THE DIVERSITY WEENIES HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR FAT SALARIES.

Northern Illinois University has been spending a lot of money on what they call diversity efforts, but there's something not-so-inclusive about a program they made available earlier today, which was the first day of Hanukkah.  (Coincidence, or deliberate?  You decide.)

Social Justice Town Hall: Religion and Oppression

This town hall series will highlight how religious institutions have historically upheld systems of oppression and provide suggestions on ways to challenge that oppression in modern religious practice.

I didn't dip in, so I can't tell you whether it focuses on Judeo-Christian traditions, or if Sharia gets a free pass, or if the "ways to challenge that oppression" include a planned gathering for the winter solstice.  More woke-scolds who get to have a nice day during the Festive Season.

ALL OF YOU ATHEISTS, HAVE A NICE DAY.

I'm making a guess about a Minnesotan's lack of faith.  Might be a Puritan who took a wrong turn at Scituate.

“The idea of twinkling, colorful lights are a reminder of divisions that continue to run though our society, a reminder of systemic biases against our neighbors who don’t celebrate Christmas or who can’t afford to put up lights of their own,” [the anonymous, of course, missive] reads. “We must do the work of educating ourselves about the harmful impact an outward facing display like yours can have.”

Don't you just love the combination of Divine Passive with scolding in that? The Twitchy responses are politer than I would be.

THE PRESIDENT IS NOT YOUR DADDY.

Today's clarity, from the editors of Issues and Insights.  "The only legitimate response to a pandemic of any president from any party would be to use the power of the office to move government out of the way as quickly and as much as possible so the private sector can adapt, innovate, and overcome."

That's the ideal, but reality intervenes.

What have Americans wanted from their president regarding the coronavirus? Have they been demanding a commander in chief who will require the entire country to wear masks, and stay inside, to give up their lives in return for an unknown but hoped-for outcome?

Some have wanted a tyrant who will make all obey the protocols they believe are the proper steps for stopping the pandemic. Others have wished for a daddy, who will spoon medicine into their mouths and tell them everything will be fine. But neither of these is consistent with American freedom nor its style of government.

The problem is, the apparent winner of the just-concluded presidential election is a coot who would like the sort of confinement to quarters noted in the first paragraph, at least for the first four months of 2021, while the "American style of government" has become one in which the cult of the presidency is a real thing, and people hailing the replacement of the orange man with the coot aren't mocked the way they should be.

ANOTHER LAYER OF MANAGEMENT WILL NOT CURE STRUCTURAL DEFECTS IN THE BUSINESS.

The structural defect with the Chicago Bears is that they suck.  The suckitude has been there for a long time.  At least Chicago sports pundit Hub Arkush understands as much.

The standard of excellence in the NFL over the past decade or so has been the New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints and Seattle Seahawks.

Remarkably strong head coach and general manager tandems, hired by and reporting directly to ownership, run six of those seven clubs.

Only the Packers with President and CEO Mark Murphy, a former NFL player himself have the kind of football wizard some Bears watchers are calling for and that is because as a publicly held company there is no one owner for him to report to.

The Bears are sort of like the Hapsburg dynasty, as ownership still rests within the Halas family; elsewhere in the division, the Lions have long been a trophy holding of the Ford family (who, you will recall, gave a participation trophy in the form of a model name to Edsel,) and the Vikings are sort of a rich person's plaything, which might or might not work for success in the playoffs.  Appointing a new grand vizier isn't necessarily going to work any better.  "The idea of hiring an executive vice president of football operations and charging that person with finding a general manager or director of player personnel and head coach still requires [team chairman George] McCaskey identifying the right top football guy and would be contrary to the way the league’s most successful teams are currently run."  There used to be a joke in football about George Halas throwing nickels around as if they were manhole covers.  I wonder if some of that attitude filtered down to the grandson, who gets what he pays for.

THE EPITAPH FOR PREFERENTIAL POLICIES.

Jeff Jacoby offers a tribute to the late Walter Williams.  Yes, dear reader, it behooves you to read the whole thing.  You must understand this.  "Affirmative action is one of the most effective means . . . of reinforcing racial stereotypes."  Everything else is elaboration.

THE FACULTY ABDICATED THEIR AUTHORITY. NOW THEY'RE GETTING WHAT THEY DESERVE.

Remember this?  "Unfortunately, the faculty has surrendered too much authority to administrators, including to trustees, often being complicit in the usurpation because it appears to be in the service of some Greater Goal, and that Greater Goal looks like a finger in the eyes of normal Americans."  That is, getting on board with getting woke was fine.

Going broke, not so much.

[Vermont arts and sciences] dean, William Falls, is quoted saying that he “did not consult with faculty over this specific proposal. [He] did not see how that could be done when [he] was proposing closing programs.”

There’s some truth to that. Part of the implied bargain that faculty have made, in delegating certain tasks to administration, is that faculty get to keep their hands clean. It’s nearly impossible to keep one’s hands clean while making significant cuts. Dean Falls refers in the piece to a time he tried to work with faculty in making cuts, and they couldn’t agree on anything large enough to matter. So, since someone had to do it, he did.

That's bundling two propositions.  One is the surrender of stewardship by the faculty, which the dean might have inferred, although the same faculty might have been fine with it when it was unleashing the diversity hustlers, without that implying consent to having staffing cuts imposed without consultation.  The other is the tendency of faculty to conduct meetings as if they were at a Quaker meeting, being able to agree on big but irrelevant things (we condemn the war in Vietnam; orange man bad) or to come up with a Platonic bike shed, but we see all those related place names in the Northeast (Millpond Center, North Millpond, Millpond Heights) as a consequence of congregational schisms, and that's not really an option here, is it?  Well, maybe it is, but the mind boggles at a bunch of academics having enough entrepreneurial chops to take their (useless, in the view of the dean) departments and charter their own college.

WHAT WE ARE DOING IS NOT WORKING.

The extreme micromanagement of California's public health bureaucrats turns people off.

“It’s not because the public is irresponsible; it’s because they are losing trust in public health officials who put out arbitrary restrictions,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco. “We are failing in our public health messaging.”

California public officials indulging themselves like Soviet nachalstvo probably has something to do with that.

[B]anning relatively safe outdoor activities risks alienating people who want to follow the rules but feel exhausted, disregarded and sometimes confused by them, Brown University health economist Emily Oster said.

“Some of the things they’re telling you not to do are incredibly low-risk,” Oster said. “When you are so strict about what people can do, they stop listening.”

But if we bet on emergence, that reveals how irrelevant the experts often are.

A pandemic response guided by harm reduction would explain the risk levels of different activities and let people decide their comfort levels, with perhaps the most dangerous settings prohibited altogether. Public health research has found that this strategy makes people feel empowered to make their own choices and that, ultimately, they don’t take more risks than they would have otherwise.

