THE CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE COMES FOR YOUR CONVOY.

Let's begin by noting that British North America was the refuge for people who for one reason or another had doubts about the notion that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness were rights inherent to all people, that governments existed to Secure those Rights, and that governments required the Consent of the Governed.  Thus Canadian pundits might not see people calling attention to governments abusing their powers the same way as their Stateside neighbors do.

Freedom, of course, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes. It’s been a rallying cry behind great triumphs such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement. But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.

More recently, political leaders, and others, with an unprecedented megaphone in the form of the internet and social media, have used the call for “freedom” to promote bigoted, racist and anti-democratic ideas.

That's a bundle of non-sequiturs, and it strikes me as less than germane to the circumstances that provoked the convoys.  I'm not sure how Canadian emergency powers work, or whether a prime minister can issue ukases and get away with them as long as there's no vote of no confidence in their parliament.  I do know that state governors in the United States have abused their emergency powers, and residents of several states have called attention, or sometimes had the emergency decrees lifted.  And yes, they get slimed by that Critique of Pure Tolerance-adjacent argument to the effect that freedom in the service of Bad Ideas is somehow anti-democratic.  The columnist ought to rethink that.  As should the coot, who again stammered out his silly idea that people were misusing their freedom by not getting vaccinated or by going out in public with a cold.  (It came to this when the Smart People deconstructed bourgeois conventions, but that's too subtle an argument for an addled ficus, let alone Canadian pundits.)

WHEN THE FACULTY LOSES STEWARDSHIP OF THE CURRICULUM, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed posed a question to his "wise and worldly" readers.

Last Friday I asked my wise and worldly readers who work at teaching-intensive colleges what the last step is in the faculty interview process.

The answers varied, but they shared a common denominator: the final interview was always one-on-one, with a high-ranking administrator (dean, VP or president) making the final call.

That was … surprising.

When the final interview for a faculty position rests with a dean or higher, working alone, then that dean or higher is cast into one of two roles: either a rubber stamp for the committee or a rogue. Neither is great. A rubber stamp is a waste of time, and a rogue undermines the work of the committee (and potentially introduces all sorts of bias).

I wonder if what we're seeing is the consequences of forty years of institutions of higher (more or less) learning relying more heavily on cheap and contingent labor.  There are people who value being in a teaching-intensive environment, but as the institutional memory is downsized by attrition, if not by administrative ukase, there might be fewer people available to serve on personnel committees.  The dean might be the only person with something resembling institutional memory the potential hire interacts with.

PURE JOY.

The corona tyranny is lifted in Nevada schools.

A small number of the kids appear not to be reacting. I wonder if those have parents like press secretary Jen "Raggedy Ann" Psaki who are OK with their "rising kindergartener" muzzled ad infinitum.

For the most part, though, the kids recognize that they've been set free.

But the children have not been happy. And if you doubt that, you only have to view this viral video showing children at an elementary school in Las Vegas upon learning that their masks are gone as of the following day (although you'll note that many of the children simply stripped off their masks immediately).

The mask ukases remain in effect in Illinois schools. We'll have our monthly report on the effects of the Illinois corona tyranny tomorrow.

THE BEST YOU CAN HOPE TO DO IS CAPTURE THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS.

I return to a familiar theme.  "Complex Adaptive Systems Do Pretty Much What They Darn Well Please." In that post, I quoted at length from a Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn essay on the difficulties of city planning, particularly if highly disaggregated.

Even scarier, with a complex, adaptive system, the same input in similar circumstances at a different time could yield wildly different results. Just because you were right once – or a thousand times – doesn’t mean you will be right the next time. And when you consider what we’re betting here on being right, well….you should be scared too.

What drives me insane about most economists is the lack of humility, the supreme confidence in their own ability to understand what they are doing. It is the same thing that drives me crazy about engineers, planners, economic development advisors and the whole range of professions that profess to use simple equations to explain infinite complexity. They don’t know what they think they know.

And now the same reality comes for the climate modellers.

This is especially true of the heart of the matter: the computer climate models we use to make predictions about future changes in the climate. But as our computer climate models are refined with more and more raw data and endless tweaks of the climate simulations, the uncertainties have arguably grown larger rather than smaller. This is not as outlandish as it may seem, given we are expecting scientists to get a grasp of a phenomenon with so many factors and scientific sub-specialties, from oceanography to forestry.

The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is "in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model." There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem, which some Wall Street Journal contributors described thusly.

First, deep in the story is an excellent description of the complexity—and also the defects—of climate models. The main climate models contain over 2 million lines of computer code (much of it apparently still in Fortran). Even after an intensive five-year process to rework the code and acquire better data at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.”

Strictly speaking, you have to write algorithms to capture atmospheric movement almost at the molecular level. That involves way more than two million lines of code, and you're still a long way from done.  (When we've been here ten thousand years, Bright, shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise, Than when we first begun.)

In addition, as we add code, we run out of computing capacity.  That's something where Divine Intervention can't help you.

Steven Koonin’s recent book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, which contains one of the best discussions for the layperson of how climate models work that I’ve ever seen, gilds this point: “Many important [climate] phenomena occur on scales smaller than the 100 km (60 mile) grid size (such as mountains, clouds, and thunderstorms).” In other words, the accuracy of the models is highly limited. Why can’t we scale down the model resolution? Koonin, who taught computational physics at CalTech, explains: “A simulation that takes two months to run with 100 km grid squares would take more than a century if it instead used 10 km grid squares. The run time would remain at two months if we had a supercomputer one thousand times faster than today’s—a capability probably two or three decades in the future.”

Put another way, it would take longer to extrapolate a century-long climate emergency on the computer than it would take for the emergency to materialize. And rewriting the code in something other than FORTRAN would not change that reality.  Let the fun begin.  "The Wall Street Journal reports that the newest models kept spitting out even more dire predictions of future warming than many previous models—but that the climate modelers don’t believe the projections."  In part, that's because the models fail one relatively cheap accuracy check, known in some circles as "backcasting" and in others as "calibration."  If you use observed data from some previous time, and your model gives you something tolerably close to what came after (where "tolerably close" means "isn't so far off reality that even a true believer referee has to reject the paper") you might be able to do some extrapolating.  Apparently, the current suite of models doesn't do well with Ice Ages.  And the modellers aren't even close to capturing some really essential elements.  "One big reason the 100 sq km resolution of climate models is inadequate is that the behavior of clouds and water vapor can’t be adequately modeled—something the [Internationa Panel on Climate Change] reports usually admit in the technical sections the media never read."  The ad hoc modifications you might do to account for clouds tend not to work well.

Maybe, between the corona scares and the environmental scares, it's time to place less confidence in extrapolations, particularly those sensitively dependent on initial conditions, whether on the ground, or in the prior beliefs of the programmers.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, CANADIAN DIVISION.

