that whimpers in abject terror at the mere mention of "triggering" words like "rape," "ghetto," "crazy" and "illegal alien" (or catching a glimpse of "We the People") is resilient enough to endure an entire week dedicated to discussions and demonstrations of oral and anal sex, masturbation, sex toys, "feminist porn" (I'll leave the dichotomy there to the gender theorists), bondage and sadomasochism, whips and flogging, and threesomes. (And so much more!)

Perhaps it's all about the experimentation.  But the rot goes beyond the overpriced hothouses.  Fortunately, sometimes the students push back against the antics of the administrators.  A few days ago the dean of journalism at North Texas State was being a hazard to herself and everybody else, walking in the street (in a subdivision that has sidewalks!) and when the local police pointed this out, she decided to play various victim cards.  In doing so, she just made the job market more difficult for North Texas journalism students.

I’m agitated that Dorothy holds the position of our dean. After the way she’s handled herself, she is undeserving of the title. Although she’s bringing poor attention to my university, I will not let her discredit the degree I worked so hard for. It’s time to turn a bunch of negativity into something positive. It’s time to prove in the real world after graduation that our writing does not portray the piece written by Dorothy Bland.

Perhaps. On the other hand, perhaps part of the practice of journalism these days is ensuring that the story fits the received narrative.

THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

Here's Chris Matthews saying good things about The America That Worked(TM).  He enjoyed the recently released Bridge of Spies.

In his own words, the real story is about patriotism, rather than the spy exchange itself (Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers, Khrushchev got a spy-master back.)  And Mr Matthews mentions shared values, shared history and culture, people doing the right thing.

Put another way, all the things that the counter-culture, with more than a little help from San Francisco Democrats and the rest of the trendy left, have been busy undermining and deconstructing.

IF YOU THINK IT'S EXPENSIVE NOW, WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE WHAT IT COSTS WHEN IT'S FREE.

That's a bon mot P. J. O'Rourke got off about health care, back in 1993, and 22 years later we still have to tell Hillary to mind her own business, and much of the rest of the essay is still depressingly accurate.  The lesson generalizes.  Here's Sarah Kobos, in Strong Towns, illustrating the way in which a mandate or an entitlement gets out of hand.

Imagine living in a city where every restaurant is required by law to provide free chicken sandwiches.  In addition to the free sandwiches, each restaurant offers a complete menu of items available for purchase.  You can order roast beef or a reuben or an Albuquerque Turkey—but you have to pay for them.

The chicken sandwiches, however, are always free.  And each day, restaurants must provide more than twice as many chicken sandwiches as their customers will eat.  A majority of the sandwiches go to waste.

This would be absurd, right?  What kind of communist plot would require a business to offer sandwiches for free?

Well, nearly every town in America does it.  But they don’t require free sandwiches, they require something much more valuable: free parking.

The line of argument echoes one Reason raised years ago, asking people to consider an alternative universe in which businesses competed for labor during World War II by providing all workers with lunches, rather than what really happened, which was that businesses competed for labor by providing health insurance.  (See how well that turned out?)  The general principle is the same: where there are no incentives to conserve, resources don't get conserved, and the only free parking space where you get to pick money up is the one on the Monopoly board.

Even if they’re located next to a bus stop, or a bike route, or a residential neighborhood where their customers live, businesses across America must purchase extra land to build parking lots.  Often, they must demolish existing buildings to do so.  And while zoning ordinances don’t specifically require the parking to be free, we’ve built so much of the darn stuff, we’ve devalued it.  People have come to expect free parking wherever they go.  As a result, it’s a rare business that dares to charge for parking.

Yes, and much of the time, that space is vacant (we're heading into the Christmas rush, that's the exception, although Strong Towns will run their Black Friday vacant parking lot challenge again this year).

Our zoning code essentially dictates that developments prioritize cars over people.  So what do we get?  A city full of cars.

As Donald Shoup famously wrote, “Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars.”

