THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IS LIMITED BY THE EXTENT OF THE MARKET.

The geniuses who brought us the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are learning a lesson, the hard way.  "Critics of Obamacare have pointed to the recent problems as proof the market is not working, while even the law’s staunchest defenders are arguing that the marketplaces need some fixes."  What's going wrong?

First, choice is disappearing.  The so-called public option might reintroduce choices, where the constraints imposed on private insurers have driven those out.  "It’s politically controversial and hard to make work in practice."  That's an understatement, but we're dealing with New York Times court intellectuals Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, and they probably had to strain real hard to admit that much.

Second, prices are rising.  Read the section, and you see nothing at all about the stifling of price discovery inherent in third-party payments, although you see more hope for a government monopsony (yeah, that works so well when it's Walmart doing it).  "Bring down costs instead of raising prices."  Who is the real faith-based community here?

Third, the market (for insurance) is too small.  Even the relatively rudimentary "remove the lines around the states" that one Donald Trump was fumbling towards would be more effective than the Times-sanctioned fixes.

Change the incentives, so more people who are currently uninsured buy health insurance. Hillary Clinton has talked about giving out more generous subsidies, so insurance costs less and more people can afford to buy it. Many Republican politicians suggest another way to lower prices: eliminating current requirements that insurance cover a wide array of services. Some policy experts, including Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton health economist, in a recent Vox.com interview, have suggested tightening up the penalties for remaining uninsured, so people can’t wait and buy insurance only after they get sick.

If you're going to have mandatory purchase, with penalties for failure to purchase, the penalty for failure to purchase has to be more painful than the cost of the insurance.  Which is currently not the case.  But subsidizing people to buy overpriced health insurance does nothing about the absence of price discovery, something that is present wherever third parties are doing the paying.  And nobody has mentioned medical savings accounts.  Sad.

Fourth, the rules are complicated.  Quelle surprise!

If the insurers think the marketplace is unfair, or that there’s no way they can ever make money there, they are unlikely to participate. Because the health law relies on private companies to participate, conditions have to be favorable enough to keep them involved.

Somehow we managed to fight and win World War II in triplicate, but perhaps, even in the provision of health care, there are unexploited gains from trade that might be more easily harvested in an emergent, spontaneous way.

Here's how the essay ends.  "The divides are not just partisan, but reflect persistent uncertainty about the most important things going wrong, and the most effective solutions to fix them."

Open markets are environments in which powerful and appraising evolutionary forces are at work.  Try them, you might like them.

LIFE OUTSIDE THE SNOWFLAKES' SAFE SPACES.

With the students returning, a reality check from Dean Dad.

At most community colleges, student diversity is a visible fact of life. (Brookdale is in an affluent area, but its student body is more diverse than the population of its county.) So are part-time or even full-time jobs off campus. We don’t have dorms. A slim majority of the student body is part-time. Many have children, and/or extended family obligations. More than I’d like to believe are only precariously housed. Steady and sufficient food can’t be assumed.

For many students, college is the relatively safe space in their lives. It functions the way that Arlie Hochschild described work functioning for adults in The Time Bind: it’s the island of relative stability and sanity in otherwise chaotic lives. It’s where they can find some peace, and raise their sights above the day-to-day.

At Holyoke, I had the library establish a quiet study room for students who needed one. It quickly became both popular and self-enforcing. We couldn’t assume that students have a quiet place at home to study. Libraries as social centers may make sense elsewhere, and group study rooms serve a purpose, but sometimes you just need some quiet, a chair, a table, and a lamp. For students at elite places, that may be redundant; here, not so much.

Students’ home environments are entirely out of our control. This is not a “total institution” in the same sense that a residential college or university can be. And some students come to us as fully formed adults, well into their thirties or beyond; at that point, talk of ‘character formation’ comes off even more arrogant than it usually does. We have students who already have degrees from elsewhere, and plenty of students with previous college experience. The “tabula rasa” assumption simply doesn’t hold here.

That's life around the Mid-American, too. "Many of their students are striving in difficult conditions, and ought not be left with high debts and little new human capital."

It's up to the faculty at the community colleges and the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors to understand that they are in the same business as the hothouses for virtue-signallers and encourage their students to learn accordingly.