Failed politician Linda McQuaig attempts to demonize and downplay the pushback against corona tyranny.  How well did it turn out?

The occupation represents an abject failure by the Ottawa police — as well as by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, both of whom have been fearful of triggering a confrontation that might antagonize right-wingers in Western Canada and rural Ontario.

By allowing the convoy to be coddled like this, Trudeau and Ford have given the freedom-bullies a sense of their own importance that is as oversized as their trucks.

Alberta and Saskatchewan premiers have lifted their mask ukases, haven't they?

Now, with a 12-day occupation of the nation’s capital under their belts, the freedom-bullies have been catapulted to the centre of the national stage, looking like a force that’ll have to be reckoned with in the future. Diane Deans, chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board, declared: “This is a nation-wide insurrection.”

No, it isn’t. It’s just a small group of belligerent men with very big trucks.

I’ve been part of much larger demonstrations that got a fraction of the attention. If these guys hadn’t been handed such an easy win in Ottawa, they — and their cause — would have likely gotten no more than a few minutes airtime on the national news.

That's not how it's playing in Paris or Brussels or Wellington, and the homeland security types in Los Angeles are wetting themselves over the prospect of a sympathy convoy in Los Angeles, and it's not that bringing Skyline Chili to the Super Bowl leads to greenhouse gas emissions.  (Too bad the Packer special teams messed up.  A chili throw-down between Cincinnati and Green Bay chili heads would have been epic.)

And what is with the promiscuous use of "insurrection" these days?  Doesn't an insurrection require the storming of a government building followed by drumhead trials of public officials?  Maybe with Eisenstein filming the re-enactment.

Maybe those Russian trucks in the borderlands are massing for a vaccine protest.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, ENVIRONMENTALIST DIVISION.

Dear reader, this, too, is a true story.

Beginning in June, all sunrooms included in new construction projects will be required to show they will not create “unwanted solar gain.” The change, noted Daily Mail, is part of “a raft of measures” aimed at “future-proofing” homes against summers where temperatures are predicted to reach 104º F. Though “well above what is currently experienced in Britain,” such highs would “cause conservatories to become unbearably hot, often increasing the temperature uncomfortably indoors too.”

This is a proposal from the U.K., where they're a long way from hitting three digits Fahrenheit most of the time. As the columnist notes, "More than half of the United States just laughed out loud and said 'Hold my beer.'"

In addition, did anybody even think about how an attached sunroom might come in handy in the winter, when most of the consumption of fossil fuels to heat houses go on?

According to Daily Mail, the objective of the new rules is to “improve domestic ventilation” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. (I wasn’t aware that sunrooms emit anything — least of which, greenhouse gases.) As a result, window sizes will be limited according to which direction they face and whether the home is likely to overheat.

Presumably, the process-worshippers are fretting about people using their central air conditioning more intensively on those two or three hot summer days because of the ambient heat coming from those conservatories.

Did it ever occur to them that large windows facing south and west take some of the load off the central heating in the winter?  There are several such windows at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, including (gasp!) an all-season sunroom, and from September to mid-November and mid-February to late April, the heat contained therein substantially lessens the use of central heating.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, STUDENT DIVISION.

It's generally my practice to cut collegiate columnists some slack, because they're still learning and there is much they don't yet know.  But then you get this complaint.

There is just one factor that is not included within the push for supporting smaller businesses: fat people. While consumers worry about the environmental costs and capitalistic practices when it comes to shopping at smaller companies, I have to worry about my body size.

That's a Northern Star columnist, and she's offering that complaint in all earnestness. Not even The Onion would dare go to the carbon footprint of plus-sized clothing (which either is machine produced for a mass market, or it has to be custom sewn), although they might serve up something like this.  "Sure, it is amazing to include the size XS, but not including the other end of that spectrum is oppressive to fat people."  Throw in enough buzzwords and nobody notices how solipsistic you're being, I suppose.

Lots of brands purposely make their plus-size clothing years behind on trends due to fatphobia. This leaves many fat women with little to no choices for fashionable clothes, and unable to shop ethically or support small clothing businesses.

As someone who lingers between M/XL and has short legs, it is near impossible for me to find trendy, fitting clothing at any ethical, small business. I can barely find properly fitting clothes at big stores like Target or American Eagle, despite them having an extremely wide range of sizes. I imagine that those bigger than me have an even more difficult time.

While environmental and ethical standards are important factors to consider while shopping sustainably, the idea of size inclusion often goes ignored.

Perhaps it's a poverty problem. The United States are where you find obese poor people.  It's never possible to be too rich, and if you're not too thin, that might be the way to be able to have plus-size stuff that looks fashionable custom made.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association began stratifying its basketball tournament by school size.  I suspect that was reality, the Hebron, Illinois title or plot of Hoosiers just didn't happen often.

The first winner in the big-school division was Milwaukee Hamilton.

In 1972, Milwaukee Hamilton started off as a team that didn't appear state championship bound.

"At the beginning of the season we were not gelling," Kevin Soucie says. "We were faltering. In fact, we lost three of (the) first four games."

Then they reeled off 18 straight wins, rallying from double digits down to beat Neenah for the championship.

There's a video at the link. There was a 35 year gathering, that was an early opportunity for me to use the Elburn rail station. It wasn't until 2005 that the school put up a banner for the event. Yes, the words of the school fight song were set to "The Stripper," even though the school system honchos didn't approve.

REALITY IS A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION.

The formulaic introduction to economics might go something like "the study of how people allocate scarce resources among competing uses."  A person considers a resource scarce if he'd like to have more of it than he currently has.  The competing use takes the form of another person also considering it scarce.

We could allocate the resources by force, the winner of the conflict establishing ownership.

We could allocate by force at one remove, with rulers determining who gets what, and enforcing the outcomes by having a monopoly on violence.

We could allocate by force at a second remove, by establishing and enforcing institutions within which people trade for mutual gain.

The problem of allocating scarce resources among conflicting uses does not go away.  Somebody, perhaps everybody, makes do with less, or perhaps does without.

When it comes to allocating health resources, Our Political Masters have trouble determining whether the second remove is even possible, or if the first remove is still the way to go.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Another week passes, another roundup of reinforcement of Cold Spring Shops themes.

Follow the links for the elaborations on the pithy bits.

IT CAME TO THIS WHEN SHE ROPED OFF THE SEED AISLES.

Governmental excess has been a depressingly familiar feature of the past couple of years, and Michigan governor Gretchen "Schlachterfrau" Whitmer earned high marks for silliness, with her rules on what home-improvement stores could or could not sell, and on how many people could occupy, or even launch, a pleasure boat.  When courts ruled she exceeded her authority, she just kept on exceeding her authority.  She even went so far as to suggest that making the ficus president would mean the end of the corona tyranny.  No dice.