And because we put the needs of cars before those of people, we require buildings to be set back far from the sidewalk.  We require enormous parking lots located between the building and the street.  We expect pedestrians and transit users to traverse asphalt wastelands and share space with speeding SUVs.

We make driving convenient and seemingly “free.”  We make every other alternative inconvenient and unpleasant, and then we charge for transit. We are handing out the chicken sandwiches and wondering why so few people choose soup or salad.

But is all this parking actually “free?”

No, and the resources devoted to providing parking spaces are diverted from providing other useful services or goods.

FAULT LINES IN THE SEXUAL UNDERGROUND.

I found the following story on Reason this morning. Amid controversy, ‘Stonewall’ screening postponed at Colorado College.  We're talking comparative oppression, Preppie, not freedom.

A group of concerned students called for a boycott of the screening and created a group, Radicals Against Institutional Damage (R.A.I.D.). The group sent a letter signed by nine to key administration on campus expressing their views.

“This film is discursively violent,” write the activists. “In a world where cisgender, white gay people have finally achieved “marriage equality” and many see the struggle as being over, it is reinforcing a hierarchy of oppression to invent someone who never existed and place them in a historically-based film with the express purpose of silencing more marginalized groups.”

The Film and Media Studies Department argued that their decision to screen the film does not condone its content. Rather it is an attempt to engage with the executive producer and possibly, an opportunity to question some of the decisions made in the film’s representation of minorities.

I don't have to make this stuff up, this is the way the Perpetually Aggrieved roll.  "Cisgender, white gay people."  Whatever.  Fifty years of gay lib has apparently led to institutions that have evolved, whether out of a sense of fundamental fairness, or out of exhaustion, or because there's scar tissue on the body politic, in such a way as to confer privilege on some parts of the BLTGQUINOA aggregation, but other parts still feel picked on.

“For me as a scholar and queer person engaging with my environment it is essential to analyze and critique these representations in order to draw attention to what is at stake for queer folks and to engage with the stories that are being told and held as representative in mass media,” said Spanish and Portuguese Professor Naomi Wood.

Others argue that this critical discussion justification is a front.

“Critical discussion is simply a way of engaging in respectability politics,” said first-year Amelia Eskani. “I think Colorado College should cancel the screening because the safety and well-being of queer and trans* students surpasses the importance of a critical discussion.”

R.A.I.D. questions the legitimacy and effectiveness of any critical discussion following the film.

“Inevitably, some students will have the burden of informing other students as well as staff and faculty about the problematic aspects of the film,” R.A.I.D wrote. “The conversation will, yet again, put queer students in the position of having to teach to justify the validity of our feelings, which is emotionally draining, difficult, and frankly, not our job.”

A hungry baby who has not yet learned words is also in the position of having to teach to justify the validity of his feelings. "Respectability politics" must be a new way for the Perpetually Aggrieved to impugn the traditional academic custom of informed disagreement. Apparently to analyze and critique is too difficult, when you're able to get away with saying "problematic" (translation: I don't like it but don't have a coherent explanation why not) or throw a temper tantrum.  Good grief.  Here's Reason's summation.

But students who demand safe-space protection from art that doesn’t quite live up to expectations are truly pitiful. They will never be able to interact with anyone outside the pathetic bubble they have created for themselves.

On the other hand, all the usual identity politics nonsense about marginalized people loses its oomph when the freakazoids self-marginalize.

USE YOUR IMAGINATION.

For the time being, the roads are not going to be made more dangerous by an Act of Congress. Ribble’s bigger trucks crash and burn.  Fortunately, it's a metaphorical crash and burn, as an amendment Wisconsin representative Reid Ribble proposed for the latest surface transportation funding bill to raise the weight limit for trucks failed.  The argument his rent-seeking buddies made is instructive.

The amendment was supported by manufacturers, shippers and trucking companies who said it would make freight shipments more efficient and reduce the number of trucks on the road. Ribble added that trucks leave dairy farms and paper mills in his district half full because they've reached the maximum weight limit.

