THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE.

"The science" and "Our democracy" have become incantations, more akin to the phrases invoked to denounce heretics than to concepts suggesting room for active contestation.  That's not going to end well.

Findings that fall into the wrong hands must be renounced. Offensive knowledge is to be buried. Truth is contingent on the identity of the person who finds it. The ascendant strain of thought today amounts to an attack on reason, rationality, and empiricism. An organized, well-funded, fiercely defended Disenlightenment is unfolding, and some of its most engaged proponents are explicit about their desire to demolish a 300-year tradition: In Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, the authors note that “unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Undoing the Enlightenment is an astonishingly bold undertaking that runs so contrary to centuries of progress in learning that it requires the frenzy of a guilt-wracked cult to sustain it. The Disenlightenment is fueled by a religious ecstasy that shares some characteristics with the Reformation (notably a dizzying rebirth of iconoclasm with no clear goal except the orgiastic thrill of destruction), while its reason-denying and reactionary elements recall the Romantic movement.

There's plenty of that sort of supposedly principled unreason floating around, all of which can be summarized as "If a thing is hard to prove, therefore, we should skip the proof and simply assume it."  That's called faith, dear reader.  These times, however, are times in which more than a little healthy skepticism is desirable.  Our New Priests would rather denounce the heretics and excommunicate the dissenters.

The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).

This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science.

Yes, and in an era when the political class and the boffins aren't performing so well, "The Science" or "Our Democracy" don't have much force.

Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.

That's not how any of this works.  Sometimes, it gets funny.  There's a yard sign going up around here that reads "Follow the science.  Unmask our kids."  Despite Illinois being supposedly in the grip of J.B. Pritzker and the Combine, there is dissidence, and calling out the credentialed mavericks is the right thing to do.

So the “believe the science” chorus gives the credentialed mavericks no notice unless it’s to defame them. Apparently, under the believers’ model of science, truth comes down from a secular Mount Sinai (Mount Science?) thanks to a set of anointed scientists, and those declarations are not to be questioned. The dissenters can be ignored because they are outside the elect. How did the elect achieve its exalted station? Often, but not always, it was through the political process: for example, appointment to a government agency or the awarding of prestigious grants. It may be that a scientist simply has won the adoration of the progressive intelligentsia because his or her views align easily with a particular policy agenda.

But that’s not science; it’s religion, or at least it’s the stereotype of religion that the “science believers” oppose in the name of enlightenment. What it yields is dogma and, in effect, accusations of heresy.

In real science no elect and no Mount Science exists. Real science is a rough-and-tumble process of hypothesizing, public testing, attempted replication, theory formation, dissent and rebuttal, refutation (perhaps), revision (perhaps), and confirmation (perhaps).

That's how real democracy works, as well, but it's apparently easier to rile up followers than to look for areas of agreement these days.

Public policy is about moral judgment, trade-offs, and the justifiable use of coercion. Natural scientists are neither uniquely knowledgeable about those matters nor uniquely capable of making the right decisions for everyone. When medical scientists advised a lockdown of economic activity because of the pandemic, they were not speaking as scientists but as moralists (in scientists’ clothing). What are their special qualifications for that role? How could those scientists possibly have taken into account all of the serious consequences of a lockdown–psychological, domestic, social, economic, etc.–for the diverse individual human beings who would be subject to the policy? What qualifies natural scientists to decide that people who need screening for cancer or heart disease must wait indefinitely while people with an officially designated disease need not? (Politicians issue the formal prohibitions, but their scientific advisers provide apparent credibility.)

Here’s the relevant distinction: while we ought to favor science, we ought to reject scientism, the mistaken belief that the only questions worth asking are those amenable to the methods of the natural sciences and therefore all questions must either be recast appropriately or dismissed as gibberish.

There is no such thing as a right decision "for everyone," it's all about trading off among conflicting notions of desirable.  Enlightenment methods of thinking understand that; belief systems do not.  But noble lies are not science.

Americans at whom those barbs are aimed are not really rejecting “science” so much as they are rejecting the people who have glued themselves to it as a means by which to accumulate more power.

That rejection is likely to survive the end of the pandemic. Indeed, if this trend continues, it will take a long time for American progressivism to recover from the fallout. In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash. In the long run, progressivism will always fail, because it is incompatible with human nature and because it is simply not possible to abolish politics, but it can work for a short while, providing that its technocrats have the discipline to prioritize science as a neutral process over “science” as a deceptive buzzword. Unfortunately for today’s progressives, the technocrats of this era chose precisely the opposite course.

Observers who wonder why so many within our government have been unwilling to let go of their power would do well to consider that the endless series of lockdowns, mask-mandates, and social-distancing rules that we have just lived through has been progressivism in its purest form. Just as war is the health of the state, the arrival of COVID-19 provided the perfect impetus for the rampant safetyism, unchecked authority, hysterical micromanagement, mawkish moral crusading, and interminable federal spending that the sorts of figures who graduate from public-policy and public-health programs spend their lives dreaming about. For the better part of two years now, they’ve had an absolute ball. If history is any guide, they’ll spend the next 20 or 30 picking up the tab.

There's a separate post to be written on the extent of the authority of the administrative state, but not today.  The reality check is also coming for a different set of mawkish moral crusaders.

[Atmospheric scientist Cliff] Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change. “You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”

Exactly, and the climate modellers and the contagion modellers have in common their reliance on dubious extrapolations.

The common theme, dear reader, is that the primitive has returned because the Bright People got too skeptical.

Specifically, the West—like Afghanistan—is falling prey to a new form of clericalism. In Middle Ages, the clerical class—what the French called the First Estate — enforced the orthodoxy of the day from the Pope and the Bishops. Today, this discipline is undertaken by university faculties, media outlets, and, most egregiously, social media oligarchs. Once celebrated as forums for debate and open inquiry, our universities function today largely as defenders of orthodoxy.

In this, they are like their medieval and Communist counterparts. In medieval universities, dissenters, like Jews and Muslims, were rare, and barely tolerated. Similar conformity haunts our elite schools, where according to one study the proportion of liberals to conservatives ran as high as 70 to one, and at elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reached 120 to one.

But the similarities don't end there. In addition to living with droughts, famines, ever-colder weather and political unrest, the masses and even the elites in the Middle Ages lived in terror of eternal damnation. More or less everyone believed that the Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent; the period saw a surge of millennialist movements that took it upon themselves to enforce this orthodoxy against dissenters and religious minorities like Jews.

I'd be amused with the observation that the denial of coherent beliefs is itself a coherent belief, but for the consequences being what they are.  "You know you're dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent."  I conclude with what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "The truth will set you free, and most of it can be found in a library."  The 'library" part is salient: your favorite search engine is too vulnerable to manipulation either by its owners or by clickbait.

TRASHING THE YELLOW JACKETS' NEST.