We still live in a constitutional republic, and when the dictatorial governors don't play by the rules, It is the Right and the Obligation of the People to make the necessary alterations.  I mean, it's so bad in Michigan that Kelly Stafford left for California and its corona tyranny.

But the Schlachterfrau's ukases, and the implicit elite contempt for Normals, continue, and some Normals with big rigs have said Enough.  You can't say, Schlachterfrau, that I didn't warn you.

"These governors and departmental secretaries have a better chance of keeping their offices by treating their constituents as citizens with the rights to dissent and to review, rather than as children to be bossed around."  Better to be voted out, which is what constituents who have run out of patience do, than to be subject to what can happen when subjects run out of patience.

In this case, it's Canadian subjects who have run out of patience, but the Schlachterfrau is feeling the pain.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called on Canada to take "all necessary and appropriate steps to immediately and safely reopen traffic so we can continue growing our economy, supporting good-paying jobs, and lowering costs for families."

"Our communities and automotive, manufacturing and agriculture businesses are feeling the effects," she added. "It’s hitting paychecks and production lines. That is unacceptable."

The Anderson Economic Group in Lansing calculated an initial estimate for lost direct wages in the Michigan auto industry as a result of the protest beginning Monday at more than $51 million.

It's a little late for somebody who was willing to cordon off the seed aisles, and allow Illinoisans, but not Michiganders, to go pleasure boating, to fret about jobs put on hold, isn't it?  No more corona tyranny, no more job action at the Ambassador Bridge.

U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Stockbridge, said that she hopes Canadian leaders reach "a safe and quick resolution" but added that "Americans are fed up with government mandates."

"It’s time for the Biden administration to listen to the people," she said. "These mandates are going to cripple our supply chain, and the Democrats can blame freedom loving truck drivers, but the real blame is on the vaccine requirements at the border."

So far, no liquor stores have been burned, no pawnshops have been looted, and no "fiery but peaceful" chyrons have been seen on cable news.

With the public health authorities suggesting the coronavirus is becoming endemic, and pandemic mitigations ought soon end, why the freedom protests now?  Perhaps because sometimes evidence accumulates that public officials are going skiing on that slippery slope.  Slow the spread was the bridge to masking which was the bridge to the shots that were our bridge to freedom, but Nature and the political class had other plans.  This late into the emergency, is a new international vaccine mandate on the relatively few holdouts among the truckers necessary?  Or does it bespeak a pattern of abuse that began with the closure of roadside eateries and truck stops two years ago?  There's not much we can do about Nature, but we must push back against the professional managerial class.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-INFLICTED LOSS OF AUTHORITY.

University of Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank is making a career move.

Blank called the state’s political divide the “greatest existential threat” to UW-Madison.

She said politicians are using the university as chips in “their partisan wars.”

The political divide can translate to less state funding, which can lead to fewer federal dollars dependent on a state match.

She added that the polarization is leading to people losing trust and confidence in the university.

It's long been a talking point from Bascom Hill that those mean legislators are picking on the university.

Sometimes, those talking points might be valid, but too often, the university comes off as taking sides in ways that might make legislators join me in being reluctant to continue to cut checks.

IMAGINE NO COMMUNISM.

It's easy, if you try.

Enjoy.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SOCIABLE?

If there's broad consensus on what the common schools ought be teaching, the school board election is probably no big deal, and it doesn't much matter who runs, or who turns out to vote.

That, however, is not reality for school boards.

“We’re certainly seeing the nationalization of school board races here in Wisconsin and across the country,” UW-Oshkosh associate professor of public administration Michael Ford said. “You’re seeing a heck of a lot of talk about things like vaccine mandates, critical race theory, things that are actually pretty disconnected from the reality of being a school board member.”

Yes and no.  Are school boards approving curricula that don't sit well with parents?  Have they been captured by public employee unions?  Have the public health measures been debated in Congress, in legislatures, in the city council?

While more civic engagement is always welcome, politicizing such historically nonpartisan races threatens to make governing more difficult, Ford said.

“The worry is obstructionism,” he said. “You have a one-issue candidate or, more importantly, if you have a few candidates who are just hellbent on conflict, you really start to mess with the group dynamic of a governing board and grind the process to a halt. That’s the real fear.”

Recent efforts that have gummed up the workings of government, Ford said, include more than a dozen school board recall elections, launched in response to COVID mitigation policies, that took place across the state since the pandemic began. A parent group in Oshkosh that was vocal about the school district’s mask policies had a few candidates throw their name into the hat to seek seats on the School Board.

“Just about every major school district in the state has at least one candidate who is running on an issue like critical race theory, and if you had gone pre-COVID-19 that was not a thing. That was never an issue anybody had talked about,” he said.

“It’s more of a frustration that some folks have with state and federal government and their inability to gain traction at the state and federal level has brought some of these more social issues to the surface at the local level.”

Put another way, had Congress or the state legislatures or the city councils been involved in approving the public health measures, the school boards might not have become contested territory.  Whether parents were quicker to find out about critical studies or other intrusions into the curriculum because they could see the indoctrination on their kids' computers is an area for further study.  But it is not a defense of the status quo to complain about "gumming up the works" of making policy.  That's a valid outcome where there is consensus, but where has there been consensus on anything, lately?  Well, maybe in ultra-woke Madison.  Not so much elsewhere in the state, or nationwide.

[Madison political scientist Barry Burden] said some of the people seeking public office in Wisconsin are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden and Gov. Tony Evers and motivated to enter the race by issues such as COVID mitigation policies and equity initiatives in K-12 curriculum.

“It’s anger more than enthusiasm, and the people who they’re angry at are the incumbents,” he said.

In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again.

Yes, if the public employee union endorses a slate, and the city is full of ... public employees, that's not a surprise.  They deserve the indisciplined schools and the children rendered illiterate by woke education that they'll get.  Voters elsewhere in the country can also see that outcome, and they get to say no.  If that means a loss of consensus and comity for the time being, so be it.

REVISITING THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE.

I've long taken a dim view of the REMFs in higher education converting the course outline into something akin to an end user license agreement.

Now comes M. S. Stewart, just in time for the end of the academic year, offering advice to Inside Higher Ed readers.  "Print the syllabus out and return to your own student days in your mind. Is this a course you would have wanted to take yourself?"  That comes, only after blocks of text that includes nuggets such as this.  "If offices such as campus security, disability services, the registrar and so on require boilerplate sections, do explain to students that the voice may be different but the shared values are there."

It's gotten to such a state in higher education that when a professor calls attention to the folly of the deanlets' micromanagement by complying with it, the best one J. B. Field could do was somehow defend the micromanagement.

A recent occurrence that bubbled out of the world of higher education and onto the radar of national news media like The New York Times and CNN concerned a stunt by Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who hid instructions in his syllabus for locating a $50 bill hidden in a library locker. At the end of the semester, he shared an image of the $50, still in the locker.