The problem that elite places are trying to solve with “safe spaces” -- a shelter from politics -- is the wrong issue here. My great fear for our students isn’t that they’ll take political positions different from my own. It’s that they won’t take any positions at all. They’ll ignore the larger questions altogether, in favor of the immediate demands of the present. Given the intensity of those demands, it’s an understandable response. But it cedes power to those who already have it, and whose agendas may be very different.

Here, the need is for enough felt daily safety that students feel capable of venturing into slightly unfamiliar ground. Students here aren’t shrinking violets, and they aren’t dorm-room socialists. They’re struggling with the demands of daily life. If we could find ways to give them time, and reasonable security, we could probably nudge more of them towards the bigger questions. How they answer those bigger questions is entirely up to them.

Perhaps it's too much to expect that the networks and the journals of opinion draw their slave labor interns from institutions that aren't an Acela ride (years ago, when I had print subscriptions to several, a Metroliner ride) from the editorial offices.  But where competence matters, a good degree irrespective of where it comes from is what opens the doors.  Thus the promotion ladder in collegiate coaching; and years ago a number of the nationally televised meteorologists -- this may still be true -- held Northern Illinois degrees.

Unfortunately, the evidence and the polemics suggest that there's more to the ceding of power to the snowflakes in their safe spaces than simply the connections among the gentry and the thick envelopes from the Ivies.

DOWNSIZING IS A FALSE ECONOMY.

Apparently, the Pacific Parlour Cars, an amenity of the Coast Starlight, with or without the proper wine tasting, are a sometime thing on the train.  During the summer peak tourism season, no less.

I’ve probably traveled on the Coast Starlight a couple of dozen times over the years. But all of the little extras that made this train so special and induced me to take an extra day and assume extra cost just to ride that train? They’re all gone. Only the parlor car is left, and apparently you’ve only got a 50-50 chance of finding one in the consist when you travel.

The troubling thing is that many first time passengers are becoming aware that the Coast Starlight is no longer the special experience they thought it would be.

Congress must come to understand that Amtrak cannot achieve break even, let alone profitability, by cutting costs, especially when those cuts affect sleeping car passengers who are already paying more than their fair share. Let us hope that a new Congress will finally, at long last, get it!

Unfortunately, Make The Coast Starlight Great Again has insufficient national appeal, and Make Amtrak Great Again will provoke questions about When Was Amtrak Great?

THE LUXURY OF BEING THE SOLE SUPERPOWER.

The Navy has been commissioning a new series of fast-attack surface ships called littoral combat ships.  I suppose you can't use motor torpedo boat to describe something bigger, but the concept remains -- that's a bit of wisdom I acquired from a Navy veteran who was a camp counselor years ago, as Vietnam was ramping up.  But the state-of-the-art transmissions on these boats are proving fragile.

"As with any new venture, the LCS program has had its ups, downs, and learning moments. Things do not always go as planned. That is no surprise," Adm. Scott H. Swift, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine in July.

He pointed out early criticisms of platforms such as the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, Spruance-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers that went on to have long Navy careers.

"I am convinced the LCS/frigate program will be similarly vindicated," Swift wrote.

Perhaps the urgency of winning a world war is not present.  (Although, during that war, submariners and patrol torpedo boat skippers sortied, for the first two years, with defective torpedoes.)

SNOB ZONING. PETARD. HOIST.

There's a funny story at Kids Prefer Cheese about the local swim club that blackballed Katie Ledecky's family.  Yes, that Katie Ledecky.  Because they lived too far away.

The Little Falls Swim club membership is capped at 377 families. Joining via waiting list can take 7 years! Points toward membership are awarded by how close you live to the pool (in a 10 zone system). If you live more that 4000 feet (yes you read that right FEET) from the pool, they won't even accept your application!

Government created artificial scarcity combined with a price ceiling provoking a frenzied but meaningless status competition that seemingly consumes peoples' lives?

Oh, yes please!

Zoning makes building another damn pool nearby unlikely. Just being Maryland makes letting prices clear the market impossible.

The Ledecky family long ago joined a different pool and swim team (the impeccably named Palisades Porpoises) and the rest is history.

Rent seeking. Positional arms races.  And now the Olympic celebrations are at a less exclusive swim club.

THE LIBERTIES OF THE PEOPLE ARE SAFE.