When a Mid-American football team gets a win against one of the so-called Power Five teams, it's occasion to splice the main brace.

The Northern Illinois win at Georgia Tech didn't get much mention on local sports radio or television, although losses by Illinois and Northwestern (and the Wisconsin failure to put Penn State away) did get mentions.  It's always fun to see a team go into another stadium, take the lead late (going for two with not much time left rather than kick the extra point) and then force a field goal attempt from long range and blocking that.

I'm still of the view that College Sports, Inc. are moving toward sixty-four teams in four power conferences, and another sixteen in the not-quite range.  All the same, if the resulting league structure had flexible conferences with relegation (although that could make a mess of all sorts of rivalry games) these Boneyard wins might serve for making Mid-American teams candidates for elevation, and the teams that think they are buying wins by scheduling Mid-American cupcakes move onto the relegation list with a loss.

AT IT FOR NINETEEN YEARS.

The posts are now longer, and there are fewer in a month, and yet the core ideas seem to be the same.

Thanks for looking in.

THE PUNCHLINES WRITE THEMSELVES.

Shrill Democrats (excuse the repetition) are so prone to claim that if they don't get their way People. Will. Die. that there's even a meme.

There's a class of wisecracks along the line of "They told me that if I didn't vote for Lori Lightfoot Chicago would be overwhelmed by a crime wave ..."  In California, now it's "Vote against the recall or people will die."  Should Gavin Newsom not be recalled and replaced, there are likely to be new wisecracks as people continue to contract Wuhan coronavirus irrespective of the ukases, or as the tent cities and the metropolitan areas continue to decay.

It's possible that the students of electoral design will have more material for their work, as the vote for a replacement governor is a simple first-past-the-post, no runoffs provided for.  "It seems as though the hope here is that recall opponents don't select a replacement. If they don't, then it seems very likely that, yes, Newsom will have gotten more votes than his replacement because so many people didn't cast a second vote."  That's the way California crumbles, despite their three National League teams waging a compelling pennant race.

ULTIMATELY, IT'S ABOUT FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

I found a meme that supposedly debunks the case for serious Passenger Rail in the United States.

The creator had to put the British Isles where they are in the comparison for artistic balance.  Move them such that John O'Groats is at the tip of the Minnesota Arrowhead, and something resembling the Head of the Lakes or the Cities to Chicago suggests a comparison with Edinburgh to London of Great Race to the North fame.  At one time, somebody contemplating a trip between the Cities and Chicago had the choice of Burlington's Zephyrs by way of LaCrosse and East Dubuque; Chicago and North Western's 400 and lesser named trains, calling at Eau Claire with a choice of a Madison or Milwaukee routing; The Milwaukee Road's Hiawathas by way of LaCrosse, the Dells, and Milwaukee; and there were once upon a time services offered by Soo Line, picking up a number of the paper mill cities in Wisconsin; or Chicago Great Western, offering the great way around but getting closer to Dubuque, Freeport, or Rockford than any of the major carriers, with Rochester, Minnesota, or Oelwein, Iowa getting in on the action.  And people in Wisconsin and Minnesota keep asking for a second (!?) Amtrak frequency along The Milwaukee Road to complement the current, overpurposed Empire Builder, and possibly to restore that corridor as far as Fargo.

Alternatively, we could leave that overlay where it is and think about this map.

That idea has been kicking around transportation circles for years.  It's not about the fast trains, though; "When high-speed rail, intercity trains, commuter trains, and buses are seamlessly connected, you can get nearly anywhere with ease, and ridership across the whole network multiplies exponentially."  Whether that exponent is greater or less than one is the more important empirical question.  It's not the speed, though, it's the ability to make connections, which currently suffers from the Illinois Department of Transportation negotiating with the host railroads individually, and what is good for Union Pacific from St. Louis or BNSF from Galesburg isn't much help going on to Milwaukee or Ann Arbor, or what have you, and Canadian National and Norfolk Southern are hopeless anyway.  It doesn't matter, for instance, how fast trains can now run on the Alton Route (90 mph between Alton and Coal City) if the host railroad dispatchers are out to lunch.

The fastest Chicago-St. Louis schedule resuming in a few weeks is train no. 301, a 7 a.m. Chicago departure with limited stops that reaches St. Louis at 12:20 p.m. This 5-hour, 20-minute trip only matches what GM&O’s Abraham Lincoln achieved in 1965.

Travelers on the route still must contend with potential freight train interference delays in the Chicago-Joliet and Alton-St. Louis terminal areas and situations such as one inflicted on St. Louis-Chicago train No. 300 on July 1.

Trains News Wire learned from a Union Pacific source that the Norfolk Southern dispatcher, who controls a shared UP-NS double-track segment between the Hazel Dell and Iles control points south of Springfield, Ill., ignored passenger train priority. The dispatcher failed to hold two NS east-west trains instead of allowing train No. 300 and UP intermodal ZG4MQ to first pass each other where the UP dispatcher had set up a rolling meet. As a result, the passenger train was 1 hour, 19 minutes late into Joliet after waiting for the NS and UP trains to clear.

Such delays negate any gains made possible by the latest speed increases.

That kind of dependability will undo any efforts to provide additional frequencies, and connectivity, which is what the Illinois Passenger Rail advocates are highlighting as a benefit of that fast train backbone.

When there are high-speed lines running from Chicago to Cleveland and Detroit, for example, New York and Buffalo/Toronto will have strong incentives to connect with them. The same is true in every direction. The incentives of a vibrant Midwestern network will pull the Atlanta/Charlotte line toward Louisville/Cincinnati/Indianapolis. And they’ll pull the Houston/Dallas line toward St. Louis. That trip—which is currently a brutal 10-hour car drive—could be an easy and pleasant five–hour train ride.

There’s an old line from a Hemingway novel about how bankruptcy happens: Gradually, then suddenly. The same is true of building something as vast and ambitious as a national HSR network.

We’re in the middle of the gradual stage, as new lines are being planned and built all around the edges of the country. With the creation of a High Speed Rail Commission in the heart of the nation, we may be approaching an exciting tipping point stage.

The individual pieces will be brought together and connected via the heart of the nation—the Midwest. And then, “suddenly,” we’ll have a national network of high-speed trains.

Perhaps so, although I submit that while the coastal types are throwing lots of money at faster trains that will never recover their construction costs (the same thing is true of freeway expansions, by the way)  the winning move in the Central States might well be in allowing free rein to 90, then to 110 and 125; providing additional frequencies (building additional tracks alongside the freight railroads, with suitable use agreements) and ensuring that the intermediate stops are well served and the connections are dependable.

I'M NOT INTERESTED IN HOW BAD LISLE BLACKBOURNE WAS.

Scooter McLean is now in charge.

EVERYBODY GETS TO SUFFER IN COUNTERPRODUCTIVE CONSTRUCTION DELAYS.