Whatever the professor’s motivations were, many observers quickly concluded that his students should hang their heads in shame for their failure to read the syllabus. Others took a different view and suggested that the professor was setting his students up to fail just so he could gain clout on social media. As Kevin Gannon pointed out, the putative clue was terse and buried in one of the many paragraphs that universities require faculty members to include in every syllabus.

Most of that verbiage is useless.  But if you write for the generally less paywalled house organ for business as usual in higher education, you might have to defend the rule, no matter how foolish it is.

I continue to be uneasy with the idea of a professor showing his students up the way that Wilson did and think sharing his trick on public social media is tacky, for lack of a better word. More generally, though, I believe this moment demonstrates that the problem is not with our students but with our syllabi.

As it stands, the syllabus is a document that has to function in at least three different ways. For the professor writing the syllabus, it is an introduction to the course and a sort of intellectual itinerary for the ground the course will cover. That’s important to many students, but they also approach the syllabus as something like a contract that stipulates the work they need to do to earn the grade they desire. And while the university may be concerned with those intellectual and academic aspects, the syllabus also functions for it as a space to share statements about various university policies that deal with issues such as academic integrity and compliance with Title IX, the Americans With Disabilities Act and COVID-related policies. My employer, for example, requires faculty members to append a 10-page document concerning university policies to the end of each syllabus or to share it with students as a separate document.

Many colleges and universities mandate what seems like an ever-expanding litany of material that must be included on every syllabus. Unfortunately, that approach can make the policies seem less rather than more important. When the same text appears on every syllabus, and students see it four or five times in short order, they often start to ignore it. If you have ever skimmed a rental car contract or clicked “Agree” on terms of service for a piece of software without reading it closely, you are familiar with this dynamic.

Presenting institutional policies in this way can have the unfortunate effect of trivializing them. The principles enshrined in Title IX or the Americans With Disabilities Act are more than “fine print” for survivors of sexual assault or people with disabilities. We do our students a disservice if we think of them as “boilerplate.” The academic part of a syllabus is important, but the due date for Essay No. 1 or which edition of McTeague to use fade into irrelevance if a sexual assault survivor finds themselves newly traumatized because they disclosed their experience to a mandatory Title IX reporter without realizing what that might mean for them.

The compromise he came up with was to create two documents, a course outline and a separate supplement that I would be tempted to call "navigating the therapeutic bureaucracy."  Apparently, though, all faculty have been conscripted into the role of "mandatory Title IX reporter" even though they're not well briefed in on the dos and dont's.

POWER PLAY BASKETBALL.

The box score for a collegiate basketball game suggests that Ohio University dressed seven players for a weekend visit to Northern Illinois, and two of them fouled out.

The minutes played column credits Ohio with two hundred minutes played.  Reality was different.

After NIU stretched their lead to as large as 16 at 72-56 with 7:34 remaining, the Bobcats went on a 11-2 run to make it a seven-point game with 4:15 to play. Playing with only five available players, an injury to Hooks at the 3:31 mark forced Ohio to play with only four on the court for the remainder of the contest. The Huskies utilized the player advantage to secure the 80-70 win.

There's apparently no provision for a disqualified player re-entering the game, or it might be so onerous that it's better to play short-handed.  The game broadcaster recalled a high school game that ended five against three.  All the short-handed side can do is play the box without one or the triangle without two and hope the team on the power play doesn't run up the score.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

The Pajamas Media types like to characterize Bill Maher as "of the left."  It's more accurate to think of him as left-libertarian, and his Politically Incorrect show of thirty years ago had lots of "party of LOL and WTF " moments.

It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL😂 and WTF🤦‍♂️. pic.twitter.com/gpdAY4vhEV

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) January 29, 2022

Enjoy.

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

I've invoked that trifecta so many times I should apply for a copyright.

A bad experience at an airport in winter (are there any other kind?) has Owen Pickford picking up the cry.  "High Speed Rail Is a Solution for Terrible Airlines."  Do it right, and you can carry it off with diesel trains topping out at 110 to 125, but you have to get the routing and the frequencies right.

My last terrible flying experience was a trip from Columbus to St. Louis. There are no direct flights between these to major cities, so you can drive 6.5 hours, bus 7.5 hours, or spend 4.5 hours flying through Chicago.

Since we were just spending three days in St. Louis, we chose to fly. Our flight departed 40 minutes late and then spent 45 minutes on the tarmac in Chicago. We ran to our connection and saw the airplane still attached to the jet bridge, but alas, they didn’t let us board. The gate was closed. A customer service agent told us the problem was coded as “weather” — so no compensation — and the earliest flight we could get on would be 1pm the following day. Our three day trip turned into a two day trip.

Columbus, Ohio, is one of several state capitals without a passenger train of any kind, and the direct passenger service for St. Louis quit with the Carter malaise taking down the National Limited.  The latest wish list for the North Central states is still too much a hub-and-spoke system.

Unfortunately, the proposed alignments still don’t have a direct route from any Ohio cities to St. Louis. Instead, the proposal recommends a hub-and-spoke system where nearly everything runs through Chicago. Much of it is not really a high-speed rail network, more like “higher” speed. Only on “Core Express” corridors will train speeds exceed 125 mph, while the “Regional” sections will be in the 90 mph to 125 mph range under the FRA plan. An incremental upgrade on the Chicago to St. Louis segment is already under development and last month saw speeds on some segments increase to 90 mph and will see some 110 mph sections once it’s done. When that corridor will achieve its planned “Core Express” status, with speeds above 125 mph, is not yet clear. As of now, the total travel time is 5.5 hours to cover 284 miles.

Get some additional lines, such as a corridor-style service linking St. Louis to Pittsburgh or Cleveland by way of Indianapolis and Columbus, and people might use it. 

Drive when you can. We draw a six-hour drive circle around our house. If we’re within six hours, we’re in the car. The airport experience and the hassles associated with flying these days make driving a much less stressful trip. That’s true even with gas prices where they are today.

That's advice from a retired airline pilot.  The train likely isn't in his mind because, apart from the current Chicago regional network, such as it is, the Northeast Corridor, and possibly Southern California, there's not much of a circle.  But a train cruising at 110-125 will be able to get people to many of those destinations within the six hour driving circle in three to five hours.

OUR GERONTOCRACY.

The world's oldest valley girl is vice-president, and that puts the party of Silent Generation governance in a bad place.  "At 28 percent approval, say goodbye to Kamala Harris being Plan B to an aging Biden."  That makes it all the more important to keep the de jure president, who is in his late seventies, alive.

When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.

The president was seated more than 10 feet from everyone, including Vice President Kamala Harris and members of his Cabinet.

A White House staffer who was wearing a surgical mask when Biden entered the room was quickly handed an N95 version.

The precautions aren't a good look.