Put another way, that's a case against 53 foot trailers, which I have long suggested are rolling hazards.  The new speaker of the House, also a Wisconsin Republican, is allowing representatives more latitude to introduce amendments during floor debate, although I doubt that any will look like these.

Special movement permits for any trailer exceeding 40 feet.  Permit fee to be substantially higher if the movement can be by rail over part or all of the trip.  Federal excise tax on retreaded tires.  And some money devoted to improving railroad tracks for faster trains, with the stipulation that the owning railroads be allowed to path intermodal trains at speeds of 90 or 100 mph on those tracks.

At least for now, the sense of Congress -- it takes some Republicans voting against Mr Ribble's amendment to defeat it -- is that on balance, the heavier trucks mean more wear and tear on the roads and more road congestion.  Perhaps there will be something resembling a coherent infrastructure bill, rather than the latest short-term fix for the Highway "Trust" Fund, during this session.

THE NAIL THAT STICKS UP GETS HAMMERED DOWN.

Teachers don't like creative students, notes Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok (via 11-D.)  On one hand, I'm inclined to say "no duh" (and surely could have gotten this post up four years ago).  On the other hand, that's just the tradeoff teachers, and the political system that creates common schools, face.

My experience as a parent is consistent with the idea that teachers don’t like creative students but I try not to blame the teachers too much. Creative people, for better and worse, ignore social conventions. Thus, it can be hard for teachers to deal with creative students in a classroom setting where they must guide 20-30 students en masse.

Yes. On the other hand, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."  Individuality.  Community.  Both useful.  Both in tension.

NATURE? NURTURE?

It's never simple.

One of [the identity-politics crowd's] ideological allies is throwing cold water on the “born this way” argument for biology-based sexuality, saying it relies on “very thin science” and has actually harmed gay rights.

That article takes readers to New York magazine,where Northeastern's Suzanna Walters, says:

“People feel and experience their sexuality in very deep and substantive ways, of course. But neither is it as simple and glib as some, you know, genome, some endocrine trigger.”

Ultimately, she argues, it's not about biological science or social science, intellectual endeavours that are never settled.  Rather, it's about freedom.

Walters believes that tolerance of biological difference is simply too flimsy a foundation for a cause such as gay rights — and that that’s part of the reason other civil-rights movements have shied away from such arguments. “Look at the women’s movement, look at the black civil rights movements,” she said. “Neither of those movements relied on notions of immutability, on acceptance, on tolerance. They relied on notions of equality, of liberation, of freedom. We have that tradition in our country.”

Walters acknowledged the challenge she faces given how deeply ingrained in the LGBT discussion the “born this way” line is. “It has become — not just for gays but for liberal allies — the position you’re supposed to take,” she said, and arguing otherwise is often seen as akin to arguing against gay rights altogether. That’s why Walters said her book specifically targets straight allies: She hopes to convince them, “You don’t need to rely on flimsy science, on notions of compulsion, on notions of immutability, in order to make a strong case for civil rights.”

Precisely. Nineteenth-century civil rights movements battled against notions of immutability, specifically the intellectual or emotional shortcomings the establishment of the era claimed to be part of the nature of being African, or female.

NOT NECESSARILY A REGRESSIVE TRANSFER.

I've long struggled with the social welfare effects of public subsidies to education, which lower the price to the student whilst giving those students the opportunity to prosper, sometimes with the assistance of taxes collected from their less intellectually gifted or less advantaged counterparts who went into the workforce out of high school.  Now comes (well, it was a long time ago in blog years, but I'm working off the backlog of posts) Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic claiming, "No, Public Spending on Higher Education Isn't Regressive."

Is State U. is overfull of upper-income kids? Well, not quite.

The trouble is that a huge chunk 0f college goers aren't actually 18-year-olds living off an allowance from mom and dad. At four-year public institutions,about 36 percent of students are considered financially "independent," which is a catch-all category for people who break the typical undergraduate mold. How so? You can qualify as independent a few ways, including if you're married, over the age of 24, an orphan, are a military veteran, or have your own children. But the key part is this: Everyone assumes you'll be paying your own way through school (and as a result, you might receive more financial aid).