Did I write "irrelevant?" I should have written "wrong."

Rabi Abonour, 30, enjoyed masked bike rides with friends to break up the monotony of living alone during the pandemic. But he feels let down by the latest policies, which seem unnecessarily punitive and not aligned with the available science, he said.

“The numbers continue to rise,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Is this really working?’”

No. Next question?

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS HOT STUFF.

In Chicago, there's another quarterback controversy.  In Green Bay, there's a chili controversy.

The owner of an iconic Green Bay eatery must temporarily cease selling its secret recipe chili while a Brown County judge hears a breach of contract lawsuit.

The temporary injunction requires Chili John's restaurant owner Jayson Wertel, of Jay Paul LLC, to stop using the Chili John's name and meat sauce, and to remove all mentions of Chili John's from advertising and digital platforms. The restaurant, located in Ashwaubenon at 3120 Packerland Drive, also cannot claim that it sells a product that's essentially the same as Chili John's while the judge's order is in effect.

There's an ancient principle of law at work.

Daniel Hoehne, owner of Zee Best Foods Inc. and former owner of Chili John's restaurant, sought the injunction in an Oct. 8 lawsuit that seeks to void a licensing agreement that allows Wertel to use the Chili John's name and meat sauce as part of his March 2019 purchase of the restaurant. The complaint claims Wertel defaulted on the terms of the agreement.

Hoehne retained control of Zee Best, which produces Chili John's' secret meat sauce and distributes the sauce for sale in grocery stores.

The agreement granted Wertel the rights to the Chili John's name, its history and exclusivity in the Green Bay market. Wertel agreed to pay Hoehne $70,000 and a $300-per-month royalty payment for use of the name. He also agreed to buy at least 600 pounds of the secret Chili John's meat sauce from Hoehne at a set price every month.

It doesn't do any good to buy a business from somebody if the seller simply takes your money and uses it to set up a shop to compete with you.  There might be a bit more to this spat.

Wertel filed a counterclaim that denied Hoehne's claims and asked Liegeois to dismiss the case because Hoehne had not adhered to the terms of the agreement. Wertel said he didn't know about the monthly royalty payment included in the agreement, and claimed that Hoehne sold him broken equipment and that the meat sauce Hoehne sold him for the restaurant wasn't coming fast enough and was a lower quality than what's sold in stores.

You might be tempted to snicker about Wisconsin chili, but there is a tradition here.

Hoehne's family moved Chili John's in 1913 from Illinois to downtown Green Bay, where it became a mainstay, eventually leading to a second location on South Military Avenue in 1973. The downtown location closed 1978, but Chili John's would stay on Military Avenue until this summer when Wertel moved it to Ashwaubenon. Green Bay Packers' opponents and TV personalities who would visit for a bowl of chili while in town for games helped vault Chili John's to national notoriety.

In fact, if they had stayed in Chicago, you'd have to have a different name for the Super Bowl.

Now, as far as the recipe, dear reader, I don't claim to have Zee Best's recipe book, but "my recipe is of the same class of hotness as Real Chili's 'Hot with beans' or Chili John's hot."  (That recipe provoked a Wisconsin chili controversy, if you can believe it.)  There are also regional loyalties at work.  Chili John had a restaurant in Milwaukee, near UW-Milwaukee.  That closed years ago.  Real Chili have two restaurants along Wells Street in Milwaukee, one near Marquette University and the other near the city hall.  I hope they survive the lockdowns as the city hall location is also a short trolley ride from the railroad station.  But Real Chili's foray into Madison didn't last long.

THEY ARE UNDERMINING THEIR AUTHORITY.

At the beginning of the War, Field Marshal William Slim issued the following instructions to his officers.  "I tell you as officers, that you will not eat, sleep, smoke, sit down, or lie down until your soldiers have had a chance to do these things. If you hold to this, they will follow you to the ends of the earth, if you do not, will break you in front of your regiments."  That seems like a simple instruction, and yet, as the compiler of those quotes notes, "Do not be a hypocrite. If you expect the soldiers to meet a certain standard, ensure you exceed it."

There are more than a few state governors who have failed, miserably, at executing that simple task.

The editorial board of New York's Post is taking names.

[S]anctimony, we’d argue, is a peculiarly progressive vice: These politicians are certain they not only know better than the little people, but that they have a moral right to dictate detailed choices to struggling business owners, desperate single moms and everyone else facing dire dilemmas as they balance safety and keeping life ­together.

We are seeing more civil disobedience, like that bar protest in Staten Island, precisely because Democrats are not practicing what they preach.

It’s that arrogance that leads you to make a mockery of a threat that has killed more than 1.5 million, and then rub it in the faces of the most vulnerable.

The article includes a rogues' gallery of lockdown hypocrites.

Lori Lightfoot merits a brief mention.

Gretchen Whitmer does not.  Perhaps that's because the Post is a coastal paper, and they have trouble placing Michigan on a map.

There is no William Slim to cashier any of these people, but the public have a say.  "If you always lead by your example, train your troops, take care of soldiers, maintain both your equipment and your integrity, and develop yourself as a professional, those matters will take care of themselves."

If you do not, those matters will also take care of themselves.

With ordinary citizens and business owners eager to defy authorities, and local law enforcement saying in no uncertain terms that they will not spend time and resources enforcing the ridiculous rules of governors and mayors, a revolution is in the offing. Not necessarily a shooting war, but a withholding of consent to be governed.

Rick Moran concludes, "Nothing is working to get people to obey."  We'll turn to that in a day or so.

THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE BECOME MORE RESTRICTIVE.

It has long been a complaint of mine that the proliferation of administrative-recommended terms and conditions in course outlines does nothing for faculty or student performance.  But what do I know, the deanlets are at it again.  "Seems quite inconsistent with basic academic freedom principles," saith Eugene Volokh, and perhaps the whole enterprise will collapse of its own weight.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS LIMP UP TO EXPLAIN IT ONCE MORE.

Jon Miltimore interviews Jordan Peterson.  "Woke culture, safe spaces, and victimhood—each is a manifestation of a culture that has replaced individual responsibility with collectivist notions of injustice."  By their fruits shall ye know them.

CAN AN ALGORITHM SIMULATE EMERGENCE?

Years ago, I had a Commodore 64 version of Sim City that offered all sorts of play value.  There are upgraded versions for today's desktops that probably offer many more features, but learning to use those is probably too much like work.  There's also something called Cities Skylines that might be designed for those game consoles or perhaps for smart 'phones.  The American Conservative's Nolan Gray suggests that those games began with a false planning conceit for the player.  "In the old SimCity-Cities: Skyline paradigm, the player begins with a master plan, crisscrossing a virgin field with infrastructure and blanketing it with use zoning, with computer-generated buildings gradually filling in the gaps."  There's a new way to pass the time away, called Townscaper, that he evaluates as imposing fewer constraints on the player.  "Townscaper works in reverse, with the player plopping down buildings as streets and plazas gradually form within the gaps. In this sense, Townscaper comes closer to capturing how cities emerged for much of human history."  It might not be the sort of game that people who like racking up points or showing up the other players enjoy.