It’s no surprise that unusual steps are taken to protect any president. But the strict precautions could also threaten to undercut the Biden administration’s own efforts to tell Americans — especially those who are vaccinated and boosted — that they can get on with something closer to their normal lives in the face of the omicron wave.

The de facto president, who is even older than the de jure president, favors those precautions. Deal with it.

THE INDICATOR SPECIES OF THE STROAD.

I found the following clip on a Strong Towns post.

The voice is friendly, intimate, measured, detail-oriented, and humorous. There is a hint of non-venomous, non-judgmental snark. It’s your favorite, funny, smart colleague you might Slack with a couple times a week, if you’re in the business.

Watch the video, and judge for yourself whether the producer got the tone right.

Let me remind you, dear reader. "Cold Spring Shops, however, welcomes conversation about transportation policy on the merits of the modes, rather than on the ideology of the advocates."  I've often wondered whether the tone of transit or bike advocates is as much a turn-off to people who might be receptive to some of the substantive points (there's not enough money to maintain the roads using current methods of finance, it's impossible to have fast flow through commercial areas, and it's impractical to build your way out of congestion) and yet get encounter an off-putting level of preening from the oh-so-hip types.

DO OUR POLITICAL MASTERS REALLY WANT US PAYING ATTENTION?

I've contended that governance is a drag on civilization, because people have to think about ever-larger bundles of policies being imposed on ever more people.  Sometimes I consider the possibility that devolving power from national governments, or the international institutions, to regional, state, or local institutions or government might be the sole way for those national and international politicians to save themselves.

That's not the way Tom "Death of Expertise" Nichols sees it.  "'I know my reaction to the Tom Brady coverage is churlish,' said Nichols (Ph.D.), 'but it’s also consistent with 40 years of my astonishment that Americans know everything about sports figures but can’t read a goddamn map or name their own member of Congress but who then bitch about democracy.'" It might be that Congressional districts are too big, or that as long as the streets are plowed and the power stays on, there's not much to get worked up about.  Perhaps it has never occurred to Mr Nichols that if those Americans who astonish him paid more attention to politics, and voted, the outcomes might not be to his liking, or to the pleasure of the professional managerial classes?

What Nichols seems to be suggesting is that there is something wrong with the fact that many Americans are aware that, say, Jonathan Taylor is the 2021 rushing leader but do not know that the House Minority Leader is a fellow named Kevin McCarthy. I am not familiar with any public polling that attempts to compare knowledge of or interest in professional football with the Schoolhouse Rock understanding of politics whose absence Professor Nichols laments, but my sense is that many millions of Americans will find themselves on the receiving end of his implied censure.

But what is he actually complaining about? Is it really such a strange thing to think that for the vast majority of people in this country, football is simply more important than politics, especially in the narrow electoral sense of the word? Readers of this website are far more likely to be interested in politics than the average American, but I would pose to them the following question: When was the last time an action or decision made by a member of Congress—your own representative in the House or any other—meaningfully altered you and your family? I suspect that very few would be able to answer the question, and that even fewer still would say that an elected official had done anything in living memory that inspired joy, awe, longing, envy or any of the other emotions (save perhaps despair) that millions of us experience weekly, indeed even hourly, during football season.

Food for thought there. Perhaps the parties have gotten so good at drawing Congressional districts, for instance, that even if the representative from that person's district was the influential voter in a close vote, that person would most likely approve of the outcome (whether that person voted or not).

But how often does such a thing happen?  There's no regular order with each Cabinet department having a separate appropriation, only a quarter century of continuing resolutions, and for the past two years Congress and the state legislatures have mostly been irrelevant as the two presidents, and fifty governors, have issued ukase after ukase.  If we gripe about that, Mr Nichols, it's not democracy we're griping about, it's tyranny.

Besides, as Matthew Walther continues, politics-as-practiced looks more like sport than serious discourse.

This is to say nothing of the fact that politics in the sense meant by Professor Nichols is something its followers mostly enjoy at precisely the level on which football fans engage with their sport. Being “informed” does not mean understanding why it is that store shelves are empty or being able to make the case for giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine (one of the esteemed professor’s hobby horses); it means watching the Red Team beat the Blue Team and vice versa.

That is, if your participation is engaging only on social media, or you get your information from watching cable news squabbles, you're delegating the thinking, such as it is, to others, who are paid by the sound bite, not by the insight.

THE ROBOT END-PLAYS ITSELF.

The term "end-play" refers to putting the defenders in the bridge equivalent of Zugzwang, where any card the defender with the lead puts down loses.  The logic of doing so is to get rid of favorable cards whilst holding enough trump cards so as to have a response to any unfavorable cards outstanding.

There's not much interesting in this diagram apart from an instructive error that the "West" bot made.

Strange auction, West has a long Heart suit, and East doesn't have much.  Three No Trump might be living dangerously, but what the heck, there's no money at stake.  West opens with the ❤ King.  Take stock: two Spade winners and some length, but getting the lead back will be risky.  One Heart winner, and better not to let either side start leading Hearts.  Two Diamond winners, and two Club winners plus some length on the board.  How, then, produce the other two winners?

I cashed the ❤ Ace, then the two Diamonds.  Now the ♣ King followed by the ♣3.  I doubt that a human player would cover that with the Queen, with the Ace visible on the board.  But the West bot did, and now the ♣ Jack and Ten are both good, with the two Spade winners being enough to make the contract.  But West discarded the ♠2 rather than a Heart on the ♣ Ten, and there's the self-endplay.  Lead the ♠4 from the board to the King, the ♠ Ace now forces out the Queen, and now the remaining three Spades are good. I had pitched one Heart during the run of the Clubs, and had one left for charity.

Don't expect that many gifts from a human opponent!

THEY DIDN'T LISTEN, THEY DID NOT KNOW HOW.

As early as April, 2020, Cold Spring Shops called attention to the folly of continuing to confine healthy people to quarters.

The governors who are having the most trouble are the ones having trouble taking "yes" for an answer. That is, the people began taking quarantine measures before the governors acted, the observed cases and deaths occurred, but in magnitudes far less than those that would overwhelm the hospitals and clinics, and instead of thinking about ways to offer some time off for good behavior, the governors extended their orders.

In the case of Illinois, dictator-for-life Democrat governor J. B. Pritzker is still extending his tyranny, for all the good it is doing. What the early tyranny was doing was mostly making people angry, although, in the United States, not in sufficient numbers to turf out the pettiest tyrants, although what Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds alerted us to appears, finally, to be breaking through to the population more generally. "People don’t appreciate being condescended to and bossed around, especially when the leaders ask them for sacrifices without empathy and humility."

Perhaps they'll listen now.

Restrictive public health measures were sold as temporary trade-offs of liberty for safety from infection. The pitch was that, if we give up freedom of movement, trade, and normal social interaction for a short time, we could beat COVID-19 and then get back to living. But from day one (as Reason has emphasized) the costs to liberty and prosperity have been high for uncertain return. And now researchers present new evidence that the world got very little benefit for the freedom that was taken away.

