WHAT CASUAL TRAVELLERS DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Alex Kingsbury of the Boston Globe goes cross-country by train.  Yes, there's a lot of the pop sociology and Euro-envy (and nothing at all about running existing trains faster on existing tracks) and yet there's a fact the casual reader ought be aware of.

As a nation, we think of our rail system as rickety, yet that’s only the passenger system.

Heading into the dining car one night on the Empire Builder, I was serendipitously seated next to Peter Gilbertson, president and CEO of Anacostia Rail Holdings, which operates six railroads in seven states. “This country has the greatest freight rail system ever built, better than any other country in the world,” he told me. “But most people don’t know it.”

Yes, and that's the basis of the Cold Spring Shops Free Rein to 110 campaign.  The freight railroads want good track.  Running intermodal trains at 90 or 100 and passenger trains at 110 or 125 on existing metals is possible, as the British have been demonstrating for years.  And good freight track is a benefit for commuters, a part of the Passenger Rail system that Mr Kingsbury understandably doesn't write about, although the bulk of passengers at Boston South Station, where he boarded, and Chicago Union Station, where he changed trains, are dashing commuters.  (And he didn't get to see North Station in Boston or North Western Station and La Salle Street Station and Randolph Street in Chicago.)

That freight system has moved countless trucks off the road and fueled tremendous economic growth. But congestion on the country’s road network is becoming paralytic — American drivers spend 14.5 million hours sitting in their cars. That’s a powerful argument to move as many of those vehicles as possible off the road, by placing their passengers on rail.

Passengers are thinking people (homo sapiens sapiens, remember?) and in Greater DeKalb, many think about parking charges and a possible two-hour traffic jam and they're on Metra, public policy neglect or not.  But Metra and the other commuter rail authorities do not have reciprocal ticketing privileges with Amtrak nor do the passenger rail authorities think much about how best to change trains in Chicago, or between the Boston commuter trains and Amtrak.

Traveling coast-to-coast on a train is one of the most intimate ways to see the country. You can see faces passing by, drivers behind the wheel on roads that parallel the track, or waiting at crossings as the train rolls through. Moreover, America also makes sense seen from the rails. Cities were build around them, after all, and trains glide easily between and through them as opposed to meandering, congested highways. There’s an undeniable romance to train travel even if the reality never quite delivers.

Yes, as a Trains writer memorably put it, after a short ride on the old Santa Fe Chief, "you can be genuinely curious about the people of West Covina, instead of wishing they would get out of the way."

Now to get Mr Kingsbury on board with frequency, connectivity, inter-authority ticketing, and 110 mph diesel trains on existing track.

ANTICIPATING THE FOURTH TURNING.

Matthew Continetti warns the punditry to "Prepare to be Blindsided" in the upcoming presidential campaign, as complex adaptive systems do what they do best. "

First the unthinkable becomes conceivable. Then the conceivable becomes plausible. Then the plausible becomes acceptable. And the next thing you know, we’ve got President Trump.

Let's just treat that as a possibility, without any indication on Mr Continetti's part whether that's desirable or not.  To Kurt Schlichter, it's also a possibility, one that his past writings suggest he might welcome.

Our contributions to society are belittled, as if the welfare-sucking losers living on Democrat handouts built this country instead of us.

This is unjust.  This is wrong.  And this will not last.  Where there is no justice, there will be no peace.  Trump is only the harbinger of a much deeper anger, and a fully justified one.  It cannot continue; the status quo is not static, and injustice will create a reaction.  Upheaval is coming, and chaos looms if we stay this course.  It’s not too late to fundamentally transform back into a just society, but that would take a real leader.

And in this Dan McLaughlin essay is the possibility that a nomination and an electoral victory for Mr Trump might come from voters who have sat out previous elections.

The number of people who voted for a past Republican presidential candidate and not for Mitt Romney likely isn’t be much above the 1 million to 1.5 million range, not enough by itself to cover the distance between Romney and Obama, and the missing stay-at-home voters did not appreciably cut into the proportion of voters who think of themselves as “conservatives.”

But this doesn’t mean the electorate really is static, or that there’s no opportunity to improve on it. What it means is that the missing potential Republican voters are not been regular voters in the recent past, and many of them may not be politically engaged people who think of themselves as conservatives, whether or not their actual beliefs are. Let’s start with the fact that about 93 million eligible voters didn’t vote at all in 2012

What follows is wonky, more about the detail work required to get voters registered, and participating in caucus and primary and then showing up in November.  Perhaps, though, it's simpler.  The Irony of Democracy (I read the 1971 edition years ago) is that the people who stay home hold what the authors characterized as negative and illiberal attitudes toward democracy.

And perhaps it is the angry radio talkers, and the angry and unbeholden to the nomenklatura presidential aspirants, who are filling the stadia at Mr Trump's rallies.  But will they turn out?

IMAGINE.

Start with Christopher Chantrill.  "Imagine the world if the left had spent the last 160 years teaching the working class and then women and blacks and now Muslims how to wive and thrive in the capitalist economy instead of teaching them how to wreck it."  Perhaps "how to wreck it" is too strong, and yet enabling dysfunction and calling it diversity or authenticity isn't turning out too well.  Take Chicago.  Robert Tracinski suggests the troubles there are self-inflicted, and names names.

If the city is about to get the riots it deserves, the protesters have to admit they have gotten the city government they asked for.

It’s not just that they have voted for politicians from the Democratic Party. It’s that they have uncritically embraced that party’s ideology. As they have suffered under the yoke of a big, intrusive, corrupt, callous, and indifferent government, they have clamored for more of it.

That's going to require getting rid of the ward-heeler politicians.

Chicago’s protesters have a legitimate grievance against their city government. What they don’t yet have is a legitimate solution. That’s going to require breaking the Democratic Party’s monopoly on the city’s politics—and something much more difficult, breaking the big-government left’s monopoly on their own minds.

Chicago has a long history of embracing lefty do-gooders and rabble-rousers who make a lot of noise about how much they care about the poor, but manage to drain billions in taxpayer dollars without making anything better. Yet the people remain in thrall to those political charlatans—they even sent one of them to the White House.

What they need is not just a blind rebellion against the police or against City Hall. What they need is a real rebellion against the paternalistic ideology that treats them as wards or subjects of government, even as it fails them continuously for 50 years.

Exactly.

There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.

As far as those bourgeois habits, there's a roundup of the social science, peer-reviewed and incomplete, tacked to Newmark's Door.

Imagine honoring your commitments, telling the truth, and exchanging your best efforts for the best efforts of others.

STOP CRYING WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

A '57 Chevy is a better looking car than a Toyota Camry (and didn't require the arch-deluxe Jan to sell it.)  But in many ways the Camry is a more reliable platform, and cheaper.

[T]oday’s typical worker in America must work 1,123 hours – or 28 weeks – to earn enough income to buy a new, base-model Toyota Camry.   Compared to 1957, two-and-a-half weeks less work is required today of an ordinary American worker to buy a popular new car – a popular new car that is nearly indescribably superior to a ’57 Chevy.

That is, if there is any such thing as a typical or ordinary worker anymore.

The article also notes that, despite farm subsidies, a gallon of milk is relatively cheaper.  Maybe cheaper food and obesity go together?

THE AXE REMAINS IN MADISON.

It has been a difficult November in Packer Nation, with the Green Bay Packers missing opportunities for last-second victories or ties in three games, meaning Jay Cutler wins a game in Green Bay, and the Detroit Lions win a game in Green Bay, something that last happened before Mikhail Gorbachev abdicated.

But Saddam Hussein was still alive, although in captivity, the last time Minnesota's Gophers wielded Paul Bunyan's Axe, and the last time ownership of the Axe required some late heroics from Wisconsin.  Minnesota hired Jerry Kill away from Northern Illinois to strengthen the football program, and Mr Kill did, but at the time he retired, the Axe remained in Madison, where it still is.

Getty Images photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

It is likely that the Axe will return to Minnesota sometime.  When it does, if that's at Gopher Stadium, or whoever has the naming rights at the time, this prediction seems likely.  "Given the length of the Wisconsin winning streak, it is likely that any future claiming of the Axe by the Minnesota team is going to have Gopher fans actually tearing down a goalpost, once the players have pantomimed the act."

Perhaps by then, football will have rethought the excessive use of replay and the committee meetings of referees that the no-huddle offenses have rendered obsolete for the players, and perhaps we will see the end of "completed the process of the catch" and illegal picks that are not illegal picks, and all the other ways that the officials have intruded themselves excessively into the game.

But we're still likely to see playoff situations resolved by teams getting a little help from other teams, as in Northern Illinois returning to the Mid-American title game in Detroit with an assist from Western Michigan.

HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK!

Simple Justice summarizes the latest list of enablements for academic underachievers, now sailing under the banner of "The Demands."  (Non-negotiable probably being too big a word for the current crop of crybullies.)  There's apparently a call to reason together circulating at Princeton,   Here's an excerpt.

While we do not wish to impose additional distribution requirements on students for fear of stifling academic exploration, we believe that all students should be encouraged to take courses taught by professors who will challenge their preconceived mindsets. To this end, the University should make every effort to attract outstanding faculty representing a wider range of viewpoints–even controversial viewpoints–across all departments. Princeton needs more Peter Singers, more Cornel Wests, and more Robert Georges.

Similarly, we believe that requiring cultural competency training for faculty threatens to impose orthodoxies on issues about which people of good faith often disagree. As Professor Sergiu Klainerman has observed, it reeks of the reeducation programs to which people in his native Romania were subjected under communist rule.

We firmly believe that there should be no space at a university in which any member of the community, student or faculty, is “safe” from having his or her most cherished and even identity-forming values challenged. It is the very mission of the university to seek truth by subjecting all beliefs to critical, rational scrutiny. While students with a shared interest in studying certain cultures are certainly welcome to live together, we reject University-sponsored separatism in housing. We are all members of the Princeton community. We denounce the notion that our basic interactions with each other should be defined by demographic traits.

It may not be mine to finish the task.  Simple Justice notes, "[S]tudents don’t want to be held captive by one identitarian group’s forcible demands to recreate education based on their feelings." No, that will not end well.

RECOGNIZING AND CULTIVATING TALENT.

In a world of high-stakes testing and a No Child Left Behind means No Child Gets Ahead, what shall the elementary schools do with intellectually gifted kids?  The old tactic of accelerating them (grade skipping) is still available.  But that brings tradeoffs with it.

[The Big Bang Theory's] central character, Caltech theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper as played by Jim Parsons, is an irritating, immature egotist. But a Nobel Prize for him seems likely. He started college at 11 and earned his doctorate from M.I.T. at 16.

Faced with children like that, gifted-student advocates say, American schools worry more about acceleration stunting their emotional growth than enhancing their genius.

University of Wisconsin mathematician Jordan Ellenberg elaborates.

When I was a child, I was a "genius"—the kind you sometimes see profiled on the local news. I started reading at 2. I could multiply two-digit numbers in my head when I was 5. One of my earliest memories is working out a way to generate Pythagorean triples. In third grade, I commuted to the local junior high to take geometry. Kids on the playground would sometimes test me by asking what a million times a million was—and were delighted when I knew the answer.

Many advocates for gifted education are similarly delighted by kids like me, seeing us as a kind of natural resource, one we risk squandering as surely as we do fossil fuels. Some educators rebrand child prodigies as "exceptional human capital" and hold us to be the drivers of global economic competitiveness. "These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles," the Vanderbilt University psychologist David Lubinski said in a recent interview. "Schizophrenia, cancer—they're going to fight terrorism, they're going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids."

Been there, did some of that, suffered the opprobrium. Mr Ellenberg suggests that education policy makers not overdo the grade-skipping, or the celebration of genius.  I concur.

Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let's say, being charitable, that we're 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we're only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn't get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren't going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful—but most highly successful people weren't child prodigies.

That's the kind of mathematical Fingerspitzengefühl he'd like to see in more of the general population.

One of the most painful aspects of teaching mathematics is seeing my students damaged by the cult of the genius. That cult tells students that it's not worth doing math unless you're the best at math—because those special few are the only ones whose contributions really count. We don't treat any other subject that way. I've never heard a student say, "I like 'Hamlet,' but I don't really belong in AP English—that child who sits in the front row knows half the plays by heart, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was 7!" Basketball players don't quit just because one of their teammates outshines them. But I see promising young mathematicians quit every year because someone in their range of vision is "ahead" of them.

And losing mathematicians isn't the only problem. We need more math majors who don't become mathematicians—more math-major doctors, more math-major high-school teachers, more math-major CEOs, more math-major senators. But we won't get there until we dump the stereotype that math is worthwhile only for child geniuses.

And there's likely to be more productive work done by identifying and nurturing those young people who don't stand out, or don't get the opportunity to stand out, as prodigies.

It is incumbent upon those who care about social mobility and racial inclusion to come up with alternatives [to affirmative action] that implicitly recognize that race matters in American society—and that, today, class matters even more.

There is a straightforward generalization to cultivating the gifted children, developed by Chester Finn and Brandon Wright with an assist by Eric Hanushek.

The second big reason to attend to the schooling of high-ability youngsters is a version of the familiar equity argument: these kids also deserve an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures, just like children with other distinctions and problems. They have their own legitimate claim on our conscience, our sense of fair- ness, our policy priorities, and our education budgets. What’s more, many of them also face such challenges as disability, poverty, ill-educated parents, non-English-speaking homes, and tough neighborhoods.

Those kids depend more than upper-middle-class youngsters on the public education system to do right by them. Some will manage to overcome the constraints of their upbringing, but many will fall by the wayside, destined by circumstances beyond their control never to realize their full potential. As Ford Foundation president Darren Walker recently remarked, “[E]ven though talent is spread evenly across America, opportunity is not.” That’s why our failure to extend such opportunities to more high-ability kids from disadvantaged backgrounds is, as the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation team recently put it, “both unacceptable and incompatible with America’s long-term prosperity.”

And some mix of grade-skipping and exposure to the life-management skills of the middle class seems helpful.

Plenty more poor kids have the ability, but lots of them lack the supports from home and family that middle-class children enjoy, and many attend schools awash in low achievement, places where all the incentives and pressures on teachers and administrators are to equip weak pupils with basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Such schools understandably invest their resources in boosting low achievers. They’re also most apt to judge teachers by their success in doing that and least apt to have much to spare—energy or time, incentive or money—for students already above the proficiency bar. These might fairly be termed the kids that [No Child Left Behind] forgot.

We are by no means the first to flag this problem. As the authors of that 1993 report declared: “The United States is squandering one of its most precious resources—the gifts, talents, and high interests of many of its students. . . . This problem is especially severe among economically disadvantaged and minority students, who have access to fewer advanced educational opportunities and whose talents often go unnoticed.” (Emphasis added.)

Although there are children no longer as far behind, the lost potential is still significant.

It’s true that not all upper-middle-class kids with strong ability can count on having education-maximizing parents—some are content for their children to be well-adjusted and popular—and some youngsters themselves lack motivation. Yet the odds are hugely better that such girls and boys will get an education that does a decent job of capitalizing on their potential, beginning in their earliest months on earth. For they are all but certain to have adults in their lives who read to them, ask them questions that don’t have simple answers, show them intriguing things, and take them to interesting places—adults with the knowledge and capacity to navigate our complicated education system in pursuit of suitable options for their daughters and sons, and to press for access to the best of those options. These are adults who possess resources that enable them to shift to better options when necessary, whether that means changing neighbor- hoods, purchasing supplemental education offerings, even sending their children to private schools.

Equally able youngsters from poor families, on the other hand, depend mainly on their local public education system to supply them with suitable learning opportunities. Many start school behind the eight ball because they haven’t learned as many words or been asked to think about as many complicated things or seen as many informative places as their more-advantaged classmates. Many also enter schools that have a weak record of academic achievement and are staffed by less experienced teachers.

All of this puts at further risk those youngsters who were disadvantaged to begin with, compared with their middle-class peers, and makes it less likely that they will receive an education that nurtures their ability to the max. Able as they may be, they face a double whammy because their schools are beset by more urgent problems: poor attendance, children arriving hungry or sick, discipline challenges, language issues, and more. Such schools may also be strapped for resources—money, expert instructors, materials, and so on. Maximizing the potential of their high-ability, high-achieving pupils may be something that principals and teachers yearn to do but are simply too swamped to devote the energy and resources it requires.

None of the above is likely to sit well with the so-called progressives and all their feel-good fads that do nothing to inculcate bourgeois habits in feral youth, whilst killing ambition among young people not yet feral.

CONTESTED THANKSGIVING.

That's a tradition almost as old as Thanksgiving, certainly as old as this weblog, and this year The American Experience shows the contest, warts and all.

I'll repeat my message.

I give thanks for your readership and your comments.

Spare a few moments thanks for the young people in harm's way around the world, for the people in emergency services who deserve to sit down to the turkey without the alarm ringing, for the people in transportation, tourism, and entertainment passing on their family gatherings to enhance yours.

And Go You Packers Go.

THE CASE FOR SOCIAL DISTANCE.

Still cleaning out the archives.  Here, from just before I turned in my dry-erase markers, is an excursion into oppression olympics among professors who may or may not be disrespected by their students.  Start with the predictable self-flagellation by an aging hippie professor who is beyond parody.

I’ve got a gray beard, a balding head, and an old person’s sartorial style—but I’ve embraced blending into student populations. For me, this isn’t simply about being cool or fitting in or feeling young. I consider it a pedagogical intervention: The idea is to challenge our collective understanding of what it means to be an intellectual, and to show that scholarly pursuits are not incompatible with the “everyday.”

That prompts the staff at College Fix to get off the case for social distance.

Respect and professionalism, prof? I’ve got news for you: With your wardrobe choices, there are students who will automatically question you, your whiteness notwithstanding. Just because no one has complained doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

But within the self-flagellation there's an anecdote that suggests offices of faculty development are missing an opportunity to do some real faculty development.

Did the students—either the legendarily political Berkeley crew or the less-progressive students who just were taking the course for a general-education requirement—ever challenge me, question why I was teaching the class, or simply resist my pedagogical approach? Never. Happened. Even though I lectured about genocide, enslavement, mass incarceration, and persistent white supremacy, students offered little resistance.

This all changed, though, when a fellow graduate student—an African-American man—delivered a couple of guest lectures about the prison-industrial complex. After two mind-blowing and brilliant talks, I was excited to continue the conversation with the class. My students? Not so much. They lamented the guest lecturer’s “attitude.” They described him as “angry,” as “biased” and “sarcastic,” and as “different from me.” Several students seemed more interested in litigating his pedagogical choices than discussing the injustices of the American judicial system.

That seemed to be a theme elsewhere those days. Consider A Black Female Professor Struggles With 'Going Mean'. Social distance matters, and carrying it off without seeming arrogant or uncaring is hard. Trust me, I worked on that and can't be sure I ever got it right.

The behavior of the overly authoritative professor was a symptom of being devalued and disrespected by students and colleagues, I said. While unfortunate, I assured the student that such dynamics were part and parcel of the minority and female academic experience. My student then used her sociological imagination to describe how this woman’s place in history had probably played a significant role as well. She said, "Yeah, this woman started in the 1970s. It must have been really tough being a black professor then." I was satisfied with her use of the sociological imagination and ended the conversation by confirming the astuteness of her insight.

I was truthful with the student about how being a black academic is an uphill battle (something I first saw while teaching in graduate school). Indeed, I almost made the decision during that first semester to "go mean" on my own students. I told her that I had felt I was at a crossroads—frustrated about being devalued by my colleagues and disrespected by my students. I had an internal conversation about whether I would continue to be my jovial self or purposefully be cold and differentiate myself from my students and colleagues. However, such behavior would be only a symptom of a larger problem that I was having as a minority female professor. And if I had decided to act coldly, I would merely be seen as "difficult" or as having an "attitude."

There's plenty more, in a similar vein, summarized by John Rosenberg. The diversity-privilege-oppression nexus comes in for stick, and yet, in all the complaints, is the missed opportunity for faculty development.

It's in the presentation, people.  Former Vice President Al Gore, for example, comes off as condescending and sanctimonious most of the time.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been making extraordinary efforts to modulate her tone and sound reasonable on the stump, although lately her handlers must have coached her to dial up the strident again.  Being firm without being nasty is an important part of saying no and upholding standards, which is what professors get paid to do, and getting the content across without coming off as sarcastic or angry or difficult ought to be what the experts in faculty development get paid to do.

JAW-DROPPINGLY DEVOID OF ECONOMIC CONTENT.

Some years ago, Historiann hosted a bull session on the curious aesthetics of one Susan Jacoby.   The culture-studies types put on a clinic every so often about how far you can go slinging big words around, and the now-ended Mad Men series provided lots of the material to be subjected to the usual theorrhea.  Start with Ms Jacoby.

Nearly all institutional power for 20 years after the war was indeed wielded by the war generation (and eventually by younger men born during the Depression). Yet a vast majority of men possessed limited power that could vanish swiftly if they committed the ultimate sin of failing to bring home a paycheck.

It was often said, as the feminist movement found its voice in the early 1970s, that most wives were just one man away from poverty. It would have been just as valid to say that most men were just one job away from poverty.

In 1960, about 25 percent of wives with children under 18 held jobs — many of them part time — and a disproportionate number of those women came not from the middle class but from the poorest fifth of American families. Throughout my childhood, “she works” was a pitying pejorative applied to women whose husbands had turned out to be “bad providers.”

The world of “Mad Men,” in which executives earn enough to pay for lavish hotel rooms for trysts with girlfriends, along with fur coats to pacify their wives, was unimaginable for most blue- or white-collar working men 50 years ago.

That's the cultural norms of The America that Worked^(TM) and the social milieu that the Serious Thinkers of the Day had to deconstruct.  Ms Jacoby is clearly conversant with Feminine Mystique and that line of reasoning, but, in the next few paragraphs her unfamiliarity with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Lonely Crowd and Organization Man and the rest of the bad ideas about excessive conformity and anomie and all the rest that burdened the emergent hippies becomes clear.

My dad worked so hard that he wouldn’t have had time for routine adultery even if he had the desire. Furthermore, my supposedly powerless mother would have spotted any unexplained expenditure of more than $20 — not enough to rent a decent hotel room even in 1960 in Lansing, Mich. Some husbands certainly did exercise tight control over money, but the basic middle-class covenant of the time ceded power to women over everything domestic, including the family budget.

The cost of that covenant to women — the suppression of worldly opportunity — has been thoroughly told. The cost to men — in terms of stress, time lost with the families they were trying so hard to support and lack of freedom to pursue personal interests — has not been nearly as well documented.

Yes, and the "do your own thing" Sixties had behind all the posturing a strong expectation that the bourgeois economy would always be there to fall back upon, and somewhere in those early feminist stirrings to pry open the social clubs and the executive suites would be the opportunity for ambitious mothers to neglect their children the same way ambitious fathers did.  We're still too close to the beginning of that transition to come to any definitive conclusions as to gains and losses, and I suspect there's going to be more than mandated leave time or taxpayer-funded child care in the final analysis.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO BRING THE HAMMER.

The Democrat-media-academy establishment is clueless.

I promised payback from the yeomanry, and the remnant of mainstream America.  But first, the causes that are inspiring the yeomanry and the remnant to bring the hammer.

Here's Ace, noticing the same puzzlement among the usual superficial thinkers.

When ISIS says that they are going to smuggle terrorists in amongst Syrian refuges to kill us at home, something they have demonstrated the ability to do as recently as last week, we think it’s simply prudent to halt an influx of refugees that we can not verify free of terrorists. Again, simple common sense.

Our leaders, the so called smart set, don’t seem to agree, and an increasing percentage of the population is realizing that what we see as blindingly obvious, they don’t see at all? Why? I’ve seen this question asked more than once this past week on social media and in the press, and have yet to hear a good answer. It quite simply makes no sense.

And Victor Davis Hanson, perhaps capturing the depths of introspection that will be required before the smart set performs its act of contrition.  Start with the creepy Obama cult, circa 2008.

The tiny number of prescient pundits who warned what the Obama years would entail were not the supposedly sober and judicious establishment voices, who in fact seemed to be caught up in the hope-and-change euphoria and missed entirely Obama’s petulance and pique: the Evan Thomases (“he’s sort of god”), or the David Brookses (“and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” “It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which [Obama] could be a great president.”), or the Chris Matthewses (“the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”), or the Michael Beschlosses (“Uh. I would say it’s probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.”), or the Chris Buckleys (“He has exhibited throughout a ‘first-class temperament,’ pace Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man”), or the Kathleen Parkers ( . . . with solemn prayers that Obama will govern as the centrist, pragmatic leader he is capable of being”), or the Peggy Noonans (“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.”).

At least Ms Noonan is admitting to second thoughts.  The rest ... probably more important that they keep getting invited to the right receptions, openings, and dinners.

Thus, it was up to the people who might have known all along that they wouldn't be invited, or that not being invited was no big deal, as it's hard work to pretend to be nice to people who are pretending to be nice to you.

In truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would render immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile of America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.

If we were only scrapping over which oppressed and marginalized voices (Ayn Rand? Ludwig von Mises? Toni Morrison? Frantz Fanon?) ought be Highly Recommended in the curriculum.  Or over the tax code (Six brackets?  Three?  Top rate 0.39?  Top rate 0.90?) and the exemptions, exclusions, deductions, and credits thereto.  Or over public investment (More lanes?  Faster trains?)

Unfortunately, these are more challenging times.

Abroad, from Obama’s post-Paris speeches, it is clear that he is now bored with and irritated by the War on Terror. He seems to have believed either that Islamist global terror was a minor distraction with no potential for real harm other than to bring right-wingers in backlash fashion out of the woodwork, or that it was an understandably radical manifestation of what was otherwise a legitimate complaint of Islam against the Western-dominated global system — thus requiring contextualization rather than mindless opposition.

We have much to look forward to.

SHORT TERM SHAREHOLDER VALUE, LONG TERM DECAY.

Two warnings for the railroads.

First, Fred Frailey of Trains calling out the freight carriers.

And yet, and yet . . . look at what a lousy job the Class I lines do today serving their customers. It’s a scandal, and preventable. In a race to see who can save the most money and achieve the lowest operating railroad, they are forgetting who really comes first: the customer. Serve the customer well, and more will follow, ultimately making the shareholders even richer. That’s classic business doctrine. But it requires patience, which investors (meaning, owners) have little of. So we get a railroad industry that has lost its way. Do I want the big railroads to get even bigger and compound the poor service already being offered? I wish that first, the Canadian Pacifics and Norfolk Southerns of this world would demonstrate they can manage the railroads they already have, before doubling in size and perhaps arrogance.

Second, Jim Loomis warning Amtrak to stop antagonizing the most dependable customers.

Regular Amtrak customers who travel in sleepers have only one question on our minds these days: What are they going to take away next?

Meanwhile, here’s the one question the Amtrak braintrust should be asking themselves: What happens when sleeping car passengers start thinking that a long-distance train ride is no longer worth the money?

Or perhaps it's a ploy, to sell all the sleeping car lines to Pullman Rail Journeys?  Their cars and food service already run as a gated cut in the City of New Orleans, where the rushed and etiolated morning breakfast being thrown at sleeping car passengers (and anyone in coach who can be seated) might be excused as a consequence of a relatively early arrival in Chicago, if the train is on time.

CLUELESS

The simplest explanation for the troubles the political establishment are having with the voters is that the political establishment is doing things badly.  But nobody wants to admit it.  Let's start with Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday.

It's hard to -- you come to someone like me, and what I do for a living is, I look at polls and I talk to political experts in Washington, and they're all baffled, Chris.  Nobody understands how Donald Trump is doing it.  I think on the Paris thing, it's clear he's a strong, reassuring voice.  He may not have a strategy other than bomb the smithereens out of them.

Process, nuance failure. There sure has been enough failure lately. That has Ron Fournier pushing the panic button on Meet the Press.

Excuse me, but if this week is a reflection of how our readers are going to respond to the next 9/11, I really think that we're one major hit away from a national unraveling. And I think of Bill Clinton who talked about in times of insecurity, people would rather have a leader who is wrong and strong than right and weak.

He repeats his warning at the end of the show.

I took a shot at our leadership earlier and I really believe in that strongly, but we as a people have to realize that we are changing in a way that we have to be more responsible. We are more scared than we were since 9/11 and we trust our institutions less than we did since 9/11.

We trust each other less than we did. And now with social media, we have to ability to ghettoize ourselves, to only listen to the views that we already agree with and demonize and attack everybody else. And when you combine that with this vacuum we have with leadership, that's why I really worry about what happens the next time we get hit. Are we as a people able to hold together?

Enough sitting around under pictures of the Capitol dome quibbling over talking points, already!

THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU PUBLIC RADIO, NUANCE, AND FAILURE.

Kevin D. Williamson describes "The Luckiest Generation."

Think of this cohort as collectively born on third base and thought they hit a triple, to swipe a swipe from one of their idols.

One does feel a twinge of envy for those born in the late 1930s and 1940s, the so-called Silent Generation. (Silent until you mention entitlement reform, at which point they become the Generation That Will Not Shut Up.) Talk about great timing: too young to fight in the big war, but just old enough to be entering the work force during the great post-war boom. The dream of constant generational improvement did indeed hold — at least up until their time. This no doubt came as a surprise to many of them: Having been born and raised in the shadow of the Great Depression and wartime austerity, it must have been far from obvious to them that they would represent a high-water mark for generational prosperity.

Not to mention that at the height of The America That Worked^(TM), these people came of age thinking that process mattered and that big institutions, such as the United Nations and Congress could work.  Thus the Watergate hearings.

But process-worship has since degenerated into booth review, endless committee meetings of the referees at the same time that the players can function without a huddle, and "completed the process of the catch" means nobody knows anymore what a catch is.

THOSE HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey of the Washington Post offers an extended look at assimilation and transition in Hamtramck, Michigan, long known for all things Polish, and for Dodge Main, and a controversial Cadillac factory. Now it's a place of affordable housing for people fleeing all sorts of Third World hellholes, and many of those people practice Islam.

Hamtramck is a microcosm of the fears gripping parts of the country since the Islamic State’s attacks on Paris: The influx of Muslims here has profoundly unsettled some residents of the town long known for its love of dancing, beer, paczki pastries and the pope.

That poses challenges to current mayor and shopkeeper Karen Majewski that would have been familiar to urban mayors of over a century ago, as I shall demonstrate.

WHY SHOULD ROAD SOCIALISM BE ANY DIFFERENT?

With the day after Thanksgiving sales coming, and the parking lot rage and rumbles at Wal-Mart to follow, here's Charles Marohn, explaining that engineering standards for commercial zoning attempt to optimize parking for extreme conditions -- that Christmas rush -- rather than for something more like normal conditions.  And the rent-seeking that goes with it illustrates neatly the way rent-seeking can be packaged in high sounding rhetoric.

People who go on and on about the free market -- and I'm largely with them -- all of a sudden became flaming communists when it came to parking. We could not have enough, we could not charge for it and it was largely the government's role to provide it, or at least have pages of regulations to require it. The entire concept of a price mechanism was suspended when it came to parking.

Go read and understand all the ways in which parking becomes more expensive once the Wise Experts decree it should be free.

YES, WE GOT SNOW.

This is an older picture, but Cold Spring Shops headquarters looks a lot like this this morning.

And yes, we have good news from The Green Bay Packers.

A TRENCHANT OBSERVATION FOR OUR TIMES.

Walter Russell Mead brings the smack.

The West as a whole these days is cursed by moral grandiosity and failing performance. Our self-esteem has seldom been more robust, or our performance more pitiable. We busy ourselves with what we think is the last unfinished work of implementing universal egalitarianism, by for example tending to high school students who identify with a gender other than that into which they were born, ensuring that they can use the restrooms toward which their aspirations lead them. We see ourselves as courageous warriors even as the foundations of our world are beginning to crack. We claim that tolerance and diversity are the touchstones of our civilization, and have raised a generation of weaklings who cannot bear to be exposed to unorthodox ideas or to the bustle and collisions that life in a diverse society inevitably brings. To cite another of Jesus’ condemnations of hypocrisy, we ‘tithe mint and dill and cumin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law.’ That is, we busy ourselves obsessively over small bore issues, and ignore the graver challenges that face us on every side.

That's not sustainable (to use another word popular with the weenies).

The time for subtlety is passing.  Bring the hammer.

FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY.

Despite having only the most rudimentary passenger train service, much of it late at night, Pittsburghers are getting into training.

Funny thing about train service in Pittsburgh is that, as infrequent as it is, ridership keeps going up. People keep voting with their feet to get off their feet and take the choo-choo. Arrivals and departures from the Pittsburgh station have gone from 125,200 in fiscal 2012 to about 149,600 in fiscal 2015. It was the third straight year ridership rose.

About two-thirds of Pittsburgh’s Amtrak riders take the Pennsylvanian, with the top destinations New York and Philadelphia. The other third of the ridership is on the Capitol Limited, which arrives here in the daily darkness on its way from Washington to Chicago and vice versa. Despite leaving at midnight, the Chicago train is our station’s most popular.

Of the 535 Amtrak stations, Pittsburgh is 68th busiest, which is more a measure of how poor train service is in most of the country than how good it is here. East from Harrisburg, there are dedicated Amtrak lines so busy that more than 500,000 arrive or depart annually in little Lancaster and more than 4 million in Philadelphia.

Pittsburgh to Harrisburg will always be a slog, absent German-style tunnelling and bridging in the Alleghenies, but The Pennsylvania Railroad used to offer multiple day-train frequencies as well as Pittsburgh and New York sleeping cars and overnight New York for and from St. Louis and Chicago sleeping cars.  Amtrak took all of those off.

Washington, D.C. to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh to Cleveland have potential as regional corridors, although heavy freight traffic on those lines means Passenger Rail authorities might have to strike a deal with the freight railroads to provide additional trackage, something that's already going on.  And there is historical precedent, in the form of multiple daily frequencies on the old Baltimore and Ohio and Pittsburgh and Lake Erie.  Frequency and connectivity bring riders.

(Via Destination: Freedom.)

NOT THEIR AMERICA ANYMORE, EITHER.

More reason to doubt that I feel like a stranger in my own country and America is not a place I can feel comfortable as myself are proxies for nativism.  I suspected that age, irrespective of politics, induces people to agree with such statements.  Evidence of the senescence of National Public Radio is unlikely to change my mind.

Many of the listeners who grew up with NPR are now reaching retirement age, leaving NPR with a challenge: How can it attract younger and middle-aged audiences — whose numbers are shrinking — to replace them?

I gave up on public radio on Labor Day, 1990.  Communism was crumbling, most of Germany about to reunify (there is unfinished business in East Prussia), Mikhail Gorbachev within a year of abdicating, and All (Liberal) Things Considered decided to end its broadcast with Pete Seeger strumming The Internationale.

NPR’s research shows a growing gulf in who is listening to the likes of “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” the daily news programs that have propelled public radio for more than 30 years. Morning listening has dropped 11 percent overall since 2010, according to Nielsen research that NPR has made public; afternoon listening is down 6 percent over the same period.

National Public Radio has long been a place where the most destructive leftists of the Silent Generation and the early Baby Boom -- too young to be called to Korea, too old to be called to Vietnam, and in graduate school just as the public universities went on a fifteen year expansion spree -- congregate to be comfortable with their prejudices.  But that's not the America of younger listeners.

NPR’s signal has gradually been fading among the young. Listening among “Morning Edition’s” audience, for example, has declined 20 percent among people under 55 in the past five years. Listening for “All Things Considered” has dropped about 25 percent among those in the 45-to-54 segment.

The growth market? People over 65, who were increasing in both the morning and afternoon hours.

The graying of NPR, and the declines overall, are potentially perilous to the public radio ecosystem.

And part of being a stranger in your own country is being unfamiliar with emergent platforms not based on broadcast technology.

But as audiences drift to newer on-demand audio sources such as podcasts and streaming, the bonds with local stations — and the contributions that come with them — may be fraying.

“It’s a problem, and no one has really figured out what to do about it,” said Jeff Hansen, the program director at Seattle public station KUOW (94.9 FM). He noted that public radio was invented by people in their 20s in the 1970s, largely at stations funded by colleges and universities. “What they didn’t realize at the time was that what they were inventing was programming for people like themselves — baby boomers with college degrees.”

That audience has largely stayed loyal. The median age of public radio listeners has roughly tracked the median age of baby boomers. The median NPR listener was 45 years old in 1995; now he or she is 54.

That makes for a great tagline. Public Radio, of, for, and by hippie relics.

Some of the other brand-name talent at NPR illustrates the situation: Talk-show host Diane Rehm is 79; senior national correspondent Linda Wertheimer is 72; legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is 71, and “Weekend Edition Saturday” host Scott Simon is a relative youngster at 63.

The article frets about new methods of delivering the content. But the content is the same old, same old, and Kurt Schlichter, an eloquently angry younger voice, nails them.

There is nothing a liberal likes more than huddling with other like-minded cryptofascists in some coastal enclave and bemoaning the moral, intellectual, and philosophical failures of the rubes inhabiting the interior of this barbarous continent. What an opportunity to signal virtue to the world, especially when it can be done from behind walls and armed guards.

Or with the imprimatur of "public" (read: left-Democrat) radio.

PROJECTION.

A recent Ipsos poll comes close to blaming the voters for their discontent.

Trump’s candidacy taps into a deep, visceral fear among many that America’s best days are behind it. That the land of freedom, baseball and apple pie is no longer recognizable ; and that ‘the other’—sometimes the immigrant, sometimes the Non-American , and almost always the nonwhite—is to blame for these circumstances.

In the article, it's the nativism.  That's not quite as nasty a slander as "cause"+phobia, but it's nasty all the same.  And possibly unfounded.  Nativist sentiment, in the pollsters view, is agreement with one or more of these propositions.  More and more, I don't identify with what America has become.  These days, I feel like a stranger in my own country.  More and more, America is not a place I can feel comfortable as myself.  As the article does not offer elaboration about questions that might elicit confounding sources for people agreeing with those propositions, while it does show that less than half of the people agreeing with the propositions identify as Republicans, Tea Party, Democrats, or live in the south while more than half of the alleged nativists are white or older than 45 years, we might be simply seeing a reaction to the trashy, splintery popular culture, or corporate America's casualization of its work force, or cheating scandals in sports.  The discussion suggests some of these possibilities, but still, this is projection of the Old Liberal Establishment's beliefs.

Trump’s rise in the polls can only be understood in context of the profound economic and cultural change in America.  And his strength, like that of the tea party, is emblematic of deeper felt concerns within the Republican party.  On the one hand, many people are scared about their economic future and that of their children as the rate of economic displacement increases with the globalization of cheap labor and technological innovation. The America Dream for many is a distant, foreign concept.

Yes, and it doesn't help to turn "land of opportunity" into a micro-aggression.  Just saying.  Or to demonize people who remember The America That Worked^(TM) and who get that in difficult times, the tough get going.

[Political correctness] doesn't hack it in war.  PC is a rich liberal's plaything, a luxury item. It works best as a subject for ridicule on South Park.  And it's not the way we really think.  It's the way we pretend we think.   So just who is it that is blowing innocent people to smithereens in Paris, Beirut, Sharm, and Mali, and who knows where else next?  Zen Buddhist monks?  The Little Sisters of the Poor?

Everybody knows who it is. Islam has a big problem and although people want to be polite or deliberately lie about it to look "good" to their neighbors or to their cousins at the Thanksgiving table, when they get into a voting booth, many of them are guiltily going to be pulling the lever for someone with the you-know-what to put an end to this global homicidal insanity -- and it's not going to be John Kasich or Rand Paul or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.  It's going to be Donald Trump.  And if not Donald, possibly Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, both of whom seem to be able to find Raqqa on a map. And none of these people are racists, not even faintly, no matter what some NBC reporter wants to imply.

All of which will make for an entertaining eleven months, as much of the rainbow coalition would be first to go should the jihadis ever get control of the United States.  But perhaps the rainbow coalition understands at some level the implications of that portion of the remnant of mainstream America that is armed and likely to give any band of jihadis a really bad day.  Plus there are places in mainstream America where a jihadi is likely to be shot by a girl.  No paradise for you.

OUR SECRET WEAPON AT WORK.

Bill Maher continues to call out the boutique multiculturalists.  The push-back that follows is instructive.

Bill Maher criticized liberals for believing that Muslims share the same values as other religions.

“This idea that all religions share the same values is bullshit and we need to call it bullshit,” Maher said. “If you are in this religion, you probably do have values that are at odds [with American ones]. This is what liberals don’t want to recognize.”

“There’s a radical portion of this religion that takes these ideas and uses them as a fuel to crush people and to kill people and that is something that needs to be squashed,” said Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech.

The good news, notes Mr Domenech, is that the American secret weapon is at work. “I think we can be optimistic though,” he said. “I think in the long run, our values actually do win the day.”  That's called buying into America.  And being good neighbors.

He explained that it’s easier for Muslims refugees to participate in American culture than it is for Muslim refugees to become a part of European culture.

“In Europe, Muslim refugees who come to France are never going to be true Frenchmen,” he said. “But if they come here, they will be Americans.”

Provided the self-despising multiculturalists don't push the pernicious cult of "authenticity" on our new neighbors, yes.

IT'S THE RENT-SEEKING, STUPID.

The American Interest on why (government) infrastructure is crumbling.

America’s infrastructure is so hard to fix in part because it is so much more expensive to do stuff here than in many other countries. It’s a bit like our health care system, in that regulatory capture, cronyism, and sweetheart deals involving both business and labor combine to drive up public costs. It ought to be getting cheaper to fix infrastructure—we use materials more efficiently, the machines are more powerful and faster, designs have improved—but costs are instead exploding. Our infrastructure policy, like our health care policy and our education policy, is being held hostage by producer lobbies and cabals. There are some legitimate reasons for higher costs (mostly related to safety and environmental factors), but overall it’s ridiculous that the country can’t afford to repair infrastructure that it built decades ago when we were all much poorer.

Finally, we need to acknowledge that policy deadlock reflects political gridlock: The inmates have captured the asylum and the rent seekers control the political process. In every statehouse, in every county seat in America, the businesses and unions who control the building and repairing of expensive pieces of public infrastructure are deeply integrated into the political power structure and have their tentacles into both parties. Again, something similar is true in the other areas of chronic policy failure in the U.S., like health care. The special interests, some “lefty” and some “business friendly”, agree on one thing: The public is a cow to be milked for their mutual benefit.

These issues get to the heart of what is wrong with American government today, and they require a sweeping set of reforms that right now our politics seems incapable of providing. That’s too bad; the decay of essential pillars of national health and safety is not a small problem. And the failures of policy in these critical areas has a lot to do with the increasingly angry tone of politics right, left, and center.

It may be too much to hope that politicians will solve these problems quickly, but it would be a good start if journalism did a better job of covering some of the most important stories in the United States today.

First thing the journalists might do is understand that "bipartisanship" is a bug in the system, precisely because "bipartisanship" is Democrats work one side of the cow, Republicans the other.

Second, they might understand that a lot of the crumbling of (government) infrastructure is a consequence precisely of past bi-partisanship.

Third, they might think carefully about why "rail" rarely comes up in these laments about infrastructure.  Hint: faster freight trains through town mean less delay at the level crossings.  That goes a long way toward mitigating permitting hassles.  Plus shareholder value varies directly with productivity of the freight trains.  Clarity trumps rent-seeking.

MORE THINGS THAT DEFY PARODY.

Take "The Feminist Guide to Being a Foodie."  Please.

Colonization and gentrification are directly related to the appropriation of food. We also need to begin educating ourselves on issues and event that impact the communities that we’re drawing our meals from.

As Sarah Hoyt quips, "We all live in an Onion world."  Confirmation here, if you can stomach it.

There is a serious point the guide misses, though.  Apparently quinoa is now an export crop for Bolivia.  In the world of the Perpetually Aggrieved, that's an unforgivable appropriation.

What all of this adds up to is a massive PR campaign aimed at rebranding collard greens, divorcing the vegetable from its working class and indigenous affiliations to place it squarely within the culinary crosshairs of the same massive gourmet health food apparatus that turned acai berries, quinoa, tofu, and chia seeds into “superfoods.” Though the health benefits of such foods are well-documented, their trendiness within majority populations tends to result in a generally unhealthy outcomes for their cultures of origin.

Economic growth brings tradeoffs. But to prohibit trade simply consigns everyone to the status quo, as this New York Times passage spells out.

Agricultural leaders claim that rising exports of the plant have lifted living standards there and in other quinoa-growing areas.

“Before quinoa was at the price it is now, people went to Argentina and Chile to work,” said Miguel Choque Llanos, commercial director of the National Association of Quinoa Producers. Now, he said, rising quinoa prices have also encouraged city dwellers to return to their plots in the countryside during planting and harvest seasons.

Yet there are causes for concern. While malnutrition on a national level has fallen over the past few years thanks to aggressive social welfare programs, Ms. Cabrerizo, the nutritionist, said studies showed that chronic malnutrition in children had climbed in quinoa-growing areas, including Salinas de Garcí Mendoza, in recent years.

In Salinas de Garcí Mendoza and elsewhere, part of this change is due to climbing quinoa prices and more quinoa being destined for export.

Where, dear reader, might the Bolivian government be raising the revenues to fund those "aggressive social welfare programs?"

And why, dear reader, have we seen the emergence of new middle classes in parts of the world that used to be desperately poor?

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The six months of outdoor season have passed.  Between the Chicago Black Hawks making a Stanley Cup run, and a little self-discipline, there's still progress to report on the railroad.

Some of last model railroad season's work involved site preparation, here insulating a crawl space that will be behind the railroad.

Once that's done, the next framing for the staging yard takes shape.

Then comes the sub-roadbed.  This goes faster when it's a sheet of 3/4" plywood rather than spline.

Next, some tracks, and a few train cars to check the alignment.  And some exercise, scrabbling below all to install wires.

Yes, there will be another level above, connecting to the section at the top of the picture.

Meanwhile, the spline continues to the east, here in the northeast corner of the room.

In the rear, there is a track in place (I work on the difficult sections first), then the roadbed for two tracks of the branch line, and a high line for the blast furnace, then two tracks of the main line, and three tracks for the steel mill.

With winter coming, the only outdoor chore to get in the way is the snow shovelling, which may be real soon.

GENERATED AND DIVERTED TRAFFIC.

One of the first things I learned in a transportation policy class was that a road improvement didn't function in isolation.  Ceteris paribus, an improved road would allow the traffic currently using it to move more smoothly (doesn't matter whether its filling potholes or a new surface or more lanes or timed traffic lights).  But a good economist learns to think about consequences beyond the immediate, which, in the transportation community come under the rubric of diverted traffic (travellers who were avoiding the unimproved road who switch) and generated traffic (non-travellers who travel because it's less burdensome.)  Apparently, this Strong Towns post suggests, the infrastructure gurus are still short of enlightenment.  "With a growing body of research showing that building more roads and more lanes just encourages more traffic, officials are starting to pay attention to induced demand."  There's more detail at the post.

The increased awareness of induced demand is a very encouraging sign. This growing acknowledgement is a key component in changing the conversation. Once we admit that building more highway capacity isn’t a real solution to congestion, we can talk about things that can actually work such as congestion pricing or building strong neighborhoods and cities that do not require such a heavy reliance on congested freeways in the first place.

These ideas are so elementary I'm surprised the wizards of smart haven't grasped them.

BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM?

I recall a passage, somewhere in The Communist Manifesto, cautioning scientific socialists not to succumb to the blandishments of all manner of faux-socialisms.  (And that style of political correctness persists to this day, the True Believer must resist all sorts of fine-sounding reforms precisely because those reforms will preserve capitalism, or the wages system, or the existing class society.)

Now comes Senator Bernie Sanders, explaining exactly what he means by "democratic socialism."  Read and understand all of it, although there is not a line in it that refutes an old William F. Buckley quip about the fundamental economic assumptions of liberalism being socialist.

I want to highlight one passage.

Democratic socialism means that, in the year 2015, a college degree is equivalent to what a high school degree was 50 years ago – and that public education must allow every person in this country, who has the ability, the qualifications and the desire, the right to go to a public colleges or university tuition free. This is also not a radical idea. It exists today in many countries around the world. In fact, it used to exist in the United States.

I thought the degradation of the college degree is the bitter fruit of at least 50 years of access-assessment-remediation-retention, and that the right to attend on the taxpayers' dime in other countries is limited to people who screened for college in the sixth grade.  That's how Minding the Campus also understands it.

Back in the 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward into higher education began, the system seemed reasonable. Most of the students who went to college were pretty well prepared and the admission and academic standards at most schools were at least moderately demanding. Expanding “access” to higher education appeared to have only an upside.

The trouble is that Uncle Sam’s increasing “generosity” towards college proved to be very corrosive of those standards over time.

College administrators quickly developed a taste for the additional revenue they could obtain by enrolling more students. To do that, many lowered admission standards and the academic quality of the college-going population began to decline. (That decline was worsened by the fact that academic rigor at many of our high schools was simultaneously falling, as “progressive” educational theories spread.) But to keep the increasingly large number of weak and disengaged students they were luring into their schools happy, it was necessary to water down the curriculum and lower academic expectations.

After decades, those trends have led us to our present, dismal situation – many students who shouldn’t have entered college in the first place are racking up debts for college while learning little and often failing to graduate.

If you think universal health care, something else the senator calls for, and universal higher education are expensive now, just wait ...

SPEAKING OF FREAKAZOID SPAWN.

Here's Adjunctular Noodling, starting with college placement day in South Korea, where there is no such thing as test anxiety, and ending up with the Perpetually Aggrieved who run the hothouses fouling all the nests.

Compare the Korean democracy to the various defiantly separate American sub-cultures. In a few years these South Korean students, if they are kind, will allow the American students to serve them. It’s unclear what service they are equipped to provide. Americans equip themselves mostly for protest. It’s doubtful that will be tolerated by Korean achievers.

Meanwhile those who would lead us by following the polls (Clinton, Rubio and Sanders) would dole out more diplomas at greater cost, fostering fewer marketable skills. The students at Missouri, Yale, Ithaca and Louisville may confound the giveaway plan. The voting public may turn away from public higher education, seeing it as a perfectly poor investment. America may also at last turn away from privileged, brutish, overly commercialized and unremarkable collegiate footballers.

The turning away is already in progress.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Here is Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writer David D. Haynes, summarizing in one sentence the challenges facing the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  "UWM has a dual mission — doing top-flight research while also serving as an entry point to students who might not otherwise consider college — that is both extremely valuable and extremely challenging."  Indeed.  Battled those challenges with part of my brain for 35 years.  Battled as well the destructive impulses of the identity-politics crazies and diversity weenies with another part.  Perhaps if the powers that be at the regional comprehensive universities disavow the antics at the hothouses for the freakazoid spawn of the priviligentsia, they'll have a better case with the legislature.

THE MUGGING BY REALITY CONTINUES.

Onetime Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan saw, back in 2008, the potential of one Barack Obama.  (She may have voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin all the same.)  The scales are falling from her eyes.  Or perhaps the kool-aid wore off.

After the [Paris] attacks Mr. Obama went on TV, apparently to comfort us and remind us it’s OK, he’s in charge. He prattled on about violence being at odds with “universal values.” He proceeded as if unaware that there are no actually universal values, that right now the values of the West and radical Islam are clashing, violently, and we have to face it. The mainstream press saw right through him. At the news conference, CNN’s Jim Acosta referred to the “frustration” of “a lot of Americans,” who wonder: “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” The president sighed and talked down to him—to us. He has a strategy and it’s the right one and it’s sad you can’t see it.

Let him prattle on about climate change as the great threat of our time.

All he can do at this point is troll the GOP with the mischief of his refugee program. If he can’t work up a passion about radical Islamic violence, at least he can tie the Republicans in knots over whether they’re heartless bigots who want to prevent widows and children from taking refuge from the Syrian civil war.

This is a poor prioritizing of what faces us. The public is appropriately alarmed about exactly who we might be letting in. It would be easy, and commonsensical, to follow their prompting and pause the refugee program, figure out how to screen those seeking entrance more carefully, and let in only the peaceable. If that takes time, it takes time.

Once upon a time, "widows and orphans" was the rhetoric used by robber barons to defend their stock dividend policies.

Unfortunately, in recalling the way things were when Ronald Reagan could call an evil empire an evil empire, Ms Noonan continues to enable the cult of the presidency, which is what Mr Obama had going for him in 2008.

There will be powerful public support now for spending—wisely, discerningly—whatever is needed for the short term, and a possible long term.

Finally, continued travels through the country show me that people continue to miss Ronald Reagan’s strength and certitude. In interviews and question-and-answer sessions, people often refer to Reagan’s “optimism.” That was his power, they say—he was optimistic.

No, I say, that wasn’t his power and isn’t what you miss. Reagan’s power was that he wasconfident. He was confident that whatever the problem—the economy, the Soviets, the million others—he could meet it, the American people could meet it, and our system could meet it. The people saw his confidence, and it allowed them to feel optimistic. And get the job done.

What people hunger for now from their leaders is an air of shown and felt confidence: I can do this. We can do it.

Who will provide that? Where will it come from? Isn’t it part of what we need in the next president?

That, unfortunately, is the mind-set that made Our President's "we are the change we have been waiting for" resonate with disaffected people.  The petulant never-tenured radical emerged later.  I know I'm repeating myself, but as the Gruff Old Yardmaster says, "no matter how many times I explain this some doofus always messes it up."  Thus.  "It may take the failure of one or more of the New Deal or Great Society or Hope and Change constructions to trigger the emergence."  Unfortunately, all the hope and change constructions are tottering at once.

ANTAGONIZE THE CARRIAGE TRADE.

Amtrak's corrupt bargain, in which sleeping car rates on the Silver Star go down in exchange for there no longer being a proper dining car, is not playing well with veteran train riders.

And it might be the most effective way for Amtrak to self-destruct, as it's unlikely we'd even have an Amtrak if the common carrier railroads had managed to get rid of all the dining cars by 1968 or so.

Trains promises a future analysis of the effects of the degradation of service.

THE TIME FOR SUBTLETY IS OVER. BRING THE HAMMER.

Let's start with Victor Davis Hanson's "The University Gone Feral."  As his subtitle puts it, social norms no longer apply.  Does that come as any surprise after thirty or forty years of deconstructing civilization, for whatever reasons seemed appealing at the time?

The strangest campus derangement is the graft of Victorian prurience onto postmodern crudity. Students who are quite sexually active, and routinely use drugs and alcohol, nonetheless revert to virginal preteens who must be shielded from rough language or mere rudeness. They demand Victorian rules of sexual etiquette, but not commensurate 19th-century notions of abstinence, housing segregated by gender, dress codes that discourage randiness, or prohibitions against drug and alcohol use. Pick-and-choose campus feminists do not wish doors opened for them, but insist that sex codes delineate the stages of arousal, from foreplay to postcoital pleasantries. How strange that “adult” students want to dress up in little kids’ costumes on Halloween, and then act like children terrified of scary things in the night.

There is another common denominator to this epidemic of madness. Why are universities free from norms that apply to other American institutions? Is it the implied social contract that their educational mission is so sacred and so dutifully fulfilled that they simply cannot follow the rules or expectations that the rest of us do?

It's been the habit of presidents of public universities to accuse legislatures of breaking that social contract, whilst glossing over the ways in which their institutions have broken the contract themselves, particularly where normal Americans are concerned.

Universities went feral and broke their social contract. If campuses can no longer educate students, then why should they be exempt from the norms that the rest of the population must follow?

Campuses claim they are left-wing, but in fact they are no-wing: just fascist, authoritarian, infantile — and incompetent.

I don't know that "campuses" claim they are left-wing, although there's a lot about the social and cultural preferences that are loosely leftish. Perhaps the best thing to do is light up the grill, pour a beer, and enjoy the slow-motion collapse.

But first, read Jennifer Kabbany. "What you are witnessing has festered and grown like a bacteria in a petri dish until this highly visibly public outbreak of campus lunacy showed itself in full force."  The details are not for the faint of heart.