CHICAGO AGGRESSES AGAINST THE WORLD ECONOMY.

We've noted, previously, that the Sanitary and Ship Canal is also the world's biggest open sewer.  Dilute it enough, though, and St. Louis and Memphis might still draw water safely.  Diluted or not, what remains eventually gets to the Gulf of Mexico.  "While the agricultural runoff from farms — exempted under the Clean Water Act — is the main driver of the Gulf dead zone, Chicago’s sewage is the largest single source of phosphorus pollution."

Over the past few years, there have been summer dead zones elsewhere in the Lakes, including Green Bay and one notorious one that closed Toledo's water works for a few days.  Yes, phosphorous fertilizers contribute to making crops more productive, and the feedstocks are relatively abundant.

Mightn't there, though, be ways of capturing the runoff for reuse?

That, however, is not what the article really wants people to Become Alarmed about.  "Climate scientists say this issue is only expected to get worse in the future as a wetter climate in the Midwest — specifically one characterized by heavy rainfall in the winter and spring — creates more runoff." That "heavy rainfall in the winter and spring" is supposed to get readers worked up about global warming.  You have to read on, though, to note that it wasn't heavy rainfall this year.  "While the concentrations of nutrients in the Mississippi River basin weren’t particularly remarkable, the melting snow and spring rains poured into waterways, leading to record high river flows and delivering an overall larger nutrient load to the Gulf of Mexico."  To add to our troubles, the wet grounds have meant corn and soybean planting is delayed, if not deferred for the crop insurance.

WOKE DONATISM.

Apparently the notion that any institutional arrangement with a less than immaculate conception is a candidate for deconstruction has an ancient pedigree.

In a world where humans rather than seraphim run the churches, perhaps the best we can hope to do is to pit conflicting claims against one another in an orderly way.

The idea was checks and balances applied to men who were not angels might prove superior to British kings and other persons of quality if the standard was external to both. This notion has carried over into modern blockchain systems, where every step is unambiguously identified, consensus enforced by explicit rules and reproducible by any party. A maximum of trust is delegated to a verifiable system and as little as possible is left to the virtue of the participants.

That's a sensible generalization of "it is not from the benevolence of the baker ..."

I like the idea of the Donatist heresy, which might have taken seriously the instruction that only those without sin get to cast stones.  As a practical matter, though, throwing out any institution that was not conceived without sin isn't going to turn out well absent careful thought about what replaces it.  "Not so long ago it was an article of faith that the road to salvation was thronged by sinners and was in fact designed for sinners alone. Perhaps it still is. The difference was that then we knew it." Notice that the Preamble to the Constitution reads "form a more perfect Union."  Better, I submit, to attempt incremental improvements, rather than deconstruct everything and hope to do better from scratch.

A THREE-CAR, POST-WAR INTERURBAN TRAIN.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin purchased ten interurban coaches that went into service after Victory.

One has returned to regular service at Illinois Railway Museum.  Here it's running as the "Batavia Shuttle" meeting a four-car mainline train.

The fleet of cars only ran in revenue service for eleven years, as Our Political Masters thought the future was limited-access motorways.  That meant a reconstruction of the Metropolitan West Side Elevated to run in the median of the Congress Street (now Eisenhower) Expressway running downtown through the Dearborn Street subway.  That was effectively the end of the Aurora-Elgin as those wooden cars couldn't go into the subway.

A lot of the cars got second life in preservation, with most of the post-War cars going to Gerald Brookins's Columbia Park and Southwestern, until subsequent owners of the complex he built decided a full-sized train set was an expensive luxury.  Thus three of the cars returned to Illinois.

There's a chance to repatriate a fourth.  The Electric City Trolley Museum in Scranton has decided to concentrate on restoring regional rolling stock, and their car 453 is available, provided members and friends of the Illinois Railway Museum dig down.  Moving these cars and restoring them to good running order (the 453 is in pretty good shape for not having run in probably sixty years) doesn't happen by magic.

Should this project come through, the museum will be able to run a five car Aurora-Elgin steel train.

LAMENTATIONS.

Jonah Goldberg.  "What America needs is less talk of national unity -- from the left or the right -- and more freedom to let people live the way they want to live, not just as individuals, but as members of local communities."

V. D. Hanson.  "[E]lites never suffered the firsthand consequences of their own ideological fiats."

Ed Driscoll.  "Los Angeles and San Francisco are rapidly becoming Detroit with palm trees."

Detroit is different in that its elites didn't expect what was coming.  The troubles of today's Credentialed Establishment are self-inflicted.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

In what way does paying tribute to a warlord differ from paying protection money to a mobster or allocating taxes to the police department?  It's an important question to be able to answer, in light of a recent Jonathan Aldred essay suggesting a greater role for the taxing power in addressing wealth or income inequality.  "Among other things, we will need to accept that how much people earn in the market is often not what they deserve, and that the tax they pay is not taking from what is rightfully theirs."

I wish I had come up with this formulation while I was still teaching the survey of public policy class.

Somewhere, there is a sweet spot at which tax-funded social and physical capital becomes symbiotic with the social and commercial activity that people also engage in. To one side of that sweet spot, to the left, if you will, is the slough of despond in which government becomes parasitic on commerce, and destructive of, social and physical capital. To the other side, to the right, is the cesspool of sin in which the rent-seekers become parasitic on government, which destroys social and physical capital, albeit in a different way.

Mr Aldred sort of gets this.

As the top 1% grow richer, they have more incentive and more ability to enrich themselves further. They exert more and more influence on politics, from election-campaign funding to lobbying over particular rules and regulations. The result is a stream of policies that help them but are inefficient and wasteful.

That's the cesspool of sin, inhabited by rent-seeking parasites.  Those rent-seekers might spin taxation as theft, particularly when it's their tax preferences (including the ability to deduct state and local taxes from income subject to federal tax?) but that's not what Mr Aldred wants to address.

To begin with, you could never have ownership rights prior to, or independent from, taxation. Ownership is a legal right. Laws require various institutions, including police and a legal system, to function. These institutions are financed through taxation. The tax and the ownership rights are effectively created simultaneously. We cannot have one without the other.

What distinguishes the imposition of taxes from the extraction of tribute or the shaking down of protection money is that governments exist to secure the rights to ownership, derive their powers from the consent of the governed, and when a government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter it.  Peaceful transfer of power and all that, rather than bigger catapults or more aggressive hit-men.