In addition, it's possible that public health authorities got caught up in a management fad, only masks took the place of twee invocations of quality.

One of the study’s more depressing findings is that lockdowns appear to have been heavily driven by intergovernmental peer pressure. “In short,” the authors note, “it is not the severity of the pandemic that drives the adoption of lockdowns, but rather the propensity to copy policies initiated by neighboring countries.”

There's a win for the economic way of thinking, if only people will recognize it.

“[Lockdown policies] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” the damning report insisted.

“Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument,” the authors said of the “ill-founded” measures.

We can count, dear reader, on politicians being politicians.

A real scientist will revise his priors. A politician, not so much, although the consequences for the politician might be more final.  [Reason's Eric] Boehm concludes,  "In fact, we're long past that point [where the politicians admit their error and lift their ukases]. But it's good to see some politicians catching up."

But even now, they'd rather spin.  The latest howler from the coot and Raggedy Ann is something about "we've never advocated lockdowns."  No, never with those words, but haven't I seen Giftzwerg fretting about superspreader events at football games ever since the season kicked off?

It's more about ruling classes being reluctant to relinquish their powers, isn't it?

Now we have further evidence that enormous incursions into civil liberties and economic prosperity have done little to reduce deaths from COVID-19. We've had an awful lot taken from us in return for very little, if any, gain.

"Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic," the Johns Hopkins paper's authors add. "Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, 'Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission.'"

There's a lesson here, though it's not just about the ineffectiveness of the most intrusive efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a caution that any benefits the political class promises in return for disrupting our lives may be illusory. We'll have to fight to regain our liberty and prosperity, and we may never fully regain what we had.

Particularly with political leaders saying stupid things like "I have the freedom to kill you with my corona."  Or pretending that they have to Do Something.  "Driven to use the tools they have, the Biden administration has been forcing boosters on younger and younger children, even though we know that (a) they are at little risk of severe disease and virtually no risk if already vaccinated, (b) there is little evidence the boosters help young people at all, and (c) FDA officials are resigning in protest."

Turf them out.

A COMPETITIVE OPPORTUNITY, IF THEY'D TAKE IT.

Perhaps it might behoove the administrations at the land-grants, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors to stop emulating the Ivies when it comes to at least one of their hiring practices.  "Prestigious universities are significantly more likely to have DEI requirements than nonprestigious universities. Perhaps surprisingly, these statements are as prevalent in STEM fields as in the humanities and social sciences, once controls are accounted for."  That might not matter, as it has long been the case that excellence in the lab or the field might have been attained at the expense of common sense in ordinary life.  What's at stake is, are the scientific and technical fields inadvertently (or is it deliberately?) introducing a cadre of Lysenkoists and calling it inclusion?

An anecdote does not an indictment make.

Of 893 nominally qualified candidates, 679 were eliminated solely due to insufficiently woke diversity, equity and inclusion statements. In other words, Berkeley used a political litmus test to eliminate over three-quarters of the applicant pool.

If the remaining quarter were still Nobel-worthy or at least capable of generating the indirect cost returns that keep the deanlets in wine and cheese, California still might be fine. But there are ominous signs. "Ideological conformity may also result in a narrowing of research questions, with negative consequences for intellectual pursuits."

Perhaps graduate schools are institutions that screen for ideological conformity to go along with the neuroses that seem to proliferate there.  I submit, though, that the ideological conformity might be shape-shifting in the humanities, the better to screen for a MacArthur fellowship or some money from the national endowments.  The grantsmanship hustle likely leads to a narrowing of research questions, and that would be true whether or not there's money to be had for Marxist genetics Indigenous ways of cosmology.  I'm also old enough to remember when the quest for grant money had some people claiming the universities were complicit in an unpopular war.

The study I've been quoting from is from American Enterprise, and it's unlikely to be submitted to a social science journal.  I also fear that the administrations of the "nonprestigious" universities might see in their underperformance relative to the two hundred or so institutions claiming to be in the top fifty according to U.S. News or the society pages an opportunity to make a career move by touting their efforts to make their institutions more pro-diversity statements.  Never mind that students there will suffer as personnel committees have to narrow their searches.

Why not offer opportunities to promising faculty members who somehow don't pass through the diversity baleen in the Ivy seas?

BLAH-BLAH-BL-BLA-BLA-BLA-BLAH

I'm with Jim Thompson.  "China's Propaganda Games Open on Friday; I Won't Be Watching."

Spare me the pretentious fanfares, the reference to barns and rinks as "venues," the invented sports, the latest ice skater that I'm supposed to get excited about, and the totalitarian pageantry.  "China’s aim, of course, is to present another Potemkin village — a deep fake — and NBC will be there to televise it."

Not here.  #NotOneMinute.

It doesn't even pay to host an Olympics any more, perhaps the best thing to happen to Chicago was being first excused in the 2016 selection.  Didn't I see someplace that only Brisbane, Australia, prepared a bid for the 2032 Games?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Justin Trudeau is afraid of his shadow.

Groundhog Day or not, it seems like there are plenty of opportunities to reiterate familiar Cold Spring Shops themes, sometimes with elaboration or review.

JESSICA CORBETT MUST NOT BE A FOODIE.

It's not enough for the moonbat left to scold people about everything, the only way you can please them is to be miserable.  "Stanford University researchers revealed Thursday that gas-burning cook stoves—coveted by many homeowners—are even worse for the global climate and human health than previously thought."  Um, that's why we have exhaust fans above our ranges, and you get better stir frying with an open flame under your wok.  I suppose you could set up an open wood flame, maybe outside, but we haven't had much in the way of conditions conducive to outdoor grilling so far this year.

Speaking of those exhaust fans, the boffin class got the memo.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not have indoor air quality standards for nitrogen oxides, but the researchers found that the government's 100 parts per billion limit for one hour of outdoor exposure is "regularly exceeded if stoves are used without adequate indoor ventilation," such as not having a hood or not turning it on while cooking.

"I don't want to breathe any extra nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, or formaldehyde," Jackson said in a statement. "Why not reduce the risk entirely? Switching to electric stoves will cut greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air pollution."

If all you're doing is boiling water for mushy vegetables, or heating up canned goods, I suppose that electric stove is good enough.  Maybe Jess depends on her companions to do the cooking.