It's not enough that Wisconsin's department of transportation has to work on the expressways south, west and northwest of Milwaukee.  Now they hope to add a third lane in each direction on the easterly expressway running north.  There will be two years of construction delays.  "These changes are being made to address existing and future traffic volumes, pavement and structural needs. It will also improve safety and address deficiencies including clearance at bridges, visibility and merging and weaving distances, according to a state Department of Transportation project overview."  Will it be worth it?  "According to the state Department of Transportation website, I-43 carries 49,000 vehicles per day south of Highway 60 and 85,460 vehicles per day north of Silver Spring Drive, with future projections raising those figures to 65,000 and 112,500 by 2040, respectively."

The induced demand is right there in the forecast, dear reader.  When the work is done, it will be just as congested as it currently is.  There is no discussion of high occupancy toll lanes, let alone toll roads, in Wisconsin.

And yet, those north suburban motorists are of the class of citizens who will call any expenditure on rail transportation toward the northern suburbs a waste of public money.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

There's plenty of foolishness going around, although a lot of it can be reduced to a line or two, or sometimes a compendium of quotes in a paragraph.

THE HIGHER EDUCATION HOTHOUSE PRODUCES NEUROTIC CAT LADIES.

Read the following advice on handling the "why are you leaving academe?" question that might come up in a job interview with a for-profit, non-profit, or government recruiter and try to keep a straight face.

A lot of things may be pushing you out of academe. That’s the case for many of the students and postdocs I meet with every year who are pursuing careers beyond it. They’re facing really bad faculty job markets. They’re sick of the never-ending pressure to chase external funding. They’re frustrated that they spend months writing articles almost no one reads. They’ve experienced microaggressions and bias in academic settings and just feel done with the whole thing. Those are all important reasons for pursuing other paths. But they aren’t the most useful answer to the question at hand.

When you spend time explaining the inner workings of academe -- which most employers don’t care about anyway -- rather than talking about yourself, it can seem as though you’re not ready to leave it. Indeed, one of the main reasons they might ask the question in first place is that they’re wondering how committed you are to the job you’re applying for, as it might appear that you’ve spent years preparing for something else. They may worry that if they hire you, they’ll just have to run another search a few months down the line when you head back into academe. Or they may think that they’re your second choice and that maybe you aren’t very interested in the work.

It can also make you seem negative and bitter. Which, honestly, you might be! There’s lots to complain about in academe and lots of problems that may have made it hard for you to thrive in it.

Or, upon encountering advice such as the above, interviewers might justifiably worry that if they hire somebody out of the academy, they'll be getting a credentialed snowflake who will make everybody else in the office miserable, and burden the personnel department with all manner of grievances.

A VIRUS CAN MUTATE FAR FASTER THAN A CARTEL MANAGER CAN ISSUE AUTHORITY.

During the recent outbreak of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, it's the intake of critically ill people in intensive care wards, particularly in sparsely settled areas, that is influencing the tightening of gubernatorial ukases lately.  At first blush, that reaction to that situation might make sense:  hospitals don't want expensive facilities sitting idle, which means that under normal circumstances, intensive care beds and wards are on average pretty full, as there's accumulated experience suggesting what the intake will be, and it's difficult to encourage staff to generate business for an idle intensive care bed (I have private information that such rainmaking activity involving more mundane procedures is not unknown among dentists, physicians, and surgeons.)  Thus when a new respiratory virus comes along, there might be more patients who could benefit from intensive care than there are beds, at least until people stop taking the other sorts of risks that might get them badly hurt.

But the installation of an intensive care ward in a hospital is not a strictly private decision.

An insufficient supply of ICU beds is one of the acute crisis points of the pandemic. When hospitals run out of room to treat patients who need the most help, doctors and hospital administrators must make difficult triage decisions. This affects not just COVID patients but anyone else who might be in urgent need of medical care—car crash victims or those who've had heart attacks—and it almost certainly means that some people will die who otherwise may have survived.

It's a crisis that has been made worse by outdated and ineffective government regulations—known as "Certificate of Need" (CON) laws—that actually& reduce the number of available hospital beds by requiring that hospitals get permission from the state before adding capacity.

That "reduce" might be excessive: at least on a chalkboard we can achieve Platonic perfection in the issuance of permits, which is to say, trade tested betterments would do no better.  Reality generally falls short of Platonic perfection, let alone of Pareto optimality.  There are certificate of need regulations in place in Illinois, and those might have had the cosmetic effect of bending the cost curve down by limiting the construction of intensive care units, particularly downstate, but with the consequence of severe capacity constraints during the coronavirus outbreaks.

It could be worse.

That is the situation in Mississippi, which in 1981 enacted a law that arbitrarily and permanently capped the number of licenses for home health agencies, businesses that arrange for nurses and other medical professionals to make house calls. For 40 years, the only way to legally launch a new home health agency in the state has been to purchase a certificate of need (CON) license from an existing agency—an arrangement that guarantees incumbent businesses won't face new competition.

This was a bad way to run a health care market before 2020. Now it looks like a disaster.

Why the New York taxi medallion model would be attractive to health policy boffins escapes me.  And, alas, it's a lot harder to make the case that a spare bedroom might work as an intensive care unit on the Air B&B model, the way a ride-share car serves as a work-around to the taxi cartel.

So it always is with cartels, and with the Democrats holding sway on health policy in Washington and in a number of the thickly settled states, it's likely that they'll continue to restrict expansion of health services because They. Know. Better, and because that will generate rents for preferred constituents.

WARS ARE NOT WON BY EVACUATIONS.

That, though, is exactly what Washington Monthly's Storer H. Rowley would like you to believe.

By all accounts, it’s reasonable for most Americans to assume this hastily arranged pullout has been an unmitigated disaster. To be sure, the Taliban has already taken over large swaths of Afghanistan, with devastating consequences for the Afghan people, especially women and girls. The scenes around Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul have been heartbreaking. The videos of Afghans clinging to U.S. military transport planes and falling to their deaths were a horrible bookend to the memories of people falling or jumping from the burning upper floors of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11—the event that propelled the U.S. into the war 20 years ago.

But that same media coverage has also overshadowed and under-covered the remarkable achievements of the U.S. military in executing an unprecedented international airlift to save Americans, NATO allies, Afghan partners, and their families. U.S. forces and coalition flights have evacuated well over 100,000 people since the evacuation began at the end of July, most of whom are Afghans who helped our soldiers over the last two decades.

Of course, there are questions that still need to be answered about the execution of the pullout—it’s an utter tragedy that this decades-long war ends with the Taliban taking control of the country in just a matter of days as the U.S. leaves—but the military is doing an exceptional job. Despite the hysteria in news accounts and the handwringing by politicians and some allied leaders, a mission like this one isn’t won or lost in a single news cycle.