Do all of these students really survive solely on the strength of their own bank accounts? Not at all. There are surely many veterans attending college with help from their families. Same goes for 26-year-olds, and even some single parents. And therein lies the trouble with figuring out how wealthy independent students actually are: since nobody asks how much their parents earn, we don't truly know how much of a financial cushion they have to rely on.

But there are some things we do know about them. First, they skew low-income, at least based on their own earnings. Almost half of them support their own dependents, like spouses and children.

To some extent, though, the institutions that hold themselves in high regard are part of the story.  College Insurrection picks up a Slate article to the effect that there are relatively few veterans enrolled at such institutions, and that institutional research doesn't seem terribly interested in quantifying the presence of veterans.  And despite the draw-down of the armed forces in the era of hope and change and peace in Asia Minor leading to an increase in veterans using their college benefits, it is still the mid-majors and regional comprehensives that are taking the lead in being veteran-friendly universities.  Thus, those institutions have the responsibility to behave like institutions of higher learning, rather than like sub-prime party schools.

THE PASTURE OR THE GLUE FACTORY?

Econ Log's Bryan Caplan, with an assist from the Simpsons, finds a metaphor for making sense of all-or-none mandates. "I just want the horse to have a good home or be food. If you want to take him, fine with me."  In like manner, "I just want the worker to make $15 an hour or be unemployed."  And so it goes.  In the political economy of public policy, there are tradeoffs.

The point is that stark ultimatums are a double-edged sword, not a no-brainer.  A devoted horse-lover really could sensibly favor an option in between "good home" and "food."  A friend of the workers really could sensibly oppose the minimum wage.

But subtlety cannot be reduced to sound-bites, and elasticity analysis is hard (although the usual principles-level approach with a lot of rivet-counting over point or arc elasticity) doesn't help the novice develop the right analytical frame of mind.

LOOKS LIKE A PLASTICVILLE BUILDING

Amtrak and the New York department of transportation will be providing a new old-look headhouse for Schenectady.  The artist suggests it will have an old-look pointless arrow logo.

New York state department of transportation graphic courtesy Albany Times-Union.

There will also be two main tracks between Schenectady and Albany. As that stretch is good for 110 mph running, there might be some fun train action to come.

The DOT said the design of the new station is inspired by the aesthetics and architecture of the former Union Station built on the same site in 1910. The new station will be owned by Amtrak and will be slightly larger than the existing station built in the 1970s.

The new station will provide waiting and ticketing areas, as well as improved accessibility for people with disabilities. There will be a new platform and the concourse access will be renovated, including the installation of a new elevator. A secondary ramp will be built to provide a second exit from the platform for emergency use.

Parking and bicycle and pedestrian access at the train station also will be improved. The parking layout will be redesigned and sidewalks, lighting and bike racks will be added.

And if you wanted to build a model of the station for your layout, you could start with this.

That's the Union Station building from Bachmann's Plasticville line, which is still in production, and Model Train Stuff have it on offer at a good price.

BEING STUPID ABOUT BEING SMART.

On Friday, Megyn Kelly's guests Meghan McCain and Eboni Williams had justifiable fun with CNBC's pathetic performance hosting last Wednesday's Republican debate.  They may have gone a snark too far taking on a followup CNBC article with a misleading headline, "College-level speaking not required at the GOP debates."  The article might have been better-received had the writers noted the generally simple structure of political discourse up-front.  But no, better to get in your digs at the Republican candidates and the Republican base and then note that plain language is de rigueur. "Complicated speech doesn't necessarily help anybody in the polls. There is no value in being over people's heads, especially if you are trying to win their emotions." Yes, and the article even notes that President Obama's language is pretty plain,  The highest-grade-level presidential statement the authors could find was President Nixon's re-election statement in 1972, using college level language, but given the obfuscations that were to come, perhaps that was a portent.  But Ms Kelly did get off trenchant advice to the political class. "It is not to your benefit to try to be so sanctimonious and smug in your intelligence and your degrees. It is better if you can speak in a way that everyone understands and doesn't have to work hard to figure out."  Yes, but perhaps the wordnoise is a portent ...