Dip into the press release touting the research, dear reader, and note two things.  First, "Hood use and ventilation help reduce concentrations of nitrogen oxides and other co-produced pollutants in kitchen air, yet surveys show that home cooks on average use hoods for kitchen ventilation only 25–40 percent of the time."  Just turn it on.  Second,

The highest emitters were cooktops that ignited using a pilot light instead of a built-in electronic sparker. Methane emissions from the puffs of gas emitted while igniting and extinguishing a burner were on average equivalent to the amount of unburned methane emitted during about 10 minutes of cooking with the burner. Interestingly, the researchers found no evidence of a relationship between the age or cost of a stove and its emissions. Most surprising of all, more than three-quarters of methane emissions occurred while stoves were off, suggesting that gas fittings and connections to the stove and in-home gas lines are responsible for most emissions, regardless of how much the stove is used.

Those pilot lights, going all the time, are releasing combustion products all the time. Maybe it's time for some stove owners to upgrade to the units with igniters. Those leaky connections? Can you say fire hazard?

SOME DAYS ONE IS LUCKY.

I experimented with that Wordle game.  Here's one from a few days ago, so no spoilers.

Guess 1:  form a word with a little help from Etaoin Shrdlu.

Guess 2: what's the most logical place for the "S" and which vowel is most likely to follow "H"?

Guesses 3 and 4: can I get the right leading consonant before I run out of guesses?

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

Socialists Condemn Workers Of The World For Uniting.

Socialists around the world are condemning the trucker freedom protest in Canada as the working class unites to defend their human rights.

"When workers of the world unite against overbearing government mandates, that's literal fascism," said a sobbing socialist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from deep within his top-secret bunker underneath Washington, D.C. "True, compassionate socialism is when the government partners with private corporations to force experimental drugs on the populace and threaten their very livelihoods if they don't. Everyone knows that."

According to sources, socialists were initially thrilled by the trucker convoy, as they had mistaken it for a bread line. To their dismay, they soon found out that it was a toxic freedom march organized by the working class against the Canadian bourgeois.

Beware of Mounties riding angry moose!

WINNING THE ELECTION, THEN LOSING THE PUBLIC.

During the Democratic nomination marathon of 2020, the current president might have secured the nomination by pledging to appoint a black woman to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.  That opportunity has now presented itself, and now the promise is freeing people to weigh in, and sometimes they invoke the specter of an affirmative action asterisk.  A Georgetown Law professor called Ilya Shapiro invoked the asterisk, and now he's in the middle of an academic cancellation squabble.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner got off what in other weeks could be a Friday short take: "Outrage over the outrage is outrageous."  The elaboration would, in a saner time, be one of those "goes without saying" commonplaces.

The outrage here is a prestigious academic institution failing to stand up for intellectual freedom, not a couple of inartful tweets. A school condemning a highly accomplished professor and university leader for expressing an opinion well within his field of expertise is extremely problematic. And doing so in a way that implies he’s a bigot is simply beyond the pale.

At Minding the Campus, John "Discriminations" Rosenberg also went there.

The coming debate over this selection criterion is sure to be as entertaining as it will be heated. I look forward, for example, to hearing how those who believe the Court is a representative body will explain why nominating a black woman—a member of a group that makes up about 6.5% of the U.S. population—will make the Court look more like America than a Hispanic man, who represents about 9.5% of the population.

In any event, it appears virtually certain that the Court will soon be joined by a new Justice selected from candidates limited by race and sex, just as it is about to decide how much latitude universities have, if any, to use race in admissions. How odd, and how insulting to the new Justice, the only one on the Court who will always have an asterisk next to her nomination.

Those are the usual suspects.  Eugene Volokh questions the wisdom of the president limiting himself to less than seven percent of the population (and perhaps an even smaller percentage of the pool of potential justices) in that way.

I think it's also relevant here that the "objective" factors are really quite subjective. It's hard to accurately evaluate the quality of people's legal minds, and especially to predict their likely work product on a nine-member Supreme Court. That doesn't of course dispose of the question of whether we should consider identity factors; for instance, I don't think race, religion, or sex should play a role in ordinary government hiring or student admissions, even when qualifications are hard to measure and success is hard to predict. But if I'm right that for high-level positions considering identity factors is permissible, then it's hard for me to say confidently that considering those factors would yield a materially less qualified candidate, given that the qualifications are so hard to pin down.

Years ago, it might have been straightforward to put forth the Thurgood Marshall who argued Brown v. Board of Education, and I don't recall him ever being called a token.  In like manner, it might have been straightforward for the current president to identify somebody who had argued a key case, or had written rulings that conformed to Supreme Court guidance whilst applying the Constitution in a way Democrats like.  Or there are other ways to screen for the high bench.

Having the opportunity to serve the law at that level is a great accomplishment whatever the bases for the appointment; and the way to make it greater is simply to do more with it. Earl Warren, like him or not, is remembered as an especially important Chief Justice because of what he helped do on the Court, and no-one diminishes that on the grounds that he was appointed in part for political reasons stemming from the 1952 election.

Again, though, that's an intramural conversation among libertarians and conservatives.

THE INTELLECTUAL WRECKAGE THAT IS PRESENTISM.

A panelist on a parody public affairs show said something foolish and got herself suspended.  "After making the bizarre claim that the Holocaust was not an example of racism—and then reiterating this view during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — [Whoopi] Goldberg was dealt a two-week suspension by ABC."

It might be, as James Joyner notes, that the best thing to do with a circus act that fails is wait for it to mope off.

If you want to argue that she’s an ignoramus who shouldn’t be given several hours a day on network television to pontificate on current events, I’m incredibly sympathetic. Then again, as best I can tell, ignoramuses giving uninformed opinions is the raison d’être of The View and has been a successful formula for more than a quarter-century.

Yes, and whenever I see supposed "opinion" programming including clips from The View, or a few other kaffeeklatsches masquerading as serious work, I cringe.

It is, rather, the intellectual failure that's behind the lady's thinking.

"This is what's interesting to me, because the Nazis lied," said Goldberg. "It wasn't [about race]. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race. Because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So for me, I'm thinking, how can you say it's about race if they were fighting each other? It all really began because I said how will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany. I said, this wasn't racial, it was about white on white."

That's how we understand ethnicities, or nationalities, now, going so far in our affirmative action or human resources reporting as to categorize all manner of people as "Asian." That's not how people thought in the 1930s.  Reason's Robby Soave doesn't grasp that.

There's a kernel of an interesting point here, in that the Nazis very deliberately pioneered the idea of a single white race that was set apart from—and in their view, superior to—all other races. Prior to the 20th century, various peoples we would all consider white by today's standards did not identify as part of the same racial tribe: There was no broad, united consensus that the Italians and the Irish, for instance, were racially linked. People of different European countries, even different neighboring countries, were often considered part of the generic other, no matter how alike they looked. The Nazis had different ideas.

Almost. The Nazis had this notion of Aryan-pure supermen, "sooper dooper soopermen" and they might have held off on investing England out of some sense of Anglo-Saxon-Aryan solidarity.  That was not too much of a stretch from social science thinking of the era, which sometimes wrote of an "American" race or distinguishing the "Italian" from "Slavic" or "German" races, that later becoming "nationalities."