That writing, which calls to mind a gibe the elder President Bush tossed at Saddam Hussein, something like "claiming victory in the middle of a retreat," detracts from a subsequent observation that people might do well to read and understand.

Biden showed courage in choosing not to pass the decision to end the war on to the next president and avoid international controversy.

Clearly, his administration will be judged on its failure to plan for a rapid collapse of a U.S.-backed government that its own people wouldn’t fight to defend. But the success of the withdrawal, overall, shouldn’t be judged based on what happens to Afghanistan once America leaves. The great failure happened two decades ago, when the George W. Bush administration undertook its misguided approach to nation-building in the Middle East.

Rather, success should be measured on whether the U.S. can continue to successfully evacuate Americans and our allies—and whether Biden can finally extract America from its longest war and allow the nation to move on. Ultimately, that could enable the U.S. to tackle new foreign policy priorities and help restore U.S. credibility and standing in the world.

Disentangling "credibility and standing" from "nation building" might be beyond the capabilities of our Credentialed Betters, particularly if they still entertain visions of that liberal international order.  The blaming of Afghans for fighting according to their local rules of feuding isn't likely to play well outside the gathering places of the establishment.

FIND YOURSELF A CIRCUS AND GO TO IT.

The Culpepper and Merriweather Circus has been touring the upper Midwest, and they played Kingston, Illinois (where the sunset for elephants took place) on Monday.

Around 9.30, the children of all ages started showing up to watch the crew setting up.  That appears to be totally emergent, the moms were not interacting the way they might had they arranged a play-date.

EXPECT YOUR OPPONENT TO MAKE THE BEST MOVE?

A dissatisfied Marine lieutenant colonel has contributed to the field of "quit-lit" with a video challenging his superiors, and National Command Authority.

I'll let others engage the political message, or call to rebellion. Rather, it's the chess position on his board that intrigues me.  The most logical way it arose was with 1 d4 Nf6 2 Bg5 d5.

The other sequence, 1 d4 d5 2 Bg5 doesn't make much sense, with that Bishop aiming at a well-defended king pawn; although there's some analysis.  The moves as I guessed are something called the Trompowsky Attack, and it's a little chess gamesmanship in which the best way to take a queen-pawn opening off the rails is with 1 ... Nf6, and deviating with 2 Bg5 rather than going into one of the Indian defenses or transposing into the Queens Gambit Declined might be a good way to take the second player out of book.

The 2 ... d5 response is daring the first player to play Bxf6, which is the move the colonel subsequently posted.  The best recapture is with the e-pawn, now both Bishops are able to develop, which is often hard to do in a Queen's Pawn opening.  A chess player might have to ask why his opponent is conceding the doubled pawns.

RUNNING EXTRA.  The colonel is getting hammered in some sectors of the internet.  His chess strategy, well, maybe it's not that unconventional.

The ‘Trompowsky Attack’ is a fairly common opening that describes the choice to move the white bishop to the g5 square, which threatens the black knight on the f6 square. This is an aggressive response to the ‘Indian defense,’ which describes black’s choice to move the knight forward. The Indian defense is itself a response to white’s choice to create a ‘Queen’s Pawn’ game with an opening move of d4. ‘Bxf6’ means “Bishop takes Knight on f6,” with f6 referring to the square on the 6th rank and 6th file of the chessboard.

Recently, grandmasters of chess that have played in games with the ‘Trompowsky Attack’ opening include Azerbaijani’s Mamedyarov, Russia’s Kramnik, China’s Liren, and America’s Philippine-born So. There are approximately 2,100 professional games on record that included this exact position, with white winning 27%, black winning 32%, and the rest resulting in a draw, though the powerful open-source chess analysis engine ‘Stockfish‘ determines this position to provide equal opportunity for a victory by each side.

It's useful to have a few offbeat openings, with analysis, to keep opponents guessing, and the Trompowsky probably works well at discombobulating players you suspect spend a lot of time memorizing openings, and an intuitive player can achieve a lot that way.  Even though those 2100 games are a small sample by chess standards (there are probably that many King's Indians in a month) the fact that the second player wins around a third of the time suggests that conceding the minor exchange might be unsound for the first player.

HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN.

Yes, that's click-baitish, even by the standards of a circus impresario.  It's also the title of a song that aired, years ago, on the Dr. Demento show and similar programs, illustrating that being frustrated with woke virtue signallers was a thing long before "militant Normal," "woke," or "virtue signallers" entered the lexicon.  Here's the song, for your viewing pleasure.

I was provoked to look for the song because of a neurotic cat lady called Rebecca Bratten Weiss (again, the pretension of the three names) going after Rod Dreher.  Mr Dreher is quite capable of looking out for himself, but it's the argument the cat lady makes that interests me.

It’s common these days to prefer the artisanal, small business, and farm-to-table food and to reject big-box stores and suburban sprawl.

The ultimate symbol of this reorientation toward the local is the farmers market. No longer just a venue for growers to make a little profit off their extra vegetables, farmers markets are now thriving centers of cultural activity, where fashionable professionals pay generously for heirloom produce and artisanal goods and their children learn about soil science while local bands play live music. A good farmers market gives one a sense of belonging, being connected with one’s community and environment. This is localism in action.

Localism is also touted as a political alternative to the extremes of authoritarian, centralized government on the one hand and anarchic lawlessness on the other. In place of a one-size-fits-all approach to legislation, a localist approach would allow regional authorities to address their own problems in their own way.

I have no objection to rolling back centralized government, and I reject the false dichotomy of Nanny State or North West Frontier. Civilization is emergent.

Rather, it's the tone-deafness about farmers markets that I wish to address.  Maybe in university towns and other places inhabited by cosmopolitan weenies, it's all about the exotic crops.  I wonder what that author would make of the now-gone farmers market near South Division High School: cucumbers for pickling, onions and other root crops, strawberries or corn on the cob in season.  No arugula, quinoa, or heirloom tomatoes in sight.  The last vestige of that era might be the West Allis farmers market.

These days, though, it's not frugal South Siders that one associates with farmers markets.  I repeat, because repeat I must,

Now to drag in farmers' markets (whether alone, or as part of a more generalized gentrification) is enough to provoke a chuckle.    What is a farmers' market in a college town if not the place to get some smug with your artisanal cheese, or to buy a virtue signal with your free-range eggs, and all to the accompaniment of Bolivian folk music.

That's the prior. "I assumed people who were invested in local food and sustainable agriculture must be liberal or progressive. I associated a familiar hippie farmers market aesthetic with ecological responsibility, multiculturalism, and peaceful coexistence." The cat lady is worked up because there were vendors and shoppers who, shall we say, didn't share her prejudices.  That turned into a long discourse and ultimately a barb aimed at Rod Dreher, who gets off a candidate for a Friday short take as the riposte.