The Trenchant Observation of the Day, from National Review's Kevin D. Williamson.  Golfing is the best thing Barack Obama does.  Why?

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices.

It helps to have at least one legislative chamber with the opposition in the majority, and that separation of powers will be useful whether we are confronting a Clinton or a Trump presidency.

Plus: Anybody remember when The Best and The Brightest griped about a do-nothing Presidency? (It takes a long memory, and I still tease my mom, who has matured politically, for once characterizing Ike in that way.)

Eisenhower could afford to goof around on the golf course all day. Nothing of any interest or consequence happened during the years of his presidency, except: The death of Stalin and the Soviets’ acquisition of the hydrogen bomb, Germany’s ascension to NATO, the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the end of the Korean War and a near nuclear confrontation with China, the Suez crisis, the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Congo crisis, revolution in Cuba, the Formosa Resolution, a military intervention in Lebanon, the U-2 incident, two major civil-rights acts, Brown vs. Board of Education, Little Rock, the further rise and chaotic fall of Joseph McCarthy, and the addition of two new states.

You know what Eisenhower did? He commissioned a putting green for the White House.

He also handled all that other business with considerable grace and skill. Eisenhower, who had spent 16 years as a major before finally winning promotion — it took him the same amount of time to go from major to lieutenant colonel as it did for him to go from lieutenant colonel to president of the United States — was a patient, wily player of the long game. He had also held the fate of Western civilization — and, arguably, the human race — in his hands in a way that no military leader had before or has since when he was planning D-Day, and so he didn’t lose his cool every time something went wrong, whether it was the French screwing up Indochina or a military confrontation between Egypt and Israel.

The Eisenhower years were in fact crisis after crisis after crisis, and Eisenhower is the great illustration that great leadership often is leadership that nobody notices. It didn’t feel like the nation was in a constant state of crisis.

In those days, we didn't have a drive-by media inflating every minor challenge into a crisis, perhaps in part because we had correspondents who had been under fire on Normandy or in the Pacific and understood what a real secular crisis looked like, and perhaps because maintaining correspondents in the field was costly (I'm ancient enough to remember "Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and Richard C. Hottelet at the United Nations, Eric Sevareid in Washington ...)

The Cult of the Presidency got stronger with the Fatal Conceit called Camelot or the Great Society, and it was abetted by the ability of the drive-by-media to quickly hustle correspondents to wherever the latest distraction was.

Perhaps the best corrective a Trump presidency might offer is an executive choosing to play golf rather than attempt to do all the hands-on management his detractors see as driving him nuts.  But there will be the usual chorus of "Action Must Be Taken" from the usual suspects.

MORE READING TO CATCH UP ON?

The Free Beacon's Micah Mattix comments on Peter Lawler's new American Heresies and Higher Education.

I got out when I'd had enough of business fads, affirmative action, and special education.  But that's apparently what business as usual looks like.

American colleges are suffering from administrative bloat, which increases every year at the hand of career managers who value standardization and procedures above all else, and who already put a great deal of trust in technology and market solutions. If the relative reduction in the number of full-time faculty per students over the past 30 years did not lead to a more efficient and affordable college education, it’s unclear how further reducing it could. Furthermore, it is unclear how increasing the use of technology—online education—already embraced at most schools will change anything.

Lawler isn’t against technology, nor is he against market solutions. What we need, he argues, are market solutions to fix the actual problems. His solution to the crisis in American higher education is to greatly reduce the amount of work required for accreditation, which would partially reduce the need for an army of administrators. Instead of a multi-year process, make accreditation a spot-check, where a small team of peers arrives unannounced on a college campus to check the books, faculty credentials, visit a few classes, and look over course syllabi. Whether or not this would be enough is unclear, and it seems that changing how much funding is available to students would have to be addressed as well, but it would be a step in the right direction. It might even curtail the pandering to students we see at a number of colleges—the provision of “safe spaces” and renaming of buildings—to the extent that it’s mostly college administrators who view students as “consumers” and espouse the view that “the consumer is always right.”

I'm not sure that's the right diagnosis, or the right mix of fixes, but perhaps that's one more thing to read.

A "SOCIAL" "SECURITY" MARRIAGE PENALTY.