Where the cities of SimCity or Cities: Skyline inevitably trend toward a chaotic death cycle of traffic congestion and municipal bankruptcy, the cities of Townscaper incrementally grow more resilient with each passing move the player makes. The bane of many a SimCity creation, complexity is what lets Townscaper thrive. Where past stalwarts of the genre demand rigid planning and careful foresight, Townscaper invites the kind of playful experimentation that allows great cities—both real and imagined—to evolve in an unplanned way.

It might be the case that those chaotic death cycles on a computer screen could serve as correctives to any sort of strong prior belief in technocracy before the aspiring urban planner destroys a real city.  "[T]o the extent that this genre has overemphasized a top-down, production-oriented view of cities over the past 30 years, Townscaper is a breath of fresh air."

THE REST OF THE WORLD DOESN'T GIVE A HOOT ABOUT YOUR SALARY SCHEDULE.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed discovers that the labor theory of value fails market tests.  His problem, and it confronts any academic administrator either working in a unionized environment where pay grades depend on position rather than performance, or with egalitarian priors so tight that "opportunity cost" might as well be an expression in Vulcan.

In fields like computer science and nursing, we often have to compete with private employers who can pay whatever the market will bear. We can only pay what the contract will bear.

That means that while we can expect deep and broad pools of applicants in fields like history and English, sometimes searches fail in certain occupational areas for lack of qualified candidates. The folks who could do the job can earn so much more working elsewhere that we struggle to attract them.

You can imagine the arguments we use to try to entice people. For example, they can do per diem or consulting work in the summers for extra pay, with the added benefit of staying current in their fields. But it’s hard for many prospective candidates to get past the hit to the baseline.

One way around that, of course, would be to try to negotiate entirely separate salary scales. But unions don’t generally go for that sort of thing; they see it as divisive. In a way, it is. But going without employees in key areas isn’t really a solution.

An underacknowledged corollary to this argument is that if we were to shift focus and go to mostly or entirely vocational programming, we’d need much more money. I’ll just leave that there.

This is a tough dilemma, because there’s truth on many sides. Yes, it would be divisive to have different salary scales according to market demand for various disciplines. On the other hand, that’s what most industries do as a matter of course, and leaving roles unfilled in the name of equity is a pretty severe sacrifice to ask students to make.

On the other hand, that might be one way to get out from the athletic arms race: simply note that the contract for coaching salaries is based on the average of one football coach with one each of a swimming coach, a fencing coach, a softball coach, and a table tennis coach.  I wonder if there's a way to apply such levelling to the assistant and associate deans as well.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 7,049.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

Sweden recently changed their approach to the virus, exhorting people to avoid crowds and go out less.  Illinois has been under some sort of mitigation since mid-March.

The latest report from Sweden counts 278,912 infections and 7,067 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 787,573 infections and 14,116 deaths.

Last week, the governor trailed by 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

II. ADVENT

Today's meditation is also about censuses.   Caesar wanted to enroll all his subjects.  His local lackey Herod sought to eliminate all the two-year-old boys so as to eliminate the rival who came to his attention.  Many centuries later, the United States enumerated enslaved persons differently from free citizens, in order that slave-holders had constraints on their ability to buy proxies, and today Our President would like to enumerate citizens differently from illegal aliens, in order that sanctuary cities do not get to import proxies.  It's enough to get the editorial board of Chicago's Sun-Times worked up.  "Keep politics out of the U.S. Census," they urge.

Trump’s goal appears to be securing an undercount in states with large numbers of immigrants at least in part because the census data is used to reapportion the 435 U.S. House seats every 10 years. Census numbers also are used to ensure state and local legislative districts have equal numbers of people.

A big enough undercount could reduce the number of congressional seats in some states and increase it in others. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, California, Florida and Texas would each lose a seat.

But the data also is used to steer hundreds of billions of dollars in annual government annual spending. A miscount would steer spending on Medicaid, special education grants, school lunches, Head Start and other programs away from where it is needed. Illinois, which was already considered likely to lose a congressional seat even without an undercount, would likely get fewer federal dollars than it deserves.

Can an action taken in the service of a political end, whether it be enumerating for taxes, or enumerating for apportionment, be anything other than political?

IF WE EVER GET OUT OF QUARANTINE, WE CAN GO THROUGH THE ROCKIES, NOT AROUND THEM.

Amtrak's California Zephyr still attempts to follow (that's just truth in packaging, dear reader, I once observed the eastbound train in Omaha about when it was due in Chicago) the sightseeing-friendly schedule with daylight transits of the California and Colorado mountains.

The scenery in Colorado is compelling enough that the Rocky Mountaineer company, operator of upscale excursion trains, hopes to launch a latter-day cruise train titled Rockies to the Red Rocks in the summer of 2021.  It's a long-weekend proposition, with overnight stays in Glenwood Springs, Colo., and Moab, Utah.

Passengers interested in riding can book in either direction, with packages on the western end available to and from both Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, Nev. Trains will leave Denver on the 194 miles to Glenwood Springs at 9 a.m. and travel “at Kodak speed” of 30 mph, according to a webinar for travel agents last week. The train will arrive in Glenwood Springs for its overnight stop at 5 p.m. Departure the next morning is at 7 a.m., with a noon arrival at the location near Moab.

The eastbound train will turn the same day, departing at 3 p.m. for Glenwood Springs; Denver arrival the next day will be at 5 p.m.

Zipping through Ruby Canyon west of Grand Junction has long been the icing on the cake for California Zephyr passengers who had experienced passage through Gore and Glenwood canyons earlier in the day, and a tempting appetizer for their eastbound counterparts. Though considerably more expensive, the new Rocky Mountaineer venture will finally allow passengers to get off and explore this unique and unsung area.

There aren't any new Budd short dome cars being built, and the modified gallery cars Rocky Mountaineer use in Canada do not fit the clearance diagram on the Moffat Tunnel Route. Thus, apparently, the sightseeing cars will be modified versions of Seaboard's old Sun Lounge cars.

Moab is at the end of a branch line Rio Grande built to haul potash.  These would be the first scheduled passenger trains routed that way.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

There have been lots of opportunities to put in an hour here, a couple hours there, moving the various locomotive projects forward.  If the prototype railroads can run hybrid locomotives that run extensively on batteries, can a latter-day battery car in the form of a B unit be far behind?