LONELINESS AND FRUSTRATION.

I've long been of the view that the deconstruction of civilizing institutions and the so-called sexual revolution have been a toxic environment for people to grow up in.

A nebbish is still a nebbish.  But the post-Enlightenment social theorists offer no special affirmation.

And nowhere are there institutions or conventions strong enough to give the nebbish something to constructively push against (as Emerson would have it) or to encourage the nebbish to interact constructively with other people.

Now comes Tom Nichols in The Federalist, also looking at disaffected and destructive young men, and suggesting "these are not men in any [traditional way]".

This is a disturbing charge, but consider for just a moment the ways in all these young men are similar, rather than different. They are aloof, and their peers generally do not understand them. They may be liked in a small circle of people, but they also make those same people uncomfortable. Their adolescence, which should have been shed years earlier, has stayed with them like a worn t-shirt or a beat-up pair shoes they couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. Whether fascinated by hip-hop culture like Lindh and Jihadi John, or living a virtual life online like Snowden, they do not move on to the responsibilities of adulthood.

These alienated young men have no structure, and they see others apparently enjoying themselves despite not playing by any rules.

The mainspring of their actions is a juvenile narcissism that grows out of social resentment and a failure to mature. And this should matter to all of us, because when society breeds too many narcissistic males determined to get even with a world that denies them their due—the fame, recognition, or sexual mate they think they deserve—we’re all in danger.

To Mr Nichols, the responsibility for these men failing to launch rests on a common culture without proper launching pads for young people.

We, the adults, have made this generation of young men by allowing, over the course of some 40 years, the eventual construction of a hyper-sexualized, publicity-obsessed, winner-take-all twenty-first-century culture in which success means money, sex, and fame at any cost. Young males no longer live in a world where there’s a Jack for every Jill, or where social institutions like schools, the police, churches, or the military—all decimated by repeated social attack since the 1960s—provide some kind of equalizing effect among men, protecting and building up the weaker boys while disciplining and maturing the stronger ones.

The result is that today American youth, and especially the males, live in a kind of “Lord of the Flies” domain where the Wild Boys act without restraint and the weak kids fall off the ledge, without even a noble Ralph to mourn them. The already-anarchic environment of adolescence has been turned completely toxic by the absence of responsible adults and especially of male role models. In the jungle, the strong and aggressive rule, and in that world, the losers, the “kind of a loner” geeks, the misfits, feel they have no place.

They’re not entirely wrong. So they settle on every young loser’s fantasy: Revenge.

But the institutions are too far gone to be reconstructed.

I am at a loss for a solution, because the answer lies in some kind of long-term restoration of social order among young men. I don’t know how to do that: the multiple horses of promiscuity, affluence (even among “poor” kids), permissiveness, violent and ghettoized teen culture, and perpetual immaturity are so far out of the barn now, and so entrenched in American life, that I have no idea how to stop their corrosive influence on the weaker or less competitive males who are plowed under a society that moves faster than they, and we, can manage.

Older men can no longer mentor younger men in any meaningful numbers. There are not enough of us, and many of us are reluctant to engage in such work in any case. The traditional venues for male socialization (including marriage) have mostly vanished or, in the case of schools, been rendered safe havens from the normal behavior of males in need of discipline and maturing.

Nor can mentors or schools fight the epidemic of divorce, pop culture, the media, and the overall assaults on the creation of the kind of family life that channels men toward creation rather than destruction. There has to be a sea-change in social attitudes, but I’m stumped about how to make that happen in a nation as self-indulgent and as averse to hard introspection as ours is now.

Dr. Helen expresses similar pessimism.