I can't make stuff like this up. "If you’re disabled and drawing Social Security and you want to get married, watch out for the booby traps."  It's an obscure trap, applicable to people who become eligible as dependent children and subsequently marry a person in the workforce.  But the author of the story has not yet obtained an explanation from the bureaucrats of why the beneficiary in error continued to receive payments for seventeen years until someone in Washington caught on and sent him a bill.

THE POPULATION IMPLOSION.

Zero, or negative population growth, in the era of Hope and Change, diminishes the appeal of making the varsity.

A few generations ago, the average family was having five or more children, while now the national average is down to fewer than three children per household.

This means fewer butts in seats in classrooms, locker rooms and band rooms than even a generation ago.

Countless coaches have talked about the drop in enrollment having a direct result on the ability to attract players.

Another factor to consider is of that select pool of potential athletes, more teenagers are choosing to work jobs after school to help pay for various things such as college.

The Reedsville girls' cross country team lost two such runners, Brianna and Alyssa Laabs, from last year’s team to this decision.

[Reedsville] coach Shawn Eckstein, while disappointed, understood their decision to not return for their senior and sophomore seasons, respectively.

The cost of education has risen sharply in the past few years, along with just about everything else, leading to more teenagers in the workforce earlier then ever — and off school sports teams.

Playing a prep sport can cost significant monetary and time commitments students and parents don’t have the luxury to afford, unlike previous generations.

Also, in more households, both parents are working and schedules might not allow shuttling children to sporting events and practices after school.

The decline in student enrollment affects government funding, which sees after-school busing programs that helped athletes, especially in rural districts, find themselves on the budgetary chopping block.

While the symptoms of the problem are multifaceted, the outcome is very real.

The future of prep sports could be in jeopardy, at least how they’re run today.

Used to be the creation of consolidated school districts, such as, to pick a few Wisconsin towns, Birnamwood - Wittenberg, Iola - Scandinavia, or Gale - Ettrick. But now, the government and parochial schools are combining to field teams, such as Two Rivers (a government school) plus Manitowoc Lutheran plus Manitowoc Roncalli.  Well, Cardinal Roncalli became Pope John XXIII, and combining forces with the Lutherans is in the spirit of his Vatican Conference.

But outmigration from rural areas has been the story for years.  Perhaps the pride of place high school sports enjoyed in the Beach Boys era was another manifestation of the victory dividend resource curse.  And both parents working is a law of conservation in economics at work.

ALWAYS WITH THE NARRATIVE.

For the feel-good story a few evenings ago, NBC Nightly News visited a few backyard roller coasters.

But the technocratic impulse dies hard, and sure enough, seventy-five seconds in, there's a brief clip of an unoccupied car leaving the rails and the obligatory whingeing about the absence of regulation.  As if daddy or grandpa are going to leave their kids or grandkids at risk of injury to save a few bucks.

The youngsters featured in the clip have the right idea.  Relatively little waiting for the roller coaster, and none of the annoying commercials the big amusement parks have taken to playing to placate the herds queuing for their ride.

MORE DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

Maybe forty percent of today's high-schoolers are ready for college.  Boys and minorities hardest hit.  "The testing company said Wednesday that only 38% of graduating seniors who took the exam hit the college-prepared benchmark in at least three of the four core subjects tested — reading, English, math and science — down from 40%. And 34% did not meet any of the benchmarks, which are designed to measure a strong readiness for college."  When they get to college, there's not going to be much added value, suggests Charlie (Prof Scam) Sykes.  "Today's university gives lip service to educating students. I think this massive industrial-research complex that treats students like an afterthought has been building for some time. There was a time when the university was a place of the mind where you expected academic freedom, where if you graduated from that university you'd actually be an educated person. Those things aren't necessarily true anymore."  That's the concluding passage of a wide-ranging interview about Mr Sykes's recent Fail U.  It's summer, think of it as Prof Scam: The Sequel, and I have a copy on order.  By all means read the interview, he works a compliment to Hillary Clinton in!

CONTEMPLATING ASSIMILATION.

Reason's E. N. Brown characterizes the efforts of secular European countries, most recently with the "burkini" bans along France's coastlines, as "a wave of non-religious fundamentalism, in which the allegedly patriarchal print of Islam and other faiths must be destroyed by the righteous benevolence of public officials."  Perhaps those non-religious fundamentalists are acting for the most secularly progressive of reasons, namely freeing the Oppressed from their chains.