More to come.

BLINKERED EXPERTS.

It's a lesson we have to learn every so often.  Governance by Wise Experts seemed to work to win the War, with an assist from the Axis powers getting too full of themselves.  After the War, though, it was the Wise Experts who got too full of themselves: interstate highways, limited wars throughout the Third World, urban renewal and a war on poverty.  The general problem with relying on experts is the very blinkering that makes them experts on the subjects they understand.  "I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings."  Thus, it's on whoever is making the decisions: a president, a governor, the general manager of a business, the head coach, to weigh and balance the advice of the various experts.  When that doesn't happen, it's on the people to say no.  That obligation is true whether the expert's area of concentration is national security (both Vietnam and Iraq looked like good ideas at first) or economics (rational expectations emerged as a modelling area in the wake of outcomes contrary to New Frontier hopes of fine-tuning the economy, and allocation czars never work) and Reason's Robby Soave now voices what is likely to be heresy to some people.  "Everyone has a right to dissent from the epidemiologists' contentment with the way things are now."

Citizens are not subjects, and they are not experimental animals.

Epidemiologists are free to take whatever precautions they deem necessary in their own lives, of course—as are the rest of us. But for too long, their pessimistic dictates have provided cover for politicians and government employees to make people's lives miserable. To take just the most obvious example, schools are still closed in many major cities, even as new scientific information has generally found that resuming in-person education would be perfectly fine. Teachers unions have echoed the choruses of the most alarmed public health experts, scrawling not until it's safe on their school reopening protest signs.

One of the blessings of liberty is that everybody shouldn't have to follow the same script. If a person has reasons to be extra cautious, or even just prefers the feeling of knowing that he is doing absolutely everything to reduce his own risk of catching the disease to as close to zero as possible, then he is free to live in accordance with that goal. Other people may decide their own circumstances don't require the same level of zealotry, or that their extremely low chance of having a negative health outcome justifies a greater degree of flexibility.

That sort of talk is defiant of the sort of wisdom that the people who seek to rule us just because keep appealing to.  Accordingly, it deserves the widest possible circulation.

THE MULTI-PURPOSE LONG DISTANCE TRAIN.

It has long been my contention that Amtrak's Empire Builder is an overworked train, providing local transportation along the northern tier, far from the interstate highways, and with not much in the way of regional air service.

Trains columnist Bob Johnston recently went on a circle tour of the Pacific Northwest, where he noted the same thing is true, even in the midst of "Recreational Travel IS Hazardous to Your Health."  "During the October trip, although demand was clearly down, seats that had been vacated in the Portland and Seattle coaches were occupied again out of Whitefish, Mont., with travelers bound for Shelby, Mont.; Columbus and Tomah, Wis.; and St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Each of the four cars also carried passengers bound for Williston, N.D."  He concludes, "The strength of this train in normal times is that with abundant promotion and exceptional onboard amenities, it can attract another layer [of] passengers traveling between major destinations who might consider a faster point-to-point alternative, but choose the Empire Builder instead."  First, in normal times the train runs daily; it's back on the austerity tri-weekly schedule of the Carter years.  Second, those faster point-to-point alternatives are likely limited to your car, and you wouldn't want to drive in the winter, and in the winter, the airplanes might not be flying.  Third, another train (on a twelve-hour-opposite schedule) across the northern tier would help a lot, but that doesn't appear to be in the works any time soon.

THE WOMEN WOULD HAVE NO MORE CHILDREN, AND THE MEN LOST REASON AND FAITH.

You'd think people would have lots of opportunities to, um, get it on, to pass the time (fifteen days to slow the spread having become nine months) away.  Doesn't appear to be happening.  "If the dire predictions of a COVID Baby Bust come true, it will point to a condition that existed prior to the pandemic. Ours is culture committed to immediate gratification, which no longer thinks of the long-term future of our society enough to value children or the family. At the same time, we’re facing a near-term future filled with aging adults, who will increasingly lack meaningful connections with family members."  (Via Mark Tapscott at Insta Pundit, who suggests the Gods of the Copybook Headings were already returning.)

Divorce lawyers seem to be experiencing an uptick in business.  Formalizing social distancing?

KEEP TRYING, PRINCETON.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed talks smack, but he's got the receipts.

Princeton University, majoring in English: $47,260

Brookdale Community College, majoring in nursing: $68,079

If you’re looking only at bang for the buck, the choice is obvious.

I should go into economist mode and bring up compensating differentials, although I endorse any information that ought remind academic administrators that the community colleges, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors are in the same business as the Ivies.

DONALD TRUMP IS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY.

Reason's Steven Greenhut gets to the point.

Many people—myself included—usually vote for Republican legislators, but found one particular Republican officeholder to be unworthy.

We tired of the president's conspiracy-mongering, whining, incessant tweeting, dishonesty, incompetence, and failure to grow into the office. The president could have tried to, at times, unite the country. He could have reined in his attacks, surrounded himself with truth-tellers rather than sycophants, and reached out to other voters. He didn't. That's why he lost. It had nothing to do with fraudulent voting or aliens.

He also noted, "Trump spent his presidency placating his core constituency, which voted in droves. But Trump's opponents were even more motivated."  Indeed.  Pajamas Media contributor J. Christian Adams concurs.  "Urban counties were able to revolutionize government election offices into Joe Biden turnout machines."  That the usual suspects won by the usual large margins in those Congressional districts was not an anomaly.  "A flood of blue votes gushing out of deep blue urban areas has a statewide effect only for statewide candidates."

The fun is going to be in the populists of left and right finding common causes.  Ro Khanna on Laura Ingraham's show?  Happened.  (The left freaked out.) Tulsi Gabbard on Shannon Bream's show? Happened.  Sleepy Joe Biden is going to have a lot more than a fractured foot to worry about.

THE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT IDIOTS WANT THEIR TALKING POINTS BACK.

Anybody else remember the people who estimated how many times the nuclear powers were able to blow up the world?  I think there was enough megatonnage to do that seven or eight times back in the day; it's currently five.  It's kind of a stupid argument, but it appeals to the kind of person who writes for public radio.  "The U.S. will probably have enough doses to vaccinate their population two times over. And Canada will have enough for their population five times over."  See, I told you so.  On the one hand, the rich countries are privilege hoarders.

Should a nurse in Peru, who's at high risk of catching the virus, be immunized before a person with low risk in the U.S. receives the vaccine?

Niko Lusiani, a senior advisor with the global aid organization Oxfam, thinks that strategy makes sense both scientifically and morally.

"I work in front of a computer, right now, in the safety of my home," he says. "I would be happy to withhold taking a vaccine so that a granny with a medical condition in Kuala Lumpur or in Lima, Peru, can get access to the vaccine. I think a lot of people will feel that way."