You'd think rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca would understand this, but no.  "[Mr Aldred's essay] was a good read. For these reasons I am pro-tax and pro-government. Government is not a curse. Government is a society's greatest good. We should all be willing to support it. Tax avoidance is theft against the body politic."  Ignore for a moment that howling non-sequitur of a last sentence.  Concentrate on voters consenting to modifications of the tax code, the way the Framers intended it, rather than on the flagrant unwillingness of the so-called resistance to support the outcomes of the most recent presidential election.  Show me a tax code that sufficiently many voters are willing to support, and I will live with it, but I reserve the right to propose improvements, or support the efforts of others to offer improvements.  Working backwards, consider all the incidences of government, from Hugo Chavez working backward to Tiberius Caesar and however many warlords came before.  Then tell me that either of those two sentences are categorically accurate.  A few years ago, Walter Hudson put it more precisely.  "Taxes may be theft in the purest sense of the term. But if taxpayer dollars are utilized to protect individual rights, the real-world effect will be a maximum amount of liberty and a minimum level of coercion. That's a worthy goal, and wholly attainable." I'll be more precise than that: if the taxing authority has received its powers from the consent of the government, it is probably not engaging in theft. You might even call it salesmanship.

A THEORY SO GENERAL AS TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING MIGHT BE USELESS.

That might be the fate of climate chaos, or whatever name it traffics under at present.

First the “undoubted” effect of global warming on the Great Lakes was drought, now it is too much snow and rain. Whatever. The nice thing about “climate change” as a dogma is that the weather is guaranteed to change, so whatever happens is consistent with the theory that continues to bring in the big bucks.

The expression for a patch to a model to explain this year's anomaly is ad hoc.  Such as what happens when January takes place in the big coastal cities.  Then it's "polar vortex."  Sufficient ad-hoc-ery, though, might as well be indistinguishable from a millenarian cult.

Climate scientists can blame anything they want on global warming. The climate models are imprecise enough that no matter what is happening they can point to it as proof that man-made climate change is happening. Too much rain, too little rain, bitterly cold winters, mild winters, more snow, less snow, rising water levels, falling water levels — they can attribute “climate change” as a cause of it all.

It's probably easier to get a platform on one of the fake news outlets by claiming catastrophe (and blaming it on Orange Man?) than it is to get to work.

Let the climate scientists continue to work on the complex dynamics by which changes in the sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide, atmospheric mixing dynamics, and the strengthening or weakening of the jet stream allow for the southward migration of the polar vortex, or equalize temperatures in the atmosphere such that there is neither jet stream nor polar vortex.

That work on the complex dynamics has yet to capture some of the essential elements, including circulation of the oceans.

Moreover, even once the climatologists figure out cause and effect in a dynamical system, they might do well to respect a division of labor in policy making.  "[L]et us unbundle the confirmation of climate change hypotheses from the discussion of policies to reduce human influences thereupon.  Doing so is not as easy as it looks."

CATCH 'EM, CATCH 'EM, CATCH 'EM ALL.

For the second Saturday in a row, here is a not-to-be regular Saturday bridge column.

Some years ago, a colleague who played the game at a very high level described bidding along lines such as "the opener says, 'I have something, but show me what you have,' and if the possible defender overcalls, that's 'show me what you really have,' while opener's partner rebids with 'maybe I can help you, but give me a better idea what you have.'"

There are supposed to be some conventions governing bidding, some of those summarized in Mr Goren's primer, and there are probably a lot of implicit understandings among people who play each other regularly.

We have another column this week, because what can one do with this deal?

The West bot deals.  After the fact, we see an unbalanced hand with eight high-card points and two for distribution.  The North bot, with eight high-card points and one point for distribution, passes.  The East bot, with additional length in Hearts but only two points, passes.  Here I sit with three Aces, eighteen high-card points, and two points for maldistribution in trumps.  At least the North bot understands what a takeout double is for.  Two no-trump, however, is what Mr Goren calls the "bust response."  In my reading, I've also discovered that it can be a signal of five cards each in two suits that have not been bid.

Thus I went for the simplest way to game with three no-trump.

If a reader can recommend the logic of what constitutes a game, I'd appreciate an explanation.  Three no-trump produces forty points for the first trick, and thirty points for each additional trick.  Four Hearts or four Spades pays off at thirty points for each trick. Is the reason a Diamond or Club contract pays off at twenty points for each trick won simply to encourage additional bidding to find a fit in Hearts or Spades, or to discourage mauering in the form of a four-trick bid with any suit?  Think about it: suppose a partnership has sufficient material to take ten tricks in Hearts.  Now change the suit of all the red cards in the game.  That should be sufficient material to take ten tricks in Diamonds, but that's twenty points short of game.  Why?  The suit doesn't matter in a contract for six or for seven.

In a real game, a live partner would be playing North, and I'd be spectator.  East led a low red card, I don't recall which.  There would probably be an "oh, s*** moment" when the dummy for that hand, which is to say the South hand, was revealed.  That was my first look at the North hand, and my immediate thinking was, could I keep the lead and run four Spades, one each of the Hearts and Diamonds, and seven Clubs?  When the ♣J fell to the ♣K (after throwing the relevant red Ace on trick 1, I unleashed North with my ♣3, working up from Queen to King, then taking stock about how best to run the rest of the Clubs and toss the lead back and forth to run the high Spades) I was able to catch 'em all.

The  solitaire site offers four deals per round, and issues a ranking after the final four.  Something like top forty for the four including this example.  Again, past performance is no indicator of future results.  Not too long ago, the North bot made a Four Hearts contract with almost no heart support.  What do you do?

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREEWAY

Reason's Steven Greenhut gets an Instalanche for complaining, "After state lawmakers boosted the gas tax with a promise to improve California streets, some cities are upsetting drivers by spending millions on so-called 'road diet' projects that reduce the number of lanes for motor vehicles."

Yes, complaining about tax increases (or the corporate equivalent, always washed down with some spin about assuring better service) is a valid thing.

Read the article, though, and search in vain for any mention of the root cause of ruined roads.  "Roads are indeed a key to a society's greatness. But I'd add that any civilization that raises gas taxes and then reduces road lanes to purposefully increase traffic congestion is insane and probably living on borrowed time."  That's probably correct, and the purposeful narrowing of roads when it gives the impression of "officials, who want us to sit in traffic longer as a means to avoid accidents or frustrate us into taking the bus or rail," isn't going to win many friends or influence many people.

Spend all the increased tax revenue (if, in fact, there is any, or if it's just more reason for people to flee a tax hell) on road construction, though, and the net result will be additional years of construction delays, with the attendant congestion, and when it's all over, there will be no net reduction in congestion.  Not to mention, the tax revenue will be inadequate.  But until the people who Do Infrastructure recognize that the roads are scarce resources that can be allocated by price, they're going to be frustrated.