It is hard to love a country that doesn’t love you. It is hard to have monogamy and a wife when the laws and cultural milieu from grade school to college and beyond say that you are a predator who is out to hurt women when you can’t even get one and that is a tough pill to swallow for a regular guy, much less a mentally disturbed one. To learn morality for many, one must see others act in a moral manner.

In today’s world, we rarely see morality acted out by others, and young men are said to be the most immoral creatures on the planet as anyone with a Y chromosome knows full well. Immorality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after hearing that you are a danger for so long. To treat others well, one generally needs to be treated well themselves and rewarded for decent behavior. This often does not happen for young men. The decent are often treated with contempt by society and if male, by many women who don’t want a decent guy until later in life, if at all. The cultural message to women is “You go girl!” but to men, it is “You suck, you dangerous perverted rapist!” How is a young man to learn morality with this message?

The current dynamic in our society is to punish the moral, decent and monogamous male with a combination of contempt, unfair marital laws and apathy to his emotional life. And yes, the narcissistic and entitled are often rewarded so these characteristics can be combined with emotional disturbance to create a disaster. Add to this the lack of intervention into these young men’s mental health issues and you have some ticking time bombs ready to explode when the time seems right.

The danger is enhanced, argues Tyler O'Neil, because in an environment where every challenge becomes a call for government action, the patient rediscovery of institutions that work is thwarted.

The classical Greco-Roman virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance mixed well with the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. This bedrock of character formation was the centerpiece of the medieval university, and even the modern colleges and universities throughout early America and past the Civil War.

The moral foundation behind such men as George Washington and William Wilberforce taught young frustrated men to direct their passions toward positive pursuits, and helped create a culture of freedom and virtue.

While some argue that restraining sexual energy and focusing it on marriage and on fulfilling one’s duty is “repressive,” this alternative lifestyle actually cuts down on sexual frustration for less successful men. If even the most impressive hunk has to limit his sexuality to one wife — or at least make a show of doing so — that leaves more available women, and makes other men less jealous. Monogamy may seem repressive, but it actually promotes social cohesion and sexual equality.

The path toward restoring this view does not require draconian laws which restrict movies, television or video games. This is a spiritual and cultural struggle — not necessarily a political one. While reintroducing the Bible in schools and teaching Judeo-Christian history and heritage without an anti-religious bias would make a huge difference, legislating these moves is the wrong approach.

Rather, Christians need to speak up, and historians need to re-examine where our values come from. The virtues of the Enlightenment — science, limited government and free markets — can also be found in the writings of the Spanish scholastics, and to some extent in the medieval university. The heritage of rights and learning we so prize today does not come from a rejection of faith — but from the very bedrocks of the great cathedrals, and from the words of a certain Galilean.

And, I would argue, from rejecting the postmodern snake-oil that denies the very notion of coherent beliefs.

GOING NOWHERE.

I'm referring to the allegations a bar-fly levelled at Chicago Blackhawk winger Patrick Kane.  At least one attorney for Mr Kane's accuser has already quit the case.

At the time the story broke, I was prepared to grant it some credence, noting only that Mr Kane, as an employee of the National Hockey League, would enjoy legal protections that would be denied a college athlete.  Girls, drinking, the protective cocoon for athletes?  Yes, still pitfalls for young people not yet accustomed to celebrity.

But because Mr Kane is subject to the presumption of innocence and the rest of the legal protections, he is still playing, the Blackhawks are still selling out the United Center, and Joel Quenneville is still behind the bench.

Had we been speaking of the Duke hockey team (yeah, that's a stretch, but stay with me) we'd probably have another academic rush to judgement to post about.

IT'S THE RENT-SEEKING, STUPID.

Here's a graphic that makes the point, probably by accident.

I'm hard pressed to think of a better case for taking "enumerated and limited powers" seriously.  Whether the folks at Occupy, from whence I got it, will, is another matter.  Then comes Cory Doctorow.  Never underestimate the strength of a model of behavior that uses self-interest as motive force.  That's what public choice theory teaches about public officials, and the related rent-seeking theory teaches about constituents.