But, he says, right now the opposite will likely occur: Low-risk people in the U.S. will likely be immunized before many high-risk people in poor countries.

"Part of the reason is that rich countries are hoarding the vaccine supply," Lusiani says. "It's understandable, to a certain extent that you want to protect your own people. That being said, it's leaving a lot of people out."

When the pandemic began, rich countries went on a buying spree. Some have even called it "panic buying." These countries started making agreements with pharmaceutical companies to purchase experimental COVID-19 vaccines, even before clinical trials had finished.

On the other hand, the sob-sisters of public radio can only raise the issue because the competition to develop vaccines was neither wasteful nor duplicative.

At the time, no one knew which experimental vaccine would work. So rich countries were hedging their bets. But now, it looks like many of the vaccines will be effective.

Vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna appear to be more than 90% effective. Both companies have already asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use of their COVID-19 vaccines. And AstraZeneca is likely not too far behind. Last week, the company said its vaccine was likely about 70% effective.

Watch for those companies to engage in highly-publicized operations to give the shots away to those Peruvian nurses, or for the foreign offices of the countries with large stockpiles to engage in displays of their generosity.

Which, for the short term, will be good for those nurses in Peru, and ultimately, for the populations of the countries that don't have domestic laboratories.  But in the long term, all that subsidized altruism (a realist would call it "dumping") is going to impede the development of those domestic laboratories.

SHUT UP AND TAKE IT.

Julie Kelly of American Greatness catalogues a long Train of Abufes and Usurpations.  "It doesn’t matter how many times the ruling class has misled us, either intentionally or purposely. After all, who are you to complain?"  That introduces a list of Facts submitted to a Candid World that ought be a more than compelling case to tell the nachalstvo to stuff it.

It's beginning.  "[U]nlike during the first lockdowns, which were to last for 15 days so we could flatten the curve of positive tests, many are not taking the undeserved punishment from their 'betters' without a fight."  That includes sheriffs and local police chiefs allocating resources to purposes other than enforcing the arbitrary ukases of governors, and a few elected representatives talking back.  It's long past time, though, for the legislatures to come back into session to enact public health measures according to the normal order of business, or to consider articles of impeachment to check those governors.

Telling the authorities to stuff it is as American as declaring your independence.

‘Happy the nation whose people have not forgotten how to rebel’, wrote the British historian RH Tawney. And unless something is done to address growing inequality and lack of upward mobility, this rebellious streak will return from the populists both left and right. As of now, the restored establishment lacks a viable vision to improve the lives of most Americans, particularly given their embrace of green ideology which makes broad-based economic growth all but impossible.

Perhaps the technocrats will be more circumspect about ordering people into "climate emergency" lockdowns in the future.  On the other hand, ordering the vassals about is something Joel Kotkin, who also wrote the article cited immediately above, has been warning us about even before the Wuhan coronavirus started scaring people.

RAIL BARON IN THE BERKSHIRES.

Northern New England is to the freight railroad network as the appendix might be to the digestive system.  The gross product originating in the Boston area can be shipped out in lobster barrels or as packets of pixels.  There's still a fair amount of newsprint, toilet paper, and lumber production in Maine and the northern reaches of New Hampshire, but not much by way of inbound shipments.  One reason the major carriers, New Haven and Boston and Maine were in and out of bankruptcy in the middle part of the twentieth century is that the inbound shipments tailed off, and the outbound traffic wasn't enough to load the inbound cars.  And the potato distribution became unreliable.

That doesn't mean the eastern trunk carriers have had no interest in the principal freight railroad of the region, currently trading as Pan Am Railroad (yes, with the blue and the globe of the old airline); previously Guilford Transportation, and for a brief shining moment as the affiliated Boston and Maine and Maine Central.  Norfolk Southern worked out a traffic agreement with Pan Am for running powers over part of Boston and Maine.  More recently, CSX, which have their own route into Boston over the former Boston and Albany, expressed interest in buying Pan Am out.

Clearly CSX sees potential in Pan Am, perhaps as a way to build on its dominant presence in New England. If so, it’s a turnabout for CSX, which has been retreating from New England since the 1999 acquisition of Conrail. It sold the former Boston & Albany main line east of Worcester to the state a decade ago for increased MBTA commuter train use, and its Beacon Park yard in Boston was ripped up for redevelopment. CSX has disposed of some Boston-area branches and just last month leased a branch to short line Grafton & Upton.

Yet CSX’s former Boston & Albany main line remains the primary freight artery serving the region from the west and handles more than a dozen trains per day. Among them: A daily merchandise train in each direction that link CSX’s hump yard at Selkirk, N.Y., with Portland, Maine, via Pan Am interchange outside of Worcester, Mass. CSX and Pan Am also interchange some merchandise traffic and unit grain trains at Rotterdam Junction, N.Y., the west end of the former Boston & Maine.

NS, in contrast, runs just two pairs of trains over Pan Am daily, a merchandise train to and from the former B&M hump yard at East Deerfield, Mass., and an intermodal/auto train to Ayer, Mass., the eastern extent of the Pan Am Southern.

It is unclear what CSX would gain from acquiring Pan Am, aside from a longer haul on traffic it already enjoys, including paper and forest products produced in the Pine Tree State and neighboring New Brunswick.

Pan Am does have an impressive growth pipeline, which railroad President David Fink outlined in a presentation at the North East Association of Rail Shippers conference in September. Maine paper mills have come back from the dead after shifting production from paper used in printing to high-demand paper used in packaging. Pan Am has other traffic on the rise, too, including propane, biodiesel, municipal solid waste, aggregates, and Poland Spring water.

“Railroads in New England have to be hardscrabble,” Fink says. “So if one thing doesn’t work we pivot to something else. And that’s what we’ve always done. And everyone else that connects with us has done the same thing.”

In that disinvestment by CSX in the former Boston and Albany might be the reason for its interest in Pan Am.  The Boston and Albany west of Worcester is primarily a single-track railroad, and Amtrak cooperate with CSX in construction season by replacing the Boston section of the Lake Shore with a bus.  Passenger Rail advocates in Massachusetts would like to add passenger train service to western Massachusetts, in order to provide business, shopping, and recreational-friendly service for Springfield and Pittsfield and possibly as far as Albany.  Get the freight trains off that single track, which hacks its way over the Berkshires, and onto Boston and Maine's Hoosac Tunnel line, which has an easier crossing of the main spine of the Berkshires (it's a wash on the crossing of the coastal ridge that makes up the east bank of the Connecticut River) and sell the tracks to the Commonwealth, with freight running powers to Providence and Worcester.  That would be the end of the interchange at Worcester, which is a survival of Boston's curious railway geography: the shipments headed to the New Haven for New York or the Alphabet Route would be handed off at Worcester; Boston and Maine preferred to keep traffic for New York Central on their own rails to Rotterdam Junction and Crescent in New York.