The good news: in the People's Republic of Wisconsin, the political unpopularity of raising the gasoline tax and increasing vehicle registration fees, as is transpiring in Illinois, is getting some radio pundits saying good things about tolling.  Yes, a lot of it is in the form of "stick it to the flatlanders" en route to Door County or the North Woods or to attempt to occupy Miller Park, but outcomes are more important than motives.

PUNCHING BACK, AT LEAST TWICE AS HARD.

Not too long ago, I asked that the hounds of hell be unleashed on Oberlin.

It's tempting to wish that they be occupied by the Russians, or sacked and pillaged by Ivar the Boneless.  But perhaps they ought to be let alone as the quintessence of clueless snowflakery.  Apparently, to the Obies, campus outreach means its the students' privilege to instruct their elders and harass the businesses that serve them.

The bakery the crazies harassed lawyered up.

Then in 2016, Black Lives Matter and a number of super-woke Oberlin students launched protests and a boycott against Gibson’s Bakery, a family-owned and run establishment that has been a fixture of downtown Oberlin since 1885. What prompted this? Gibson’s had the temerity to apprehend and charge three students with shoplifting (they later pled guilty), but because of the race of the offenders, the Oberlin College wokerati accused Gibson’s with racism, racial profiling, and probably genocide for all I know.

The Oberlin student Senate passed a resolution charging Gibson’s with “a long history of racial profiling,” and the Oberlin dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, endorsed and distributed the flyer. The college also discontinued purchasing baked goods from Gibsons, because you just can’t take the chance that you’ll cause literal pain or mental anguish to Oberlin students by procuring a bag of racist bear claws for the faculty lounge.

Gibson’s decided not to take this politically-motivated harassment lying down. They filed a libel and slander suit against Oberlin College, and yesterday a jury found for Gibson’s, ordering Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages. A punitive damages hearing will follow, so the total award could grow to over $30 million.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a complete account of the background of the case and the legal drama that has played out. A news account quotes Jacobson: “The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

Good for the Gibsons. Between lawsuits like this, and the mounting cost of settlements (now dozens if not hundreds) that colleges have had to pay out for violating the due process rights of students in ideologically-driven Title IX star chamber proceedings, maybe college administrators and trustees will start to wake up to the cost of wokeness. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, “get woke, go broke.” More of this please.

It appears that when justice triumphs, Oberlin will do the expected thing and take an appeal.

We are disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented.

Neither Oberlin College nor Dean Meredith Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners, and they never endorsed statements made by others. Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student protests.

As we have stated, colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of their students. Institutions of higher education are obligated to protect freedom of speech on their campuses and respect their students’ decision to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. Oberlin College acted in accordance with these obligations.

While we are disappointed with the outcome, Oberlin College wishes to thank the members of the jury for their attention and dedication during this lengthy trial. They contributed a great deal of time and effort to this case, and we appreciate their commitment.

Our team will review the jury’s verdict and determine how to move forward.

Read this, and ask yourself how committed Oberlin College is to protecting freedom of speech on campus.  Yes, I know it's not relevant to the case at bar.  It is indicative of the state of mind that would lead Obies to protest, and their administrators to enable, the mau-mauing of a business for daring to call a shop-lifter a shop-lifter.

NOW THEY'VE DONE IT.

It's more convenient for Amtrak and the Boston and Albany, er, CSX, to channel their inner Penn Central and run a bus service in substitution for the Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited.

Sometimes, the trip goes on, as the O Scale convention is going to take place, whether the train goes to Worcester or not.  On a more recent trip, I scheduled a research trip to Boston for days when I knew the train would be running, and that time, at least, it did.

It's summer, and somehow, Penn Central or whoever it is still has to do enough work on the Worcester and Western that the passenger trains can't go through.  That's more than enough for Passenger Rail advocate Jim Loomis.

On my way home from London in July, I’m flying into Boston and had planned to take Amtrak all the way back to the West Coast from there. Specifically, I had booked the Lake Shore Limited from Boston to Chicago, connecting there with the California Zephyr to Emeryville.

Alas, it was not to be. The Boston-to-Albany section of the Lake Shore has been cancelled because of extensive track work and instead of a lovely relaxing train ride through the Berkshires  to Albany, I was suddenly facing five-plus hours in a bus.

The same thing happened to me two years ago, but this time there’s no dining car on the train. And so I went on line, cancelled the Lake Shore Limited, and booked a mid-day flight from Boston to Chicago.

And it was only after the transaction was completed that I realized the significance of what had just happened: a passionate advocate for train travel had cancelled an overnight train ride and booked a three-hour flight instead. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But through their relentless cost-cutting, Amtrak’s management has chipped away at the many pleasures, large and small, of overnight train travel. And now what is for me the most enjoyable experience of them all is no longer being offered by this train. Instead of having dinner with three fellow passengers, I was reduced to what Amtrak calls “contemporary dining”, a meal prepared at some off-site location, put aboard the train in Albany, and delivered to my roomette in a cardboard box.

I don’t know if the vice-president-in-charge-of-nickels-and-dimes thought we wouldn’t care, but for me that’s what made the difference.

And I’m flying to Chicago.

That superintendentlet in charge of nickels and dimes would probably spin the situation as "be grateful your arch deluxe boxed lunch is delivered to your roomette, sparing you the walk through all the coaches back to the sleeper originating at Boston."  I believe, though, that Mr Loomis had previously booked business class Boston to Rensselaer and a sleeper in the New York section onward to Chicago, avoiding that hike.

AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE?

Cartoonist Steve Kelley comments on D-Day plus 75 years.

Perhaps we will celebrate the recognition that there are precious few common purposes to unite around, and that the Washington of Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win the War ought not be looked to for guidance on everything else.

It has been my hope that someone will run for president with the objective of lowering expectations: no longer Chief Operating Officer of The Economy and Commander in Chief of the Free World and Father Confessor and Keeper of the Down Pillows. Perhaps, though, the leading indicator will be from the press, in the form of one of the Sunday shows returning to a studio in New York City, or even Los Angeles, rather than Washington, or, more encouragingly, setting up in Chicago.

I've been fighting it out on this line for more than one summer, but so far, I have not been persuaded not to keep fighting.  "The beginning of wisdom is the recognition that, perhaps, Washington, as a source of the problem, might be able to help fix the problem by offering to, oh, scale back some of its efforts."  Emergence is messy, and not subject to the enlightened efforts of Supreme Commanders or Mission Control.

That is all.

SOME ADVICE TO THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES.

Peter Oborne pens some lines that I wouldn't expect to see in Common Dreams.

The supposed threat of Islam to the West is a myth.

Millions of Muslims have settled in the West to enjoy the benefits of Western life, and to contribute as workers, entrepreneurs and citizens.