Political scientists and economists who've undertaken peer-reviewed research into policy outcomes have concluded that all over the world, and at every level of government, wealth inequality is correlated with corrupt policy-making in which politicians create laws and regulations that favor the rich at the expense of the wider public.

This is a vicious cycle: the more unequal a society becomes, the more its politicians enact rules that lead to greater inequality.

Which provokes the Blogfather to quip, "He can't seem to make the leap to the 'allow fewer laws' point."

Indeed.

RECLAIMING THE AMERICA THAT WORKED?

A Washington Post story suggests that, behind the Donald Trump phenomenon, there are more than a few voters who remember The America That Worked^(TM).  Yes, I've been pointing out how all the social criticism aimed at the supposed excess conformity of the 1950s burdened all who came after with the fallout of bad ideas and symbolism over substance for a long time.  Good on the legacy press for recognizing that people see something lost.

Trump’s slogan is a tribute to a simpler time. “He could have said, ‘Make America what it was before’ and I would have voted for him,” said Jane Cimbal, 69, who lives in Winchester and signed up to collect signatures to get Trump on the Virginia ballot. “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.”

Unfortunately, there are no do-overs, thus no opportunity to leave racial and sexual minorities alone by limiting the powers of government to trammel free association, a development that might have made getting the military hamstrung in Southeast Asia more difficult.  But even among people with no living memory of The America That Worked^(TM) we perceive a sense that the new dispensation is unsatisfactory.

The crowds at Trump events tend to be older and whiter than the national population, but so is the party whose nomination he seeks, and so are frequent voters generally. If younger supporters don’t have firsthand experience of the Eisenhower, Kennedy or Reagan years, they nonetheless share the older generation’s sense of loss.

Instructively, it's not so much the trashy, splintery popular culture that comes out of these vignettes.

That free-floating sense of decline expresses itself in many different ways among Trump supporters. Some speak of a fading sense of mobility, a loss of the expectation that each generation will surpass its parents’ standard of living. Others focus on the loss of blue-collar jobs and a sense that only those with computer backgrounds can take advantage of the new digital economy.

Technical progress we always have. Ask the next switchboard operator or elevator operator you see. Social orders, however, can emerge, perhaps out of the wreckage of the current trashy culture.

BEST WISHES.

Minnesota and former Northern Illinois football coach Jerry Kill announces his retirement.  He's been battling epilepsy and on occasion had to coach from the press box.  Around Northern Illinois sports, Mr Kill is honored by current and past players.

"The impact Coach Kill had on everyone is evident today seeing the support for his retirement," tweeted former linebacker Patrick Schiller, who was with Northern Illinois from 2007-2011 and is now playing for the Atlanta Falcons. "He taught me to be a man, went beyond football."

While current Northern Illinois coach Rod Carey came to Northern Illinois in 2011, he praised Kill for not only helping him, but elevating the Huskie program that he eventually took over.

"There's no doubt Coach Kill helped set the stage for where we are as a program right now," Carey said. "Personally, he was always willing to help and spend time with me, talk with me as I started out as a head coach. He is just a genuine, genuine person who is stepping aside for all the right reasons. It's so hard because we're going to miss him."

Thus life goes on in the Mid-American Conference, where successful coaches often receive offers they can't turn down from more visible programs.  Northern Illinois has managed to continue to field competitive teams, despite those teams making the coaches look so good that such offers come in.

And Mr Kill brought what the punditry characterizes as a "hard hat and lunch pail" approach to football, which apparently meant thinking about it all the time. But it also involved acting like a guy who started as a volunteer tackling-dummy holder rather than as Tsarevich.

Jerry Kill was more than a football coach. You'll read and hear endless stories about him today, about his kindness, about his on-field successes and how genuine of a guy he really is. Realize that hardly any college football coach gets this kind of treatment, especially on a national level.

At the time Mr Kill left for Minnesota, I wished him well, and also that the Axe remain in Madison.  Although he finished with an even record at Minnesota, the Axe is still in Madison.