It should not surprise anyone that unsavory people enjoy a delicious tomato as well as the next person. If a Communist or a neo-Nazi enjoys locally grown fruits and vegetables, I can congratulate him on his good taste in food while rejecting his politics. This is called being a grown-up.

But being a woke intellectual is the antithesis of being a grown-up. "Perhaps, though, one sign that universities are no longer playpens for really stupid people will be when faculty hirings are not so obviously skewed toward annoyingly self-righteous ideologues."

PROMOTE, DEVELOP, AND BUILD CONFIDENCE.

Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Aaron Ashby continues to reward the faith headquarters placed in him after a difficult debut.  "The offense finally awakened from its doldrums to score in three consecutive frames early on, and rookie Aaron Ashby spun five solid innings to pave the way to a 6-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins at Target Field." That's his first win in the majors, and solid innings have a way of bringing that earned run average into respectable territory, at 3.95.  The way major league managers track pitch counts these days, it's difficult for any pitcher to add more than five or six innings to the denominator in an outing any more.

The baseball playoffs will be here about the same time pro basketball training camps open.

PRAY THAT THEY ARE THE LAST.

Red State's Nick Arama calls the roll, and shares the stories, of the thirteen military members killed by a jihadi in Kabul.

The Marines:
– Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming
– Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City, Utah
– Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosariopichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts
– Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, California
– Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, California
– Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Missouri
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, California
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California

Navy Corpsman Maxton Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio
Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee

National Command Authority have ordered military action in Afghanistan brought to an end.  I'm inclined to agree with Reason's Billy Binion that the outcome has been "nauseating."  That is, "You can both support withdrawal and recognize its failed execution."

Earlier, we noted the spontaneous placement of thirteen flags or thirteen empty chairs each served a beer, in this fashion.

Townhall's Spencer Brown offers an illustrated tour of taverns where "Americans are uniting to show their gratitude for those who gave their last full measure of devotion in service to the country."  Taverns, ballparks, pizzerias, casinos.  By the looks of things, that's mostly a populist-conservative thing, despite the alternative lifestyle bars looking for ways to build business.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT.

We started the new academic year with news of more misguided inclusion at James Madison University.

I'm pleased to report that the people in charge at James Madison are backing down, even though the university president is doing so with his fingers crossed.

Because of coverage by outlets including The College Fix and Fox News, university president Jonathan Alger released a statement on Friday announcing, “We have decided to pause the training in question for evaluation and review with a variety of JMU constituents.”

“These are challenging topics to discuss, and we know that they are important and demand a lot of thought and care. The ongoing work of the university can, and must be, to seek to have such conversations in ways that honor and respect all members of our community,” he wrote.

The ongoing work of identifying and mocking indoctrination must go on until the Morale Conditioners in the diversity, inclusion, and equity bureaucracies treat the various critical theories as possible hypotheses for continuing disparate outcomes, rather than as received explanations thereto.

ATTEMPT AT EXASPERATION, UNSUCCESSFUL.

Last week, the coot's complete failure went viral.

That was during his attempt to do the usual Democrat thing of question-motives and deploy-snark, which he used to be pretty good at.  The White House transcript of the sequence reads like this.

THE PRESIDENT:  Whoa.  Wait, wait, wait.  Let me take the one question from the most interesting guy that I know in the press.

Thank you, Mr. President.  Is that — is there — thank you.

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s you.  (Laughter.)

Q    Mr. President, there had not been a U.S. service member killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020.  You set a deadline.  You pulled troops out.  You sent troops back in.  And now 12 Marines are dead.  You said the buck stops with you.  Do you bear any responsibility for the way that things have unfolded in the last two weeks?

THE PRESIDENT:  I bear responsibility for, fundamentally, all that’s happened of late.

But here’s the deal: You know — I wish you’d one day say these things — you know as well as I do that the former President made a deal with the Taliban that he would get all American forces out of Afghanistan by May 1.

In return, the commitment was made — and that was a year before — in return, he was given a commitment that the Taliban would continue to attack others, but would not attack any American forces.

Remember that?  I’m being serious.

Q    Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT:  No, I — I’m asking you a question.  Be a — because before I —

Q    Donald Trump is not the President right now.

THE PRESIDENT:  No, no — now wait a minute.  I’m asking you a question.  Is that — is that accurate, to the best of your knowledge?

Q    I know what you’re talking about.  But, Mr. President, respectfully —

THE PRESIDENT:  What?

Q    — since — I don’t think that the issue that — do you think that people have an issue with pulling out of Afghanistan, or just the way that things have happened?

THE PRESIDENT:  I think they have an issue that people are likely to get hurt — some, as we’ve seen, have gotten killed — and that it is messy.

The reason why — whether my friend will acknowledge it and was — reported it — the reason why there were no attacks on Americans, as you said, from the date until I came into office, was because the commitment was made by President Trump: “I will be out by May 1st.  In the meantime, you agree not to attack any Americans.”  That was the deal.  That’s why no American was attacked.

Q    And you said that you still — a few days ago, you said you squarely stand by your decision to pull out.

THE PRESIDENT:  Yes, I do.  Because look at it this way, folks — and I’m going to — I have another meeting, for real.  But imagine where we’d be if I had indicated, on May the 1st, I was not going to renegotiate an evacuation date; we were going to stay there.

I’d have only one alternative: Pour thousands of more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative — is why the reason we went in the first place.

I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan — a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up — and I don’t mean this in a derogatory — made up of different tribes who have never, ever, ever gotten along with one another.

And so, as I said before — and this is the last comment I’ll make, but we’ll have more chance to talk about this, unfortunately, beyond, because we’re not out yet — if Osama bin Laden, as well as al Qaeda, had chosen to launch an attack — when they left Saudi Arabia — out of Yemen, would we have ever gone to Afghanistan?  Even though the Taliban completely controlled Afghanistan at the time, would we have ever gone?

I know it’s not fair to ask you questions.  It’s rhetorical.  But raise your hand if you think we should have gone and given up thousands of lives and tens of thousands of wounded.

I've highlighted the part of the exchange where I think the coot went into that crouch.  What follows is a word salad.  What matters is this: it is after 1 May, and the Adults In Charge apparently could not come up with a better plan than what we're seeing.  Never mind that, though, there's a Crooks and Liars contributor willing to white-knight for the coot.

Biden then attempted the impossible. No, not a completely bloodless Afghanistan withdrawal, but to extract a statement of truth and accuracy from Peter Doocy.

"You know, I wish you would one day say these things. You know as well as I do that the former president made a deal with the Taliban that he would get all American forces out of Afghanistan by May 1. In return, the commitment was made — and that was a year before — in return, he was given a commitment that the Taliban would continue to attack others, but would not attack any American forces. Remember that? I'm being serious," the president asked Doocy gently, though rather pointedly.