They certainly considered Jews to be part of an inferior, non-white racial group, however. Their anti-Jewish rhetoric was starkly racial. That's where Goldberg's comments really go off the rails.

She's right that in a world where racial categories have been expanded to include all white-looking people in the same bucket, modern children might have difficulty understanding why Jews—who are now frequently considered to be white, even though many of them are not—suffered racial genocide at the hands of people who more or less look similar to them. But that doesn't mean the Holocaust was somehow devoid of racial motivations. It was very much about race.

If the relatively young Mr Soave can recognize that there have been changes in the understanding of race, why didn't that register with the Baby Boom educated Ms Goldberg?

A CURMUDGEONLY VIEW OF THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN.

A Hidden Europe contributor muses on what makes an overnight train a proper overnight train. "Call us old-school if you will, but in our book a night train isn’t a proper night train if it doesn’t have proper sleeping cars. A night curled up in a seat isn’t very comfy - and couchettes have their limitations. For us at least, sleeping on a train means crisp, clean sheets and the comfort of a real sleeping berth."  Yes, and there ought to be a coffee urn that gets started around five in the morning.

In Europe, though, the shorter distances and the trackage good for fast running pose a challenge.

A key issue is timing. Our checklist includes time on board (no less than ten hours, please!) and sensible departure and arrival times. Salzburg to Venice sounds like a decent proposition, surely a route which might attract good overnight traffic in the tourist season. But Venice-bound travellers cannot actually join the train in Salzburg until well after midnight. Some carriages are ready for boarding at 00.20, the rest not till about 45 minutes later.

The pleasure of the night train is having some daylight hours on the train, and not being forced to wake unreasonably early. One wonders if passengers who ride the night train from Vienna really do find any hint of romance on the railway platform in Verona when they alight at 05.51 on a winter morning.

The article does not make clear whether some of those cars are Salzburg adds and others are available space on trains originating elsewhere on the railroad.  And clearly there are no setout sleepers for Venice.  There's a similar lacuna on Amtrak's sorta-restarted Night Owl, which once upon a time did feature Washington to New York cars dropped or added in The Pennsylvania Station.

Also, the correspondent focuses on the tourist, not the business, trade.

Making an occasion of a journey is all about making time for a journey. The decadence of a leisurely evening on board, sleeping well and enjoying time on the train in the morning are key factors. In an ideal world, every night train would depart around 19.00, have a proper restaurant car for a relaxed dinner, and no-one would be turfed off the train until well after breakfast next morning. The same applies to overnight ferries.

It doesn’t always work out thus. A pragmatic compromise is “board by 20.30, alight after 09.30.” It’s a good rule of thumb which works for us. The new thrice-weekly Paris to Vienna night sleeper fits the bill perfectly. As will the new route from Berlin to Graz which starts in June – that one will allow well over 15 hours on board. The Caledonian Sleeper from London to Fort William gets full marks with boarding from 20.30 and arrival in its Scottish Highland destination at 09.57.

So much for that Broadway Limited or Twentieth Century leaving New York around five for an eight a.m. arrival in Chicago, although that sort of timing might have worked for a Fort Pitt or the Cleveland cars of the Ohio State Limited, and the Pioneer Limited sort of satisfies those criteria, and, at one time, offered a St. Paul for or from Milwaukee car.

The distances in Europe, however, are not conducive to a California Zephyr sort of experience.

The other key thing in our decision to take or avoid a night sleeper revolves around the scenery we might miss while sleeping. Does it not make more sense to cover long hops through less scenic areas by night and then reserve the more scenic stretches for daytime legs? A night train from Hamburg or Amsterdam to Zürich might become even more memorable if on the morning of arrival one continues on by slow trains through the Alps. Sleeping through the Alps by night just doesn’t quite seem right.

Yes, although the business traveller on that line might prefer to arrive in time for the morning meeting.  And the re-enactments of the Orient Express are upscale cruise trains these days, and those might have the mountainous bits on the timetable by day.

IT DOESN'T PAY TO ANTAGONIZE YOUR CUSTOMERS.

The Penzey Spice Company like to curry favor with public radio listeners who buy their spices.  Not long ago, chief spice merchant Bill Penzey thought he could bundle a bad ripoff of the Guy Fawkes song with the cinnamon sticks.

Remember, remember January Sixth in November,
The Republican Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Republican Treason
Should ever be forgot.

No doubt that's selling well in Madison and on the Vineyard.

Not so much with the consumers more generally.

Penzey acknowledged this allegation had cost his business a substantial number of newsletter subscribers.

“After starting the year with All Republicans are Republicans and following up with Republicans are Racists we’ve set a nice little Boycott Penzeys! surge in motion,” he admitted. “It certainly wasn’t unexpected, but if it’s within your means, you picking up a small stack of Gift Cards would help.”

Penzey informed supporters that his “Republicans are Racists” email cost his newsletter 40,005 subscribers—approximately 3 percent of its total. While this was offset by 30,000 new fans, he explained, he still needs to make up for the lost business and is offering a deal on Penzey’s Spices gift cards to lure them in “with the hope this might make it a bit easier for you to share some and possibly get a few good new customers to replace the ones we’ve lost.”

Sorry, no.  Not that the troubles of a communist spice merchant bother me, I'm capable of growing my own.  But look at the awkward construction of a Monica Showalter essay mocking his discomfiture.

Doofus here from riot-burned Wisconsin and not far from riot-hit Minneapolis was telling us MLK Jr. was a racist? This goes beyond typical wokester dumbassery. And it was a very, very, very big and direct insult to a lot of potential customers on the Republican end. It was not just the minor wokesterism that comes out of most business executives.

Why that Minneapolis reference? Can't anybody locate Milwaukee on a map? (Hint: Bucks, not Timberwolves. Brewers, not Twins.)  

Turning to the substance, perhaps it's time for Normals to stop patronizing businesses that despise them.

Republicans have tolerated leftist views for years from the executives of the companies they buy from. We all love Martha Stewart and can safely assume that she donates to left-wing causes, but there is no reason to boycott her — she puts out a quality product, and it's her money to do with as she pleases. What she doesn't do is target and insult her customers, effectively declaring she doesn't want their money. That's what Penzey did, unleashing a boycott on his products that he anticipated, no less, which turned out to be biting off more than he could chew.

Let Penzey be the first, but not the last. But then she gets this dig off. "It's weird stuff for an executive of a global spice company, which must source from all over the world, to be acting as if he's never been out of the wokester part of Minneapolis."

Perhaps she had too much Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio on her mind.  I can think of similar fashionable neighborhoods in the Milwaukee area or in Madison, which is to say, in Wisconsin.  We finally got a clarification at the end, presumably from some critical comments.  "UPDATE: This post was updated to clarify that Penzey's CEO is in Wisconsin, not Minnesota."