Millions more are campaigning for the best of Western values: freedom of thought and expression, the rule of law, and equality of opportunity, in the face of obscurantism.

Free minds, free markets, emergence, assimilation, anyone?

He continues,

Yet, the latest spectacle of the meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and Orban should act as an important reminder of the monstrous threat posed to Muslims around the world.  If anyone is under threat it’s the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Muslim migrants in Hungary, and the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs still being held in detention camps.

That's a case for limiting the role of government, and dialing back the boutique multiculturalism that's OK with veiling women and other not-exactly-Enlightenment cultural practices in the name of authenticity.

A QUESTION FOR OUR TIME.

Tyler Cowen, who we recently saw endorsing centrist cosmopolitanism (whatever that means) now weighs in on the recently released Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back-Row America.  "Is it more or less condescending to hold the poor to high standards?"

I strongly suspect that the genre of Discovering The Lumpenproletariat suffers from a serious Excluded Middle Fallacy, in which whoever is Not of the Cosmopolitans is to be written off as Deplorable, or otherwise Lost and In Need of Guidance.

That noted, dear reader, it is never an error to note that we've learned a few things in four to six thousand years that might benefit Cosmopolitan and Deplorable alike.

ENJOYING FREEDOM AND INHERITING PEACE.

On D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower was General in Command and Walter Cronkite was a war correspondent.  (He had some interesting stories to tell.  Do your own research.)

Twenty years after the Normandy landings, the general was President Emeritus, and the correspondent fancied that he could tell people "that's the way it is."  They took a stroll through  the Normandy American Cemetery.

Yes, the television news footage from remote locations was still in black and white, and sometimes still footage.

In the lands set free, the descendants of the people who were liberated (which did not come easy either for the landing forces or for the residents) still get it.  "If you’re ever fortunate enough to make this trip to see these places, a pride and awe of the United States will wash over you that is overwhelming, awe inspiring, and often tear jerking." Indeed.

That is all.

THE HOUR OF YOUR LIBERATION IS APPROACHING.

Three score and fifteen years ago.

Nous restons ici.

It turned out well.  Imagine an international order, fractured or not, with the Warsaw Pact in Denmark and perhaps as far west as the Pyrenees.

AN EMPIRE WITHOUT HOPE.

Thirty years ago, the Chinese government suppressed what they perceived as a rebellion.

I probably just got Cold Spring Shops blocked on the mainland, although with residents of Hong Kong still free to hold commemorations, the word about what the newest rulers of the Middle Kingdom have done will get out.  "Remember the Tiananmen Square massacre. Remember the thousands who died. And know that, despite all the economic progress and the glitz of their cities, China’s people are still shackled, so long as the Communist Party controls their lives." Do the Party bosses really think that a one-child policy leading to millions of men fighting over the few women of reproductive age and a reservations policy that makes Sheridan and Custer look like good guys and a trade policy that bets on the Western world looking the other way at the theft of intellectual property will turn out well?

The United States, Europe, and our democratic allies in Asia have on balance assets that all but ensure a winning hand, given a modicum of coordination and resolve. We need to rewrite the rules to ensure that market access does not continue to favor Beijing’s predatory policies, that China’s access to our educational and research institutions does not give it an unfair advantage, and that our values and our intellectual property laws are respected. The West has ample resources to stop China’s rise. What has been missing is a clear-headed diagnosis of the problem and the political will to craft and implement a solution.

The most valuable resource might be disaffected Chinese, particularly as they come to the conclusion that it is their government, supposedly ruling in their interest, that is keeping those young men involuntarily chaste and building those ghost towns in the desert and running latter-day gulags rather than securing the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and all the other things that have to get back to the mainland from all those expatriates paying full fare to attend U.S. universities.

NOW DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE FACULTY MORALE.

Quick, name the country's winningest Division I college football teams.  "During the past decade, few programs have produced the same level of success as Northern Illinois. The Huskies have won more games (93) than blue blood powers Notre Dame (87), Penn State (87) and USC (87) during the same period."  Yes, and now Northern Illinois will play under the gaze of Touchdown Jesus in 2024.  In the upcoming season, there will be all of five home games, only two of which are on Saturdays.  Did I mention the faculty recently voted for union representation?

SEEKING A POSITIVE MESSAGE.

David Brooks suggests that the coming demographic transition (the coalition of the ascendant, if you will) brings a serious generation gap in attitudes with it.

[Younger voters] have constructed an ethos that is mostly about dealing with difference. They are much more sympathetic to those who identify as transgender. They are much more likely than other groups to say that racial discrimination is the main barrier to black progress. They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world.

These days the Republican Party looks like a direct reaction against this ethos — against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism. Moreover, conservative thought seems to be getting less relevant to the America that is coming into being.

Republican, and conservative, pundits have solid arguments against those claims of discrimination or misplaced national pride. Mr Brooks appears to be suggesting that they're not making those arguments.

The most burning question for conservatives should be: What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in? Instead, conservative intellectuals seem hellbent on taking their 12 percent share among the young and turning it to 3.

There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down.

A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed.

If that sounds a lot like the past couple of years on Cold Spring Shops, it should.  I don't care if the same ideas have occurred to me as to Mr Brooks or to if one of his stringers is finding some of this stuff, as long as the ideas get out and get purchase.

PEDESTRIANS ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRESPASS UPON THE RAILWAY.

School principals claim they are role models.  Playing the role of squished trespasser isn't in the job description.  "The principal of St. John's Catholic Elementary School has been charged after video surfaced of people taking photos of students while standing on train tracks at the GO station in Kitchener as a train pulled in."  "GO" refers to the Toronto area Commuter Rail Operator, Government of Ontario Transit.

The good news is that no school teachers, parent volunteers, or students became roadkill in the production of this teachable moment.

Expect train movements at any time, on any track, in either direction.

PUT THE PUNDIT CLASS ON HALF RATIONS.

Columnist S. E. Cupp contemplates the fine line between corporate virtue signalling and corporate stupidity.  "The message to corporate America, entertainment media and even Hollywood isn’t that social issues shouldn’t matter — it’s that politics shouldn’t overtake the experience of watching sports, buying a cup of coffee or eating a hamburger."

The message to the pundit class is that it's boring people with its endless process worship.  Take the most recent Sunday morning on the opinion shows.  Another disgruntled employee shoots up an office: because he had a suppressor on his pistol, now banning "silencers" (as the weenies who have watched too many spy flicks have it) becomes a thing and "what can the president do?" becomes the question.  That is, before chewing over the next iteration of the investigation of the Mueller investigation.  I'm beginning to think the reason none of the pundits tackle the role of mental health in these shootings is that to take seriously the idea that there are crazy people who ought be locked away might lead to a few pundits being committed, perhaps after the notion of gender-fluidity gets investigated.