Doocy hemmed and hawed, and of course did not answer. Instead he tried to ask another question. Biden stuck with it, though, and said, "No, I'm asking you a question, because --"

Doocy interrupted the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES again, prompting Biden to say, "No, no, wait a minute. I'm asking you a question. Is that the accurate to the best of your knowledge?"

Obviously having been raised by entitled white a$sholes, Doocy played the part to a "T", speaking over Biden again, asking the thoroughly uninspired and obtuse question, "Do you think people have an issue with pulling out of Afghanistan, or just the way that things have happened?"

At this point, President Biden put his head down on his hands in disgust at this POS. For some reason, though, he answered the question.

Turn on the smear machinery, and never mind the deflections. Donald Trump is no longer president, and the exchange took place on 26 August, the better part of a pennant race since May 1.  But Democrats have gotten away with their brand of sarcasm as a substitute for policy for years.  Mr Biden wouldn't let Paul Ryan get a complete sentence out during their 2012 vice-presidential debate, and he got cheered for saying "malarkey."  I suspect that the odd whispering "pay them more money" is more of the same trick, attempting to turn entrepreneurs' complaint about labor shortages back on their stinginess.  Populist froth.  These days, though, the one-trick pony ought be put out to pasture.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.

It is long past time for more than a few four-stars to resign.  The men and women who were in the dangerous places have been rescuing comrades who would otherwise be left behind.  It's called Project Pineapple.

My only allegiance is to the men and women who volunteer, leave their homes and their loved ones for years on end, risk their lives, bodies, minds and spirits, and follow orders from people who have failed them for 20 years. Utterly.

Sorry for the long wind up on this. Like I said, emotions are running high. All this was just to set up this incredible story of the former servicemen who decided to go around the failures they used to serve and put themselves in harm's way to do some good in the chaos. Described by ABC News as "an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan," they have been quietly saving lives by the hundreds.

That, dear reader, is what American Exceptionalism looks like.

Where the highest ranking officials have failed over four administrations, we still have people of incredible valor willing to do the impossible. For no personal gain. No glory. No appreciation other than what they get from one another for carrying out their private mission. No one will ever remember their names, other than hopefully the people whose lives they're saving. For sure, they are not going to get rich off of this. They'll never get appointed to a corporate board where they can rake in huge percentage from selling weapons systems. They were motivated only by the shared humanity they felt for these people they'd never met. And maybe to make some good out of the utter fiasco that has been their nation's involvement in this godforsaken place.

I just hope the world could understand these people are the best America has to offer, not the ones who get elected. At the very least, let someone make a movie about this mission so we can all know their story. Too bad their name has already been taken.

Stacey Lennox of Pajamas Media suggests there might be more to the story. "In these conditions, non-profits, veterans, retired intelligence agents, and others mounted efforts to rescue those the Taliban would put to death if they remained when America entirely withdrew. On August 25, an all-volunteer group of special forces veterans dubbed Task Force Pineapple launched a final rescue mission."  There is.

How did “Aisha” even get the last-minute paperwork? How did she know what gate to approach? How did she and about thirty other Afghan feminists (and counting) finally escape from Hell?

I am thrilled to share that answer. My team consists of radical feminists, anti-trafficking/anti-sex slavery activists and experts, honor killing experts, (myself included), a brilliant legal team—Europeans and Americans, mainly white girls, (who’ve lately been overly maligned): some Jews, some Christians, a Sikh, maybe some atheists—perhaps a Goddess worshiper or two. Who knows? It is my honor and my privilege to be among them.

Oddly, predictably, I got no help—not even a response—from any of the Muslim feminists whom I contacted. Maybe they were already on the front lines somewhere else. To her credit, one American feminist politician did respond and immediately sent me on to another, a “global ambassador” for women and girls from whom I never heard. Another former director of an American-based American-Afghan women’s organization called and sent me some very complicated bureaucratic guidelines for a special visa which may take months, if not years to obtain, and whose guidelines I absolutely failed to understand. She certainly meant well. Through others, I got the name of a smuggler who was ready to sell fake visas—and passed the information along.

There is still work to be done, and I fear there will be more carnage in Afghanistan with some of the other warlords gathering in the north to continue settling accounts with the Taliban, and the varying factions of Afghan Moslem fundamentalism have all the schismatic tendencies of New England Puritans, only with better weapons.  But when the House Organ for The Credentialed Class gives a platform to a veteran under the headline  "It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean Up Biden’s Mess" the correlation of forces still strongly suggests there are still areas of agreement under the rubric "These United States."

For the past two weeks, I’ve worked alongside an ad hoc group of veterans, journalists and activists with connections to Afghanistan who are trying to coordinate the evacuation of not just our Afghan friends but also strangers, like Ahmad and N., whose lives are under imminent threat. Days and nights full of creating elaborate text chains, building rosters of evacuees and sharing satellite imagery of routes to the airport.

As a Marine, I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and participated in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. As a journalist, I covered the war in Syria. Never have I witnessed a greater, swifter collapse of competence than what I have seen with the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan.

Central to President Biden’s campaign was a promise that the candidate understood, deeply and personally, two essential things: empathy and service. Events in Afghanistan this week indicate this promise was, at worst, false and, at best, limited. Events in Afghanistan illustrate what happens when there is a breakdown in empathy. Events at the airport — desperation, death — indicate the extreme chaos that ensues when the commander in chief doesn’t actually understand the value of service.

The ficus doesn't understand much of anything else, either. That's not going to matter. American Exceptionalism has more than a little empiricism in it, and we understand that Reality always bats last.

But it’s not only Afghans for whom the Biden administration has shown a lack of empathy. It’s also America’s veterans. It shouldn’t fall to our service members to clean up the mess made by this catastrophic withdrawal. And yet it has. For years, veterans have been calling for the issuing of long-promised visas for Afghan allies to be sped up. The calls only grew louder after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal plan. In April, a chorus of veterans’ groups pleaded with the White House to begin a mass evacuation of Afghans. A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the White House in June asking why the Pentagon had not been mobilized to protect Afghan allies, warning “the time is now.”

And yet Mr. Biden went ahead, over the pleas and against the advice of so many. The warnings came true. And because the administration provided no meaningful method for Afghans to leave, aside from a sclerotic special-visa application process, it has fallen to veterans and other civilians to try to save those who are desperately appealing for our help. Most of us, I believe, have done it out of a sense of duty and moral obligation, and as a last-ditch effort to uphold the promises we made to our Afghan friends. While there have been some success stories in this “digital Dunkirk,” as the former C.I.A. analyst Matt Zeller called it, there have been far more failures, near misses and desperate hopes dashed after hours and days of waiting in fear.