That is not the culture of France, say leaders, and hence its zero-tolerance policy for such symbols of female oppression.

It's a silly scheme for several reasons. For one, it's unlikely to make the lives of actual oppressed women any better; for those whom husbands or families force headscarves and burquas in public, a ban on these items will simply mean many Muslim have to forgo the beach and other public outings entirely. (It's also unlikely to inspire goodwill among Muslim communities already alienated from mainstream French society.) For another, it's contradictory: in the name of women's equality, France is literally forcing women to wear less clothing than they're comfortable in and passing laws that target female attire but not male.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan is thinking along similar lines:  there's a strand of Islamic practice that's male chauvinism codified, but there's also a tension between boutique multiculturalism (and its toxic accomplice, authenticity) and freedom of choice and association.

But it is now really the intellectual responsibility of people who defend a cultural status quo in which women are visually annihilated to examine with honesty and humility how it is that they came to be so out of step with the instinct of vast majorities in almost all of the European countries where the status of fully veiled women begins to become a matter of law.

It's possible that by taking too hard a line against looking like a Third Worlder in public, the non-religious fundamentalists are giving the new arrivals from the Third World reason to embrace their practices more fully.  To quote Ms Brown, "Setting our Western gaze on women in hijabs and seeing only oppression isn't some new-fangled feminist awareness, it's a perfect extension of imperialist legacies." Yes, the French were attempting to Europeanize Algeria in the late 1950s. How well did that turn out?

Assimilation begins with live-and-let-live, and it emerges as the youngsters wonder why they have to draw attention to themselves by looking like Third Worlders.  Here's Ms Brown's example from the States.

One only need look to the story of Catholics in America to see we got it right: once an outcast, suspicious, and non-assimilating crew, Catholics are now no less mainstream in America than apple pie. It turns out that when you let people assimilate at their own pace, picking and choosing from the dominant (liberal, secular) culture and their own smaller communities as they go along, most people will eventually begin to blend the two. The process can work in reverse, as well, with a minority group shifting dominant cultural views through time and tolerance—something we've seen in America over the past few decades when it comes to same-sex relationships and rights.

The lesson here for secular, socially-liberal Americans (and one I'm afraid few progressives pillorying France right now will entertain) is not to be like the burkini banners and other non-religious fundamentalists when it comes to spreading "tolerance" in America.

Here's an instructive car-card, in preservation at the Illinois Railway Museum.

M-m-good, and marketing to Chicagoland's Catholics is good business.  (How long ago was tomato soup 12 cents a can, and what does that translate into in 2016 dollars?)

Thus, though, does the Friday fish fry morph from a lesser sacrament to a festive tradition, all over Wisconsin, and in adjoining portions of Illinois.  And we've looked at the evolution of Sunday from the Puritan ritual in which only milking cows is permitted to the German tradition of a post-worship keg of beer.  "The grandchildren of the migrants will buy into the common culture, given the proper inducements."  Picking on Grandma for wearing her babushka, or her hijab, isn't the proper inducement.

THE CLINTONIAN COLLEGE BUBBLE.

The Nothing But Clinton Nightly News filed a report.

It's almost farcical.  Mr Clinton earns several millions of dollars delivering speeches at Laureate International campuses around the world.  In the United States, Laureate's "flagship campus" is called "Walden University."  As in a Doonesbury reference?  Was nobody paying attention?

It's almost too much for Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan.

The Clintons were just as willing to enrich themselves via the scummy tax-syphons as many Republicans were and are. Bill’s bogus chancellorship at a for-profit school paid him many millions to jet around the world now and then making inspirational speeches. UD is obviously a strong Hillary supporter, but the Clintons are paying now for what they did, and I’m afraid they deserve to.

Substantively Hillary Clinton's own words disqualify her for the presidency.

But as far as Laureate is concerned, it's just business as usual.  Mrs Clinton once endorsed Laureate's efforts, with passages such as "Bill likes [the Laureate president] 'a lot'." and "Pleased to support mission." Yeah, seventeen million dollars will buy a lot of like.  Pay to play is the Clinton Way.  "If you wanted to see Madam Secretary, you had to pay up."  Exactly as if you wanted to see Mr Ex-President.