There was nothing about the weather.  No rallies snowed out in the big coastal cities, no Nationals or Dodgers games rained out, you see.  It wasn't news that several levees along the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers have failed, and barge traffic is slowed, and rail traffic disrupted, because of the flooding.  You'd think the Weather Gods were conspiring with Amtrak to gut Amtrak's national network.

Between the winter weather, with March roaring like a lion well into April, and the April showers falling well into May, less than two-thirds of the national corn crop and just over half of the national soybean crop is in the ground.  Perhaps the pundit class will volunteer to waive the ethanol mandate, just for one year.  In addition, there are things we can not do for all the pigs in China.  "All over the country people want answers, and they are frustrated with the lack of information that they are getting from the mainstream media."

Indeed.

AN EMPIRE LOST HOPE.

Early in the morning of 4 June, 1942 (Hawaiian time) the Imperial Japanese Navy was preparing to lure what was left of the United States Navy out for a decisive battle.  By mid-morning, the Japanese First Carrier Striking Force was a wreck, and the Pacific War had become a battle of attrition.

"LIGHT RAIL" IS AN OXYMORON.

The term distinguishes electric rapid transit with single-unit or short-consist latter-day streetcars (although the transit professionals will tell you how they differ, thirty ways from Sunday) often sharing the roads with motor vehicles, as opposed to heavy rail transit with multiple-unit cars using dedicated rights of way, often elevated, in subways, or in the median of an expressway.

But the light rail vehicle (and its contemporary streetcar kin) is heavier than the trolleys it replaces.  Thus, if Boston's transit authority replace the PCC units running on the Ashmont High Speed Line, they might have to buy new track structure as well.  "If modern light rail cars were chosen, as elsewhere in city, the line will require rebuilding as these are much heavier than the PCC cars."  That is, if Boston buy cars similar to the Green Line cars that run in trains downtown.  Perhaps they could look into something lighter.

The problem, though, is that you can't go over to Home Depot and buy PCC parts any more.  "They were built in 1945/46 and are the oldest passenger vehicles in continuous regular public transport service in the USA."  The Kenosha PCC service uses former Toronto cars, and the service stands down during the deep mid-winter.

Arguably, though, San Francisco's cable cars are older, although there is probably an element of grandfather's axe in any statement about their age.  The cars are listed.  Also, and a lot closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters than Boston, there is the Fenelon Place Elevator in Dubuque, and those are clearly passenger vehicles running on those rails, although they, too, stand down for the winter.

PREPARE TO BE A MISERABLE HUMAN BEING?

Thirteen years ago, an eternity in weblog years, I made reference to an even older Chicago Tribune Magazine article about life in the University of Chicago's economics department, which has almost as many Nobel laureates as Green Bay has football trophies.

[K]eep in mind an anecdote that the Chicago Tribune repeated in a Sunday feature on a local economics department during its run of consecutive Nobel Memorial Awards. A junior professor urged his colleagues to wrap up a meeting that was running long as his wife was waiting in a car outside and he didn't want her to divorce him. One of the older heads is quoted as saying "You'd fit in better if she did." Draw your own conclusions.

I was reacting to some advice by the very successful N. Gregory Mankiw, who was giving economists leave to have a life. (If you're as talented as he is, that's easy. For others, not so much.)

It recently came to my attention that the magazine article in question is available in Tribune archives.  Here's the anecdote as reported there.

A story that has filtered down to the graduate students involves a younger faculty member attending a meeting that went longer than expected. Finally, he announced he was leaving because his wife was waiting for him in a car downstairs.

"I wouldn't want her to divorce me," he said.

"Why not?" retorted a senior faculty member. "You'd fit in better then."

Certainly such zealous devotion to work can take a personal toll. (For Lucas it also took a financial toll: Half his million-dollar prize money for the Nobel goes to his ex-wife as part of a 6-year-old divorce settlement.)

But inside the walls of the university this intensity creates an excitement, a sense of anticipation that there are new economic worlds that can be conquered. You cannot spend time around the laureates and their less-famous colleagues without feeling that these people genuinely believe they are lucky to work at something they love in a place that is intellectually stimulating.

Yes, and Tribune writer George Papajohn describes them as "regular guys."

Let the record show that there was a sunset clause on Professor Lucas's divorce settlement.  The Nobel Prize stipulation was to expire in seven years.  Professor Lucas's award was for his work on rational expectations.  Was he further up the short list than he expected?

SETTING THE POOR UP FOR FAILURE.

A few weeks ago, we noted that in Madison, a middle school administrator paid a back-handed compliment to students not born into the mainstream who nevertheless managed to swim in the mainstream.  "The kids that can conform and can code switch into the predominant white supremacy culture, they are successful."  It's worse than that.  The College Fix reports that more than a few Madison teachers are saying Acts of Contrition about doing anything that might smack of inculcating bourgeois habits.

In response to the Isthmus article “A Rotten Year,” our students of color are not the reason why our schools are rotting, it is white supremacy culture. This year was rotten, but not for lack of excellence in our schools; this year was rotten because a long dormant undercurrent of white supremacy broke through our defenses this year, flooding our communities with fear and distrust. If it felt like a rotten year for teachers, it is because teachers are finally being called out on their covert and overt participation in white supremacy culture.

They write about "decentering whiteness," whatever that means. If it's about buying into the aspirations of all students while encouraging them to buy into success strategies, fine.

Unfortunately, that's probably not what's at work.  In New York, public schools honcho Richard Carranza has spelled out what that "white supremacy culture" means.

“There’s been a lot of discussion of white supremacy and how it manifests in the workplace, conversations about race, and looking at how the white culture behaves,” said a white executive who received the training.

“White supremacy is characterized by perfectionism, a belief in meritocracy, and the Protestant work ethic,” the exec said, adding that whites who object when accused of deep-rooted bias are called “fragile” and “defensive.”

That sort of stereotyping of responsible behavior as somehow racialized has been around for years: in Illiberal Education Dinesh D'Souza had some fun with a proto-social justice warrior who advanced such arguments.

Today, we have Sarah Hoyt to bring the smack.

We'll pass over the point that defensiveness is supposed to be a matter of white supremacy, okay?  Apparently, when you're being accused of horrible stuff, you're not supposed to be defensive. Yeah. That's interesting.

Instead, let's consider that individualism is now supposed to be white supremacy, and if you like working on your own, or dislike group work (remember group work from school? Almost anyone competent hated it) you're supposedly a white supremacist.