What is the value of service? How can the Biden administration claim to know, when it seems so willing to squander that value in pursuit of ill-laid plans? Apologists for the policies that brought us here claim that the catastrophic withdrawal was inevitable, that no degree of planning could have avoided this. That’s absurd. You need only look at a map to understand the inherent challenges in withdrawing from Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, which has hundreds of miles of coastline, Afghanistan is landlocked. The only way in or out is by air. So why were our U.S.-owned air bases shut down before an evacuation was complete? And that’s to say nothing of setting an arbitrary timeline of Sept. 11, 2021, for the complete troop withdrawal and then moving the timeline up to Aug. 31, 2021. If our back is up against a wall, it is a wall we built.

When the president spoke on Thursday night after the attack on Abbey Gate, he nodded at sacrifice. That’s fine, but it’s not what matters. What matters is to truly understand the value of service. If you do, you don’t send troops to die on a poorly planned and poorly executed mission. Failing to understand the value of service results in incompetence. And incompetence costs lives.

My social media feeds feature pictures of taverns around the country setting tables with fifteen glasses of beer, honoring the troops murdered at Abbey Gate. As far as I know, they are not yet contemplating direct action.  Questioning the authority of the four-stars, though, has begun.

The maverick Marine fired after he released a now-viral video slamming the US military for botching the exit from Kabul, issued a clear threat to his aging superiors Saturday.

“The baby boomer’s turn is over,” Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller told The Post. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.”

He also quoted Thomas Jefferson, saying “every generation needs a revolution.”

The colonel is deferring any further comment until his separation from the military is complete. Militant Normals understand. "But now he’s a hero to many in the military and among civilians for, as one person commented, 'coming out with what everyone was thinking but was afraid to say.'" Sometimes that's the most important thing to do, to call attention to what others are seeing but fear the opprobrium of others.  Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Apparently the REMFs have not yet received the memo.

Army Gen. Hank Taylor arrogantly suggested hat handing over this de facto kill list was a good idea. In so doing, Taylor reminded everyone that the prerequisite to be a U.S. general officer is no longer to evince intellect and leadership, but rather to show utter subservience to higher ranks.

So it seems to be with the rest of the Credentialed Gerontocracy's institutions, whether it's higher education, or entertainment, or what passes for journalism, or government, or much of business.

UNVACCINATED IS UNPROTECTED. IS UNARMED ALSO UNPROTECTED?

I'm spitballing here, but call me troubled that America's Most Credentialed Jewish Mother is weighing in on gun violence as a "serious public health threat."  I don't know, maybe the Centers for Disease Control ought to work on improving their coronavirus testing and statistical reporting, and refrain from issuing unconstitutional eviction moratoria  ("The United States of America does not have an elective democracy merely as window-dressing for a monarchy housed in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" is Friday Short Take material on any other day) or from failing to understand why there is a rising crime rate.  Here's how the Morale Conditioners at CNN spin it.

This summer alone has seen a spree of gun injuries and deaths, and the weekends have been especially violent, with an average of 200 people killed and 472 injured by guns each weekend in the United States, not including suicides, according to an analysis done by the Gun Violence Archive for CNN. That's nearly 3.4 people shot every hour every weekend.

Even before summer began, Chicago weekends were violent.  That's a city, recall, with strict laws governing the firearms trade, and the local sob-sisters are forever worked up about the easy access to guns in Indiana.  (It's poor form to ask about the paucity of mostly peaceful weekends in Indianapolis or Terre Haute.)  Those toddlers who are too frequently collateral damage in the turf wars that involve drive-by shootings are unarmed, as, frequently, are their parents.  The gangbangers themselves are notoriously poor shots: not much evidence of range-safety training on their parts.  You don't see them settling accounts in Crown Point, and there might be a reason. The bad guys fear to tread where they can expect an armed response.

Despite screwing up their corona testing and tracking, Dr. Mom wants to do ... more testing and tracking.

Decades after lobbying pressure and politics all but stopped gun violence research, Walensky's plan is to restart that research and identify effective solutions.

For example, the CDC is spending $2,224,482 to fund a surveillance mechanism that tracks, in nearly real time, the number of people coming into emergency rooms with nonfatal gunshot wounds. It collects data on the intent of the injury -- documenting, for example, whether it was self-inflicted, unintentional or related to an assault.

"We don't even know who enters the emergency department, in most places, as a result of firearm injury -- we don't even know it," Walesnky [c.q.] said.

Gosh, can't shoe-leather reporters figure some of that out?  There might be local sources in some of the bigger cities.

Right now, what's the over-under on "absence of bourgeois norms" being absent from the proposed work?

Walensky said much of CDC's research will be engaged in understanding the root causes of gun violence.

"Oftentimes these will be escalating events that occur that might lead to a suicide or a homicide, and what we really need to do is understand the root causes of that," she said. "The firearm injury is probably the most distal part of what happens. It is the end event. What are the 10, 12, 15 things where we could have intervened before that singular event?"

I bet "juvenile detention" and "range safety course" are not on offer, despite Dr. Mom offering the expected call for "dialogue."

She said she doesn't want people to think she is trying to take away their guns.

"This is not a conversation about having them or not having them. This is a conversation about how we can make them being here safe," she said. "The research that we intend to do is going to be squarely about making America safe. Making people safe."

She invited gun owners to be part of the solution.

"Come to the table. Join us in the conversation," she said. "I want you to teach me what you have done to make your gun safe, and then I want you to teach everybody else," she added.

"We cannot understand the research of firearm violence, firearm injury, without embracing wholeheartedly, the firearm owning community," she added. "I really do believe that the population of people who wants to own a gun doesn't want people hurt by them. The majority of the population does not want people hurt by them. I want them at the table."

A few NRA range safety instructors in the urban high schools, and a few 4-H sport shooting programs for after school, might do more productive work than all the conversations of the process worshippers.

HOW BAD COULD IT GET?

Two years ago, I flagged a number of reactions to the death of Procurer To The Powerful Jeffrey Epstein, most of which suggested that the Credentialed Establishment was losing credibility.  Evidently, though, they didn't lose it fast enough.

Here's Kurt Schlichter.

The fact is you cannot trust our institutions. They are not, and have not been, operating in the interests of Normal Americans for quite some time. They have degenerated into seedy scams run by, and for the benefit of, a garbage ruling caste that inherited the most powerful society in human history and seems determined to do in a couple generations what the Romans took a few hundred years to do – squander it.

That's before "fifteen days to slow the spread" and "build back better" and people attempting to hitch a ride on the landing gear of aircraft, and yet that ruling caste still rules.  Perhaps John Kass has the correct explanation.

Generation upon generation of corrupt and cynical leaders have taught us that those who believe in coincidence are fools. And so, we build alternate realities from the dust and mud of discredited institutions.

We use them like armor to shield us from the world.

Put another way, that language in the Declaration about "light and transient Causes" suggests it takes a really Long Train of Abufes and Ufurpations before the peasants abandon their "good Tsar, bad advisors" state of mind.

Scott Rasmussen was thinking, as pollsters are wont to do, about the upcoming presidential election.