At the end of November, CSX have a new train set in time for Christmas.

Including haulage rights, Pan Am stretches 1,700 miles from the Albany, N.Y., area to Maine. It includes trackage of the former Maine Central, Boston & Maine, Portland Terminal, and Springfield Terminal railroads. Pan Am connects with four Class I railroads — CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National, and Canadian Pacific — and 14 short lines. It also operates over Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority commuter lines in the Boston area and hosts Amtrak’s Downeaster service linking Boston with Portland, Maine.

CSX connects with Pan Am at Rotterdam Junction, N.Y., on its former New York Central Water Level Route, and outside of Worcester, Mass., via its former Boston & Albany main line, which is far and away the busiest freight route in New England.

Norfolk Southern are seeking regulatory protections to accompany the transaction.

Word first leaked in early November that CSX was making a move for Pan Am when Norfolk Southern filed a preemptive objection with the STB to any deal between the two carriers. NS has a joint venture with the New England regional called Pan Am Southern that includes more than 400 miles of track in Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut. The venture dates back to 2009 and allows NS to go head-to-head with CSX in the Boston market.

“NS is concerned with CSX’s potential acquisition of Pan Am, specifically its interest in PAS, and is further concerned with CSX’s potential use of a voting trust to acquire Pan Am,” an attorney for NS wrote. “One of the main benefits of NS’ and Pan Am’s joint control and ownership of PAS was to strengthen competition with CSX… Any CSX effort to acquire Pan Am would threaten to materially undermine this existing competition, thus impacting not only NS but also rail shippers and other railroads.”

The letter also notes that NS was “given certain rights in the event of a ‘change of control,’” including the establishment of a voting trust.

As of Monday, the STB had not responded to NS’ objection and it’s unclear if the issues have been resolved behind the scenes. Earlier this month, a CSX spokesperson told Railfan & Railroad that the carrier was working directly with NS to “understand any issues they might have.”

In the alternative model railroad world of Cold Spring Shops, Boston and Albany had a friendly connection as far north as central Maine in the form of the State of Maine Northern. Reality sometimes imitates the model.

THIS COLLECTIVE "WE" HAS NO SCIENTIFIC MEANING.

It's a technical argument, which Pierre Lemieux aptly summarizes.  "Except, arguably, at the very abstract level of a social contract, expressions such as 'we as a society' have no ascertainable meaning, except to say 'people who, like me, impose their preferences and choices on others.'"  That way lies the tyranny of experts and the aristocracy of pull.

Read and understand.

THE THIRD WORLD IS FULL OF SLOW LEARNERS.

Among John Galt's denunciations of the Establishment of his era is this: "When some bum in some pesthole of Asia screams, 'How dare you be rich?' you apologize and promise to give it all away."  It's dystopian fiction, and yet, you can regularly find the same sort of foolishness in Common Dreams.

With patents for Covid-19 vaccines under private control, adds Global Justice Now policy advisor Heidi Chow, Big Pharma’s power players get to decide “who gets the vaccine and at what price.”

And so we now have some promising vaccines but no global gameplan for assuring every person on Earth ready and timely access to a future sans Covid. Millions more of us will suffer while a fortunate few of us make multiple billions. We can do better, and advocacy groups like Global Justice Now are organizing to make that better happen.

Some 78 percent of Moderna’s vaccine doses, Global Justice Now points out, has already been sold to rich nations with only 12 percent of the world’s population.

“In this global health emergency, vaccines should be available to all, everywhere, free of charge,” says a new Global Justice Now campaign for Covid-19 justice. “Manufacturers should be working together to produce enough doses for everyone, distributed in order of need. And companies and governments should be cooperating through the World Health Organization to make this happen.”

That's Sam Pizzigati, and it's likely you can find brain-brothers of his elsewhere on Common Dreams, or The Nation, or The Progressive, or featured on public radio.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THE BAD NEWS IS WRONG.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg has some fun with the ghoulish coastal press, those pantywaists who are forever hoping for medieval-level contagion and suffering in the prairies.

Remember the Sturgis [North Dakota gathering of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts] rally? When snarky bobbleheads with tin “reporter” badges uncritically regurgitated garbage “science” tying every single case in the upper midwest to the Sturgis rally? That made the headlines. The clarification – it was more like 80 cases in Minnesota – got Section C page 16.

He's got a link to a Michael Fumento essay that's also worth your consideration.  "What’s driving the anti-Dakotas vendetta is that the mainstream media overwhelmingly support authoritarian measures and governors of both states have resisted them." That's part of the problem, dear reader: I submit that the establishment press and their court intellectuals continuing to carry water for public officials who behave as if the rules are for hoi polloi is going to be more damaging to the establishment than any snarking at the Dakotas.

Envy may be a driving force, as well. Say you’re a writer in New York or Los Angeles living in something approaching a coronavirus police state and fearing for your job and pining for a pint and you learn North Dakota ranked second in least economic distress from the pandemic while South Dakota also did quite well. Further, a U.S. Census Bureau poll found that the two states least suffering from anxiety and depression right now are, yup, the Dakotas. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s freedom!

That's part of it. I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings.

THEY COULD JUST ASK THE ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT.

Inside Higher Education have become all woke, all the time, and they don't even allow comments any more.  A recent column attempts to inform us of the importance of "inequality studies."  Just the thing for higher education in an age of retrenchment, more concentrations, more administrators.  Seriously.  "Students, professors and administrators need a deeper understanding of how human disparities have developed, why they persist and how they evolve over time."  They could start here.  They could extend their education.  They might even consider heterodox perspectives.  They might even figure out how their call for action is really an extended act of question-begging.

Students, professors and administrators need a deeper understanding of how human disparities have developed, why they persist and how they continue to evolve over time. They also need to understand how the forces of social inequality inform the habits and practices of colleges and universities today. To understand inequality is to understand the modern world and the forces that created it. More to the point, understanding inequality is precondition to overcoming it: that is, to healing the wounds of the past, generating social solidarity and rebuilding a more just society.

On the other hand, keep it up. I can keep sharp by pouncing on this sort of silliness.

ENTREPRENEURIAL ALERTNESS.

What happens to spent batteries?  There might be money in that scrap pile.

Over the past decade, the world’s lithium-ion production capacity has increased tenfold to meet the growing demand for EVs. Now vehicles from that first production wave are just beginning to reach the end of their lifespan. This marks the beginning of a tsunami of spent batteries, which will only get worse as more electric cars hit the road. The International Energy Agency predicts an 800 percent increase in the number of EVs over the next decade, each car packed with thousands of cells. The dirty secret of the EV revolution is that it created an e-waste timebomb—and cracking lithium-ion recycling is the only way to defuse it.

That's something metal manufacturers probably figured out about the time the first battlefield littered with dead knights had to be cleaned up.  (They've gotten a lot better at it in the years since.)

There are two main ways to deactivate lithium-ion batteries. The most common technique, called pyrometallurgy, involves burning them to remove unwanted organic materials and plastics. This method leaves the recycler with just a fraction of the original material—typically just the copper from current collectors and nickel or cobalt from the cathode. A common pyro method, called smelting, uses a furnace powered with fossil fuels, which isn’t great for the environment, and it loses a lot of aluminum and lithium in the process. But it is simple, and smelting factories that currently exist to process ore from the mining industry are already able to handle batteries. Of the small fraction of lithium-ion batteries that are recycled in the US—just 5 percent of all spent cells—most of them end up in a smelting furnace.

It's challenging when the vaporization temperature of some metals is lower than the melting temperature of others, and for all the chemistry involved, a battery well-might be an alloy waiting to happen. Could be easier to expose Chinese slave laborers to the hazards of digging out more rare earths (which aren't that rare, they're just messy to isolate.)

The other approach is called hydrometallurgy. A common form of this technique, called leaching, involves soaking lithium-ion cells in strong acids to dissolve the metals into a solution. More materials, including lithium, can be recovered this way. But leaching comes with its own challenges. Recyclers must preprocess the cells to remove unwanted plastic casings and drain the charge on the battery, which increases cost and complexity. It’s part of the reason why spent lithium-ion batteries have been treated as waste ever since the first commercial cells hit the market in the early 1990s. It was often several times cheaper to mine new material, especially lithium, than recover it with leaching.

But a battery is a carefully-contained exothermic reaction (something that owners of hoverboards or small dead rail locomotives sometimes learn the hard way) and there might lie an opportunity.

Redwood uses a combination of pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy to recover these valuable materials. First, technicians wearing reflective silver heat suits cook the batteries in converters to separate the metals. Rather than using fossil fuels to burn the material, like in a conventional smelting process, Redwood’s pyro technique uses residual energy in the batteries, such as the organics in the electrolyte, to drive the conversion process. The stuff that’s left over is a metal alloy that is filtered through a hydrometallurgical process to recover individual compounds.

Repeated smelting of metals weakens them and introduces impurities, that's what made Nucor's Thin Strip Caster fed with recycled steel such a challenging project.  Apparently at the atomic level, the act of discharging a battery does not change lead into gold, or lithium into baking soda.

Many of the challenges that come with lithium-ion recycling stem from the fact that the facilities that process them weren’t designed specifically for cooking down batteries. But people at the vanguard of battery recycling expect that creating dedicated facilities will improve the industry’s economics. “We’re focused on a bespoke process that is specifically designed for lithium ion batteries because we’re starting to see increased volumes,” says Tim Johnston, the cofounder of Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycler. “Historically, batteries were viewed as waste, and we seek to turn that on its head by focusing on them as a resource.”

There's still work to be done.

A battery’s cathode, for example, is nanoengineered to boost performance. So some battery experts are working on a process called direct recovery, which salvages cathode material without destroying its crystalline nanostructure. This would dramatically reduce the cost of reusing the material.

There's a lot more at the link, including other promising developments, other potential dead ends, and the ever-present market tests. As long as there are dollar bills on the sidewalk, though, somebody's going to pick them up.

IT'S A LITTLE LATE TO DEVELOP A CONSCIENCE.

Former national security advisor Susan Rice, of Benghazi and unmasking fame, warns that it is time for Congress to "shore up our institutions."  I'd be inclined to agree, but for the superficial wish list she offers.

If the Senate flips to Democratic control, Congress will be able to apply the lessons of our democracy’s near-death experience.

It would enact the For the People Act to combat corruption, strengthen ethics rules and improve voter access as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the protections of the 1965 legislation. Congress would pass the Protecting Our Democracy Act to constrain the power of future presidents who deem themselves above the law and finally adopt long-stalled legislation to shore up our election infrastructure against adversaries, foreign or domestic.

Now is no time for self-congratulation or complacency. We must act with the unique urgency and courage of those who know they are living on borrowed time.

Yawn.  A few tweaks to process (doesn't the Federal Constitution already constrain the power of presidents?) while the house is divided, and the governing class is hoping to buy people off with borrowed money?  Good luck with that.

Vague calls for a “national conversation” or emotive spectacles from celebrities obscure the problem and solution. Those calling for dialogue expect a monologue. But it is not clear that one America will continue to respond to charges of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” with polite nods or cowed silence. A guilty plea is demanded from an accused convinced she was far from the scene of the crime.

One-party control of the levers of power isn't going to help.

Partisan divides now overlay religious divides, cultural divides, geographic divides and racial divides.” Already in After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre noted that “patriotism cannot be what it was because we lack in the fullest sense a patria.” He foresaw that a lack of shared foundational values would lead to unresolvable conflicts between fragmented communities within what had once been one nation.

The vehemence of that conflict is exacerbated by the hypertrophy of government. The side in power controls a gargantuan fiscal and administrative apparatus that shapes our livelihoods, health, religion, education and family itself. For anything not touched by the bureaucracy, the winners appoint the judges that shape everything else.

Voters keep protecting themselves from the administrative apparatus by gridlocking the government, which might work except when it doesn't.  It's probably also too much to expect the personnel and the mouthpieces of Official Washington to become more modest in their aspirations.

MERITOCRACY BEGAT OLIGARCHY.

Last night, Tucker Carlson went off for a full segment on the Watergate Babies class reunion known as the Biden presidency, drawing attention to the ways in which that collection of ancients was engaging in blaming the victim.

The Cold Spring Shops condensed version focuses on two of the points he makes.

First, he correctly observed that the legacy media fawning over a "diverse cabinet" comprising a person of one color (Yale Law); another person of another color (Kennedy School); a hermaphrodite (Wilson School, or whatever Princeton calls it these days); a lesbian (Smith: finding alternative lifestyles in Northampton is about as newsworthy as finding seagulls in Boston); and the "two Jews and a cripple" that got James Watt tossed for insensitivity nearly forty years ago elides the more important point, which is that for all the chromosomal and epithelial variations, there's going to be a lot by way of shared values, worldviews, and policy approaches.  There's nothing quite so sure to go wrong as the course of action that's Everybody's Consensus.

Second, he sort of correctly observed that you'd probably be hard-pressed to find anyone among those appointees who could clean the fish she caught, field-dress a deer, let alone fire a tobacco barn or carry water for a patternmaker.  But his call for a "real meritocracy" as opposed to the fiefdoms protected by moats missed the point.  Yes, there is reason to believe that the Swamp comprises a sclerotic inbred oligarchy these days, but that's because the people first up the ladder figured out how to get their spawn onto the ladder ahead of the strivers from the hinterland.  Consider, dear reader, how many children and grandchildren of the sports and entertainment stars of yesteryear are themselves in the bigs or on the big screen.  In academic economics, we can find enough family ties to fill out a chapter or two of the Book of Numbers; and my skepticism of estate taxation stems in part from my understanding of incentives, specifically those that favor the transmission of human and social capital in ways the tax-man can't touch.

Thus, although on occasion, somebody without the Proper Credentials (as the oligarchs understand them) does break through, the more general outcome is the mediocre spawn of the conventionally minded get on top.

The botched policy response to the Wuhan coronavirus has done much to heighten the contradictions, but the work is not yet done.

WE WILL HAVE THEIR WORKS TO REMEMBER THEM BY.

Last week, we learned of the passing of Edward P. Lazear.

A student of and intellectual successor to economist and Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, Lazear founded the Society of Labor Economists and later served as its president. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, and also founded the working group on Personnel Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lazear won practically every award labor economics has to offer, including the Leo Melamed Prize, IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Jacob Mincer Prize, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and designation as Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

We noted his work with the late Sherwin Rosen on executive compensation as if in a tournament.  National Review's Andrew Stuttaford cited a more recent policy essay that includes  "One surprising finding from my study is that changing a country’s name to eliminate the terms 'socialist,' 'democratic,' or 'people’s' is associated with an 18 percent rise in incomes of the poor over the subsequent years. Of course, it is not the name change per se that helps the poor, but the change in the form of government and the adoption of more market-oriented institutions that accompanies the name change."  We're likely to have more to say along those lines in more specific posts soon to come.

This morning, though, we learned of the passing of Walter Williams.  For a time, he was head of the economics faculty at George Mason, and a regular Festive Season substitute host for Rush Limbaugh (!)  His colleague Veronique de Rugy writes,

The great economist and freedom fighter Walter Williams has died. This is an incredibly sad news. Walter was a great communicator of ideas and a prolific, provocative and uncompromising writer. He was the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University. His voice, his happy-warrior demeanor, his cosmopolitan views, his endless fight on behalf of those with no political voices, and his generosity to all of us at Mason will be missed.

Professor Williams was a regular contributor to Town Hall, and the column he submitted for publication overnight was a necessary reiteration of The State Against Blacks.

If we accept the notion that rotten education is not preordained, then I wonder when the black community will demand an end to an educational environment that condemns so many youngsters to mediocrity. You can bet the rent money that white liberals and high-income blacks would not begin to accept the kind of education for their children that most blacks receive.

It might be fun to put together a course outline for a survey of political economy featuring works by Loury, McCloskey, Sowell, and Williams just to mess with the minds of the usual diversicrats.

It is not given to any of us to finish the task, but we are in a better place to continue thanks to the works of Messrs. Lazear and Williams.  RIP.

LOSING THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

Look, Rutgers sending a football team into the Big Ten to become a crash test dummy for Wisconsin or Ohio State as well as Penn State never made much sense.  But now, the deanlets and deanlings in New Brunswick are twisting themselves into pretzels because the Wuhan coronavirus is having a much more deleterious effect on university finances than is football.

Dory Devlin, a spokesperson for Rutgers, said that athletics makes up 2 percent of the university's annual budget and the department's deficit is not a primary factor in the pandemic-related shortfalls.

"To suggest that the athletics budget is at the heart of our budget shortfall ignores the COVID-related shortfalls we are confronting that are in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars," Devlin wrote in an email.

That makes sense in the same way that if you just had a bad encounter with a chain saw, perhaps you deal with that before you address the paper cut.  The paper cut, however, was self-inflicted.

Rutgers leaders have long promised that the university’s Division I sports program would become financially self-sufficient, Killingsworth said. In 2014, the university joined the Big Ten, which is considered the most academically prestigious and research-focused “Power Five” league, with hopes that Rutgers would be competitive against football and men’s basketball powerhouses in the conference such as Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan and Ohio State University.

The increased advertising and exposure in national media “allows us to showcase the full breadth of Rutgers University and its mission,” Robert Barchi, the former president of Rutgers, said in a 2015 letter to the University Senate, responding to faculty leaders’ concerns about the athletics budget deficit that was growing at the time. “Big Ten membership provides a clear path to our goal of financial neutrality in athletics within the next seven years.”

Barchi assured the senate that the athletics department would not only become self-sufficient but also profitable.

“We are well on our way to our goal of reaching not only a point of budget neutrality, but also a point where athletics becomes a net financial supporter of our academic programs, as it is for many Big Ten schools,” he wrote.

Those predictions proved wrong.

If you believe that any athletics programs are net financial supporters of their academic programs, I have some mountain property in Illinois to show you.

That chain-saw cut, though?  It wasn't done by the Chinese virus.  It was the work of serial administrators.

Todd Wolfson, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said the union estimates that dining hall workers and adjunct professors -- employees who are more likely to be lower paid and people of color -- have suffered the brunt of the economic fallout. The union estimates that in addition to the laid-off workers, about 300 adjunct professors did not have their teaching contracts renewed for fall 2020, Wolfson said.

Wolfson considers it “malpractice” that cuts to university personnel are occurring as the athletics department racks up debt.

“There’s always been distrust among both students and faculty, the other unions, and others on campus in how the university has allocated money to athletics,” he said. But the pandemic has laid bare Rutgers’s “misplaced priorities” as a public institution.

It's always encouraging to see faculty members exercising their authority as stewards of the university.

“There’s 73,000 people at Rutgers, and we have a lot at stake here, more than the higher-up administrators who come in and stay at Rutgers for a couple years,” Wolfson said. “We need to have a serious role in deciding where money goes and why it goes and center the core mission of the university, which is service, teaching and higher learning.”

He added that the student body is “very aware” that part of their campus fees are being used to support athletics. Nearly 31,500 students signed a petition in July for the university to reduce the fee, which for full-time undergraduates on the New Brunswick campus amounts to $1,350 each semester. There are additional costs depending on which individual school or college a student attends of up to $243, according to an explanation of tuition and fee assessments by the university's Student Accounting, Billing and Cashier Services. The petition was started when undergraduates learned their courses would be delivered mostly online and that they would not have access to campus facilities and resources due to the pandemic, said Shreya Patel, a senior who started the petition.

The amount of student fees allocated to Rutgers Athletics has been increasing for nearly two decades and is consistently higher than the fees charged by most other institutions in the Big Ten, with the exception of the University of Maryland, according to the Rutgers AAUP-AFT analysis.

Maryland coming into the B1G didn't make any sense, either.  The key learning point, though, is that any university athletic department that relies on student fees for some of its revenue is not, on net, a financial supporter of the university's academic efforts.