Let's consider instead stuff like perfectionism -- you know, trying to make things as perfect as possible and calling out people on their f*ck ups. Or a sense of urgency -- or as we call it around here, having your work done on time. Or what they call "worship of the written word," which apparently is the ability to express yourself in writing. Or objectivity, which they define as BELIEVING THERE'S AN ULTIMATE TRUTH.

Supposedly all of these things -- things that are absolutely required for any kind of workplace to get any kind of, you know, work done -- are toxic whiteness and signs of white supremacy.

So, the left, in teaching people to avoid white supremacy, assumes that minorities cannot express themselves in writing, can't get things done on time, and won't try to make the work as good as possible.

As College Fix notes, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

It helps to have good teachers in the underachieving districts, but when decentering whiteness turns into enabling dysfunction, good luck with that.

OUR SELF-DEALING DESTRUCTIVE THOUGHT LEADERS.

American Mind's Dan McCarthy summarizes.  "The natural and traditional ties between people are subjected to a constant acid bath." In his view, what the self-styled thought leaders are doing is neither stressing the organism, in the sense of "whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger," nor assisting in the emergence of a fitter organism through mutation, adaptation, and selection. It's maladaptiveness for its own sake. "Outside the family, our culture of celebrity individualism is indistinguishable from underclass irresponsibility."  That's a point going back at least as far as Emmett Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up, wherein what trickled down from Hollywood to the poorer quarters was the bastardy and drug dependence, but in the poorer quarters there are neither expensive fixer lawyers nor cheap illegal immigrant nannies.

The acid bath, however, is the baptismal water for the contemporary priestly castes.

Multiculturalism unites and militarizes the members of an educated class whose education chiefly concerns their own fitness to rule—on account of their greater enlightenment and moral sensitivity, of course, but also their recognition of the fitness to rule in other rulers. They respect the right idols, the right kinds of authority for their class.

Multiculturalism is a class ideology, but not in a purely economic sense: it binds a group that is distinct in its position within the social hierarchy together and provides it a common spirit. It is the religion of the ruling class.

Yes, and in place of additional orders of mendicant monks, there are new novices and postulants in the Church of Intersectionality. Take Georgetown University. Please.

The only barriers to student success are the result of Georgetown’s own diversity policies. By admitting certain “diverse” students with lower average academic qualifications than their non-diverse peers (which Georgetown, like every other selective college, inevitably does), it puts those students at a competitive disadvantage in the classroom. The diversity bureaucracy encourages those alleged beneficiaries of preferences to interpret their academic difficulties as a manifestation of institutional bigotry; the demand for more retention specialists and diversity hand-holders usually follows. Many of these students will take their cultivated resentments with them into the non-academic world, increasing social tensions.

That's Heather MacDonald in City Journal, and she's missing that the competitive disadvantage for the diversity admits begins in elementary school if not before.

I am hopeful that there are enough assimilating and mediating forces at work that the wider world will not degenerate into a nightmare run by Human Resources.  That's material for a future post.  The diversity bureaucracy, however, functions like the parish priests instructing the sinners in the Baltimore Catechism.  Mr McCarthy elaborates.

The multicultural clerisy—the intellectuals and media figures, including social media activists, who formulate and propagate the doctrine—is not by itself the country’s ruling class. The spiritual power it wields has to be employed in tandem with the temporal power of the plutocracy and the administrative class. Those temporal elites rest their claim to rule on technical expertise and a supposed natural relationship to wealth-creation. Yet such claims, widely believed though they may be, are lacking in the moral dimension. The clerisy supplies the ruling classes’ missing moral legitimacy.

Bet on emergence. That technical expertise has to provide results, and there is accumulating evidence of Normals getting militant and rejecting that legitimacy.  There are no such advantages to joining the Church of Intersectionality.

Sooner or later this entropy [call it deconstruction, or call it denying coherent beliefs -- ed.] consumes even the plutocrats and ideologues who brought it into being, and a new, possibly crueler form of rule emerges.

Ideology and power are in the end simply no substitute for real human relationships of place, faith, work, and love. Yet by poisoning those relationships at their psychological wellsprings, multiculturalism destroys what it can never create: the clusters of affection necessary for the well-ordered and good society.

That might be, but it's a belief system that's endlessly mockable, as well as one hostile to people who drink beer and own guns.

AN OLD DOG TAKES SOME NEW TRICKS.

I recently found a copy of Charles Goren's Contract Bridge for Beginners (apparently still in print) at a library clearance sale.  After all these years, I can finally understand the language in the newspaper bridge columns, which I sometimes read just to see what sort of mysticism is being practiced.

But then I found that the American Contract Bridge League have a solitaire bridge application, in which a human plays against three algorithms.  I haven't figured out what the algorithms do, sometimes the North algorithm, my virtual partner, proposes some strange bids and I get treated rather roughly.

But then, there was this position.

I was a little slow on the uptake: in human play, a bid of four no-trump is a call to show aces.  Thus I should have responded "fivc hearts," showing three aces, and the algorithm might have gone to six or seven no-trump, and then what would I do?  There are probably terms in bridge that are synonymous with sheepshead's "mauering."

I passed. (OK, slag on me if you play for real!)  The algorithm opened with the 4♣, as Mr Goren teaches, and an experienced player would expect.  I won that with the Ace, and decided to run my Spades and Diamonds.  If you've never played bridge, note that in a no-trump contract, two long suits are of great value.  If you have a long non-trump suit, you are at risk that an opponent will show out with a trump card.  (On the other hand, we'll see that the defenders' length in Hearts did them no good, as I limited their ability to use it.)

Thus, I had one trick in hand, a second trick with the K♣, four good tricks with Spades, another four with the Diamonds, and two more Aces.  But the way the cards fell, I was able to take all the tricks.  First the four Spades; West and East show out.  That's the luck of the draw.  Four Spades is a game value contract, but if the opponent's six spades divide 5-1 or 6-0 there are two ruffing opportunities for the defense.  Fortunately, we're in Four No Trump, not 4♠, and the defense's spades divided 3-3.

Then put the lead in dummy with a low Diamond.  When the Jack (any card, it transpired) forces the ten-spot  out, I see a way to take three of the four Diamond tricks I sought a different way, run the A♡ and A♣, put the lead back in dummy with the 6♣, and smoke out all the remaining high cards with the remaining Diamonds.

Five Diamonds is also a game-value contract, and I might have been able to run all the cards with those last diamonds locked and loaded in the dummy, visible to all like the shot-gun in a pickup truck rack.

Here's something else the newspaper columns and Mr Goren's book don't necessarily tell you.  A player leads from low to high either to place the lead or to run a finesse (something I didn't have to do with so many good cards to play) but in order for that to work the declarer has to hope that the card to be finessed is to the left.

That's not to say I claim any expertise in this game, not yet.  On occasion, the algorithms tell me my performance is in the top twenty for that hand.  More commonly, though, it tells me there are some twelve thousand players who have done better than I.  Generally, I'm in the position of a defender sitting with some high Hearts and the declarer is running a long suit, trump or not.

I'm also unlikely to add a Saturday bridge column to Cold Spring Shops.  There is still a railroad to be built.

THE SOCIAL ENGINEERING VICE.

David Harsanyi talks back.  "Sorry, Democrats, There Is No Climate Chaos."  I'm not prepared to go quite that far, for the same reason Charles Krauthammer once offered, namely that using the atmosphere as a sink for all manner of combustion isn't likely to turn out well.  I do concur, though, with Mr Harsanyi's assertion that climate policy is simply the latest stalking horse for a power-grab by the technocrats.

Pointing out these sort of things usually elicits the same reaction: Why do you knuckle-dragging troglodytes hate science? Well, because science's predictive abilities on most things, but especially climate, has been atrocious. But mostly because science is being used as a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions without considering economic tradeoffs, societal reality or morality.

If they're so smart, shouldn't they be rich?

WHAT'S CHINESE FOR "MOVEMENT AUTHORIZATION IDENTIFICATION NUMBER?"

In U.S. railroading, the MAIN train was a military movement, perhaps troops, perhaps guns and tanks, perhaps key supplies, moving from arsenal to port or recruiting depot to training camp.

These days, the troops generally fly or ride the bus, although the heavy machinery moves by rail, sometimes on dedicated trains.

China, though, is a continental power with rivals at its borders.  Thus, it's working on expediting the movement of troops.

The Lanzhou brigade’s trip — which included its equipment — was the first time a military unit had ever traveled along the high-speed rail line to Xinjiang. The western province is home to an insurgency fought between the state and ethnic Uyghur Muslim militants.

The state-owned Chinese military newspaper Jiefangjun Bao anesthetically described the exercise as part of “the military’s power projection and combat readiness force movement on to the ‘contemporary train’ of civil-military integration.”

This is an oblique reference to China using civilian infrastructure for military purposes. China has the largest high-speed rail network in the world — defined as rail lines with trains traveling above 120 miles per hour.

Did I mention quelling internal rebellions? Grenville Dodge and Herman Haupt would understand.

WHAT, ARE THEY AFRAID OF DISCLOSING THE PASSWORDS?

Last week, the house organ for business as usual in higher education posted, "The Academy’s New Favorite Hate-Read."  Tom Bartlett uses that title to get in a dig at Quillette.  Perhaps the author intended the title as clickbait for the Perpetually Aggrieved.  The article, which is a Twitter capture here, is not as nasty to Quillette or its writers as the title suggests.

ARE THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS CALLING?

Lysistrata Among the Hippies.

The liberal ideologists that “liberated” us from staying with hard marriages wrought divorce on a scale so massive that it completely destroyed the authority of women in private life. So although modern women have freedoms Athenian women would have found hard to imagine, Athenian women nonetheless had powers modern women simply cannot fathom.

Next, the consequences of divorce since the sexual revolution are obvious now and have birthed new consequences. When young people in their twenties increasingly don’t even bother to get married in the first place, it is impossible for wives to organize a sex strike. Without marriage as a norm, there is no way for women to tell men what to do and therefore there is no way for society to get them to do what’s needed for the common good. We are now learning the generational consequences of divorce the hard way: vast numbers of men might resign themselves to loneliness.

If only someone had warned them.

Finally, to understand the full delusion of liberals who think they could use the power of withholding sex against men—look up studies on young Americans up to their early 30s. They are the most free and least burdened by responsibility; they are the most passionate, least experienced; the most rash, least prudent part of America. Yet, studies show they aren’t having much sex anymore. Up to a third of young Americans report not having had sex in about a year. Many don’t report anger or even being ashamed about this. It’s just how we live now, loneliness as far as the eye can see.

The sex strike, despite deluded liberals who talk about women’s issues, has already started. Its character must be a political revolution just as surely as in the comedy of Aristophanes. But it is not under the control of liberals or abortion enthusiasts—our sex strike has slipped the bounds of political control entirely. Which reminds me: Americans don’t have enough children to replace themselves anymore. For the first time in American history, people are willingly, it seems, refusing to make more of themselves—or even as many as themselves. The belief that it’s good to be American leads us to make more of ourselves. It is the fear that it’s not worth being American that leads to this unprecedented lack of sex, marriage, and children.

Perhaps it's the women having no more children and the men losing reason and faith, or perhaps there's more social science to be done.

ILLINOIS IS A TAX HELL.

There's a constitutional amendment that has to be approved by the voters to turn up the heat.  But only on rich people.

The tax's supporters argue that it will address Illinois' budget shortfall of $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2021, stabilizing a jurisdiction that the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center has ranked the least fiscally healthy state in the nation. But the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market think tank, argues that the Pritzker administration has overestimated the revenue the tax would raise. Even if the higher tax rates do not slow down economic growth, IRS data indicate that the tax would raise roughly $2.4 billion, not the $3.4 billion promised.

Another defense of the law points out that it will not raise taxes for the 97 percent of taxpayers that make less than $250,000. Yet given the size of Illinois' long-term fiscal problems, a progressive tax system could mean future tax increases on the middle class once the rich have been soaked.

Another concern is that high-income earners will respond by leaving the state, a phenomenon known as tax flight. Advocates of tax increases have proclaimed that tax flight is a myth, citing a study by the Stanford sociologist Cristobal Young that found a 10 percent increase in the tax rate would produce an exodus of 1 percent of millionaires. Young's work doesn't debunk the concept of tax flight so much as suggest it's a fairly marginal phenomenon with few implications for public policy.

But more recent research suggests otherwise. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in April found that high-income individuals' migratory responses to high taxes can be quite high, depending on the proximity of lower-tax jurisdictions, individuals' roles in the labor market, and the level of human capital.

For now, the powers that be are selling the referendum as "only a few people will pay more taxes," and implicitly they deserve to pay more.  But there's no guarantee, particularly given the parlous state of Illinois government finances, that more people won't be on the hook for additional taxes.

A TRENCHANT QUESTION.

Vicki Alger asks, "[I]f we want less poverty, do we really need more government?"  No.  "When it comes to alleviating poverty, good intentions aren’t enough. After more than five decades of the War on Poverty, it’s time to admit that government isn’t the solution. It’s been a big part of the problem."  Precisely.

THE CASE FOR RANKING BY RETURN ON INVESTMENT.

Yes, politicians like to fund roads for the visibility, but it doesn't necessarily make economic sense.

For decades, lawmakers would trade votes to get a new bridge in their district for a tough vote on a tax increase to fund infrastructure. But legislators are considering a proposal to get rid of that practice.

Instead, the Illinois Department of Transportation would put together a process based on long-range plans and goals, such as reducing fatalities or easing congestion. They’d then evaluate projects and score them, and use those scores to divide up funds. The results would be published, so it’s clear how the funding decisions were made.

Audrey Wennink, director of transportation with the Metropolitan Planning Council, a Chicago-based nonprofit that focuses on sustainable development, said the politically driven way of divvying up money is outdated.

She said the performance-based system is more transparent, which is particularly important as lawmakers consider raising the gas tax, vehicle registration and other fees to pay for infrastructure improvements.

It's probably asking too much of the legislature and the department of transportation to allocate funds within their existing budget, rather than adjusting tax rates to make their wish list possible.

But recognizing that the best use of construction resources might involve letting some roads crumble is a good first step.

HIJACKING HIS BULLY PULPIT?

Professional protester Michael Winship is not happy that Our President wants to make himself Master of Ceremonies at this year's Independence Day festivities.

Trump's favorite perks surrounding the office of being president revolve around a similar but exponentially greater grandiosity: he wallows in the overall pomp and circumstance of the job and the receiving of or presenting awards and honors; anything focusing on him that doesn't take too much mental effort.

So as we enter the official beginning of summer with the Memorial Day weekend, we need to look ahead just a few weeks to the next big holiday and realize, with a shudder, that even the Fourth of July, that most patriotic of American celebrations isn’t safe. Solid ego and id, Trump has decided to make it all about him.

It began with a surprise tweet from him in late February: "HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called 'A Salute To America' and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!"

It gives Mr Winship opportunity to have a good wallow in the past, invoking another president much despised by the Angry Left.

The last time something like this happened was nearly fifty years ago, in 1970, when Washington's Fourth of July was rechristened "Honor America Day," exactly two months after the National Guard killed four kids at Kent State University in Ohio during protests against Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. (A week and a half later, police killed two more demonstrators at Jackson State University in Mississippi.)

In the wake of this violent national division, and bipartisan claims to the contrary, "Honor America Day" was created as a celebration of Richard Nixon organized by his pals J. Willard Marriott, the hotel magnate; the Rev. Billy Graham and Bob Hope. As per historian Kevin Kruse, "Organizers self-consciously recruited conservative crowds, sending White House advance teams across the country to bring 350,000 members of Nixon's Silent Majority to the capital by car, train and bus."

I was there. I had been taking a course in filmmaking taught by a local priest at Washington's free university. In the wake of the national student strike and antiwar demonstrations that had closed DC's colleges, classes were done, so he and I decided to take the Super 8 mm camera we had been using and film the events of Honor America Day.

We met up early and began shooting the spectators dressed up in variations of red-white-and-blue finery and the many counter-protesters who had gathered as well. We worked our way over to the Lincoln Memorial where Billy Graham was leading a prayer service. Simultaneously, a smoke-in featuring red-white-and-blue joints began with lot of stripping down and jumping naked into the reflecting pool in front of the memorial. Meanwhile, a small group of young neo-Nazis shouted abuse. It was quite a scene.

Throughout the hot and humid day, there were confrontations between police and protesters. It all culminated in the evening when a nationally broadcast extravaganza hosted by Bob Hope and featuring a taped address from Nixon plus performances by Jack Benny, Red Skelton and Dinah Shore was broadcast from the Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument.

Demonstrators pushed through police lines and tear gas was fired. But the gas, intended for protesters, accidentally drifted into the crowd there for the show and pandemonium ensued. The gas hit us, and I always swear this is true, it was while Kate Smith was singing "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever."

It's probably a good thing the heavies didn't know Kate Smith's full discography, or you would likely have had an even more violent protest.

Mr Winship's concluding remarks are instructive.

Instead of bringing the nation together, they only served to illustrate just how divided it had become — or perhaps to remind us how divided it has always been.”

If Trump insists on making the anniversary of our nation's birth a celebration of him, he will antagonize two-thirds of the country and perhaps thrill the other third that constitute his base. But his overreach will symbolize all that he has done to the country, trampling tradition and unity, trampling the tenets of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that we commemorate on the Fourth, and trampling American democracy as no other president has ever done.

As far as I know, there are no internment camps for citizens in operation, no suspensions of habeas corpus, no garrisons at Arlington Cemetery or Fort Steadman.

I invoke those events because an anonymous Washington Post gripe about that presidential action requires them as context.  "One can get happily lost imagining how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy might have graced such an occasion."

You don't have to imagine.  On Independence Day, 1863, Abraham Lincoln had just received word that the Army of the Potomac had held at Gettysburg, and that Vicksburg was taken.  He used the opportunity a few days later to offer a brief, unplanned speech to a cheering crowd in Lafayette Plaza.  "How long ago is it?  Eighty-odd years -- since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that 'all men are created equal.'"  He had another four months to revise and extend those remarks into the more familiar form.

We ought be grateful that the fractures in the international order, disturbing though they might be, are taking place at a time of relative calm, and we might pray that the world will little note, nor long remember what either Mr Trump says or how Mr Winship will trash it.

Yes, I did write "relative calm."  That despite what attorney general William Barr noted recently.

I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven't seen bill of particulars as to how that's being done. From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring."

That interview has been recommended at Insta Pundit and Power Line.  And yes, I'm troubled that the very people who professed to be most appalled before the election that anybody would dare question the results of an election seem to be the people most devoted to questioning the results of an election.

On the other hand, as Don Surber concludes, "We have been fortunate to have good men come along at the right moments."  It doesn't hurt, either, that the brain-brothers of the people who, like Mr Winship, are now counting on Process, are the very people who, for a long time, have used every opportunity they have to deconstruct the institutions they now hope to rely on.  They're not going to like the new rules.

EXCESSIVELY EARNEST PROCESS WORSHIPPERS.

An acknowledged satire account called "Humans of Higher Ed" posts a video that might be suitable for the last days of classes.  It's not just the students who celebrate school being out for the summer.

When you realize that when you get to work tomorrow no students will be there pic.twitter.com/4dWc1qI2nF

— HumansofHigherEd (@HumanOfHigherEd) May 27, 2019

But the outrage mob just can't deal.  "Virtue signalling doesn't have a 9-month appointment," indeed.

Gosh, these people are probably a lot of fun to be around when Christmas approaches.

The good news is, none of them can hector me or make me report for sensitivity training or shaming sessions any more.