While politicians dream of sweeping new programs that will be their personal legacy, 73% of voters prefer that the government implement gradual and modest changes to address specific problems.

It's not that Americans are resistant to change. When thinking about the country as a whole — including the government, private sector, and popular culture — 45% believe change is happening too slowly, while just 20% say it's happening too fast.

But voters prefer bottom-up change from the culture rather than top-down change from Washington. That's partly because 60% recognize that Americans have more power acting as consumers than they do as voters. Only 13% believe they have more control through the political process.

In an era of such deep distrust, it might be wise for candidates to focus on how to make the government more trustworthy rather than more powerful. At the very least, they should find a way to convince voters that the failures of the political system won't eventually drag the nation down.

There's the additional nuance that those 45% disappointed with the pace of change have more than one vision of what that change should look like.  Today, though, we have a government that is less trustworthy, allegedly headed by a figurehead who ran on a platform of stability yet is hoping to push through measures that will enhance the national government's power and reach.  We're still, though, in the "good tsar, bad advisors" stage, I fear, with much of the electorate.  Never mind what Richard "Wretchard the Cat" Fernandez wrote.

The crisis of confidence in Western institutions can be described as a crisis of morality. The public has discovered that many public figures are shams. The #MeToo sex scandals, the accusations of collaborating with foreign powers, and most recently the Epstein case have undermined the reputation of our social betters.  They are perceived are no better than the common clay and probably a good deal worse. This has undermined the trust that formerly allowed them to exercise authority over the public.

It might be that the public health types, at least in the spring of 2020, still had, perhaps out of habits, the deference of the public.  There's a tradeoff involved in questioning authority, as Clarice Feldman noted.  "Maybe it’s a good thing that people are less credulous about press accounts and government conduct than they were decades ago. On the other hand, if we automatically discount all official proceedings, why are we different than any Third-world state where mobs act on the most outlandish of rumors?"  I'll be nice and not mention last summer's mob actions on the basis of outlandish rumors.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FINISHED STATE.

I've previously engaged Strong Towns on some of their more rigid criticisms of the Suburban Experiment, noting, for instance, "The Suburban Environment is Emergent" and betting on emergence, for instance with "In the same way that the American High built environment emerged piecemeal, whatever comes next is also likely to take shape piecemeal, although some experiments might be more successful than others."

That might be what Strong Towns and American Conservative contributor Addison Del Mastro is seeing in Wheaton, Maryland, where a mid-sized big-box store (sorry for the awkward phrasing) that is no longer useful to the discounter that built it is none-the-less useful as a resale shop.  "The giant thrift store that occupies it, which imitates the layout and product range of a discount department store, is basically a perfect fit. It allows people in this crowded, deeply settled area to donate a lot of stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. And it provides cheap and often pretty good merchandise to the area’s less affluent residents."  That might be a St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill or the Salvation Amry, or it could be a Ross, which have an outlet in what I think was the Barnes and Noble store that was before that the K-Mart in DeKalb selling new stuff in an environment that sure looks like Railroad Salvage or a resale shop.

The neighborhood appears to be trending downscale (must not have been discovered by Beltway rent-seekers yet?) and the surrounding stroad network is not conducive to walking.  But shoppers who walk in now have food options, even though there's not the expected set of outbuildings with franchised bun-'n-run operations.

It’s quite common in this area of Maryland to see food trucks or carts set up in parking lots—the space is freed up, either due to retail vacancies or to higher-than-planned pedestrian traffic—often selling Latino foods or snacks. In the overbuilt parking lot of the giant thrift store, there were not one, not two, but three food trucks, at least on the day I visited. (I was there too early for lunch and they still appeared to be setting up.)

Sometimes those food truck operators move up to opening a permanent eatery, or perhaps they would, if the corona tyrants would lift the uncertainty surrounding in-person dining.  Perhaps some of those eateries will emerge in the repurposed four-unit apartments that became common in the peak years of the American High.

For something similar, take a look at this row of repurposed multifamily houses, now various offices and businesses, in the relatively poor and heavily immigrant community of Langley Park, about 20 minutes away. Langley Park suffers even more intensely from the dynamic of heavy pedestrian traffic in a working-class and largely car-less community originally designed for the motoring middle class.

This isn’t aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it’s the kind of environment that, growing up in quiet, affluent, white suburbia, you instinctively learn to avoid. In some cases, though, there’s nothing malign going on; there’s just no particular reason to go to these places. (I frequented a thrift store and international supermarket along here in grad school, but lots of people didn’t, and most of them didn’t have offensive reasons not to.) This isn’t to glorify it either; this community does have an elevated rate of poverty, dangerous highways, lots of traffic, and a very old housing stock.

But while I might once have just seen run-down buildings through my windshield and kept on driving, now I see people doing what they can with what they have. It’s not perfect. They don’t think it’s perfect. But it’s better than abandonment and blight. Many hold the impression that the working-class immigrants who often own and patronize these businesses are to blame for the physical decay. But they’re simply buying or renting what’s available, often from commercial landlords who are speculating on the land.

That's the funny thing about older housing stock. When it gets old enough, it gets listed, and it takes a Papal Bull and an Act of Congress to make changes to it, but before it gets that old, it might be viewed as "blighted."  It's more accurate to think of "doing they can with what they have" as a manifestation of resiliency.  It's probably easier to turn a one-story big-box into a thrift store than it is to convert a multi-story urban department store into some sort of community "incubator" or put apartments up where lingerie and toys once were, both attempts at improving central Milwaukee; and converting the first-floor apartments in those four-units into retail space extends the commercial life of those properties.

Sometimes, emergence simply happens.  Would you believe that the Cold Spring Shops headquarters are in a planned use development with conditions including "no permanent outdoor clotheslines," "no outdoor storage buildings," and "no flagpole taller than sixteen feet."  (Thus, no multiple hoist Naval flagpole outside, although I was tempted ...)  But the developer is out of business, having sold off the unimproved lots piecemeal, and the builder, who did a very good job, is also out of business, and the new construction looks different from what the developer and builder were offering, and there are more than a few outdoor storage buildings popping up.  So far, though, nobody basing a taco or ice cream truck in the driveway.

We’ve come to have a low tolerance for chaos and disorder. We expect things to be neat, organized, clean, frictionless. This expectation is ironic, because we glorify our country’s rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial history, yet we often look down on people who embody it today, and on the commercial landscapes that result.

Back in 2019, I attended Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns book talk, fittingly in the nearby DC suburb of Greenbelt, Maryland. He may not have used the word “chaos,” but he argued that affluent suburbanites were basically wrong in their expectation that we were rich enough to buy our way out of that rough and tumble, the need to be constantly productive, and the certain messiness that comes with it. In reality, it’s more like we’re living on accumulated capital that we’re no longer producing.

Indeed, dear reader, there is no production that doesn't bring messiness with it.