So it always is with Big Government.  Expenditures lead to rent-seeking, and where there is rent-seeking, there will be scummy tax-syphons.

SOCIALISM IS THE LONGEST ROAD FROM EMERGENT ORDER TO EMERGENT ORDER.

Twenty-six years after reunification, eastern Germany remains economically anaemic with little prospect of catching up with the rest of the country by 2030.  The Iron Curtain that kept people in prior to 1989 didn't reflect only economic failure, perhaps it reflected the attitudes of the masses.

The former GDR has seen a decades-long emigration of the young, exacerbating the ageing population problem due to low birth rates that affect all of Germany.

"Exactly the people with a high level of qualification who could push increased productivity and innovation are lacking," [policy analyst Ifo] Ragnitz wrote.

As well as sapping the supply side of the economy with a brain drain, demographic weakness also undermines demand, as fewer people are around to spend in the local economy.

Meanwhile, Ragnitz noted that "large, structurally defining firms are largely lacking", apart from subsidiaries of foreign firms, meaning "higher-value business functions are lacking and strategic decisions taken without taking east German interests into account."

Most firms in eastern Germany remain small, concentrating on market niches - and are therefore "by definition notable for their limited opportunity to expand".

"Structurally defining firms" might be as obsolete in the old People's Republic of Prussia as they became in the Rust Belt. The flight of the ambitious people, another parallel to the Rust Belt. Those startup businesses? As the vanguard of the gig economy or rapid prototyping, perhaps that's something better emerging. As the German equivalent of resale shops, tattoo parlors, and nail salons?  All that's missing are the meth labs.  The parallels to fifty years of the Great Society depress.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT.

We've noted, for several years, people resisting being on call all the time (once America is great again, expect the resistance to spread), complete with accumulating evidence that too much stress is unhealthy.  But emergence, as I have suggested, is messy.  "[W]e're more likely to see improved work-life balance as a consequence of talented people getting off the treadmill than as a consequence of legislation and litigation."  How messy?  Here's an American Interest essay attempting to tie the old employment contract to the blue social model.  The new dispensation, however, looks like the 24/7 treadmill on speed, with Big Brother in your home computers.  "The brave new post-blue world increasingly features corporations leveraging technology to get the absolute most out of its employees." Against current developments, the new equilibrium appears wishful in the extreme.

It is not a great thing for people who have been raised to live under one set of institutions and assumptions when their world changes and the cold winds of change start to blow. The workers who have had their lives disrupted by this change have our sympathy.

But it’s also important to remember that the goal of the social transformation through which we are now passing isn’t to have everyone wired up to demanding jobs 24/7 with instant feedback—jobs that fire those losers who didn’t get to their emails fast enough over the weekend.

Perhaps not, but that's reality as many people live it.

As is the case with the social order becoming incompatible with its capitalist integument, the transition, plus whatever comes next, isn't evident yet.

The transition away from the old system of lifetime employment at sleepy and paternalistic corporations is not ultimately about plunging us all into a world of cutthroat hyper capitalism. It’s about decreasing the amount of work and energy it takes to produce the necessities of life so that fewer and fewer people spend their entire lives in routine and repetitive labor, toiling at drudgery that provides a living but detracts from life itself. The Great Work of the human race in this transition from the old industrial economy to the new information one is about releasing the energy and talent of hundreds of millions of people to work on making their lives better, richer, and more interesting. As a species, we will be spending less time wresting nature into submission, and more time learning what it means to be fully human.

Sounds a lot like "fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, and criticize at dinner." The getting there from here?

Those thoughts are probably not much of a consolation to the ten percent of workers losing their jobs every year at what once used to be a paternalistic company. Nor is their grief assuaged by thinking about how much more the managers who have engineered this change in corporate culture are making under the new dispensation.

An economic and social transformation as sweeping and as radical as the one Americans are now going through is bound to create many victims and many stories of hardship and loss. It’s tempting to think that the best way to help those who are being hurt by the change is to fight the change: to tax Uber to subsidize taxis, to block foreign competition, pass laws against self-driving cars, and otherwise to circle the wagons against social change. It’s very human to reach for responses like this, but also ultimately very misguided.

While we need to be compassionate as a society to those whose lives are being disrupted, and be helpful to those who need retraining or other help, what we really need to do is to be creating the conditions that favor the emergence of new jobs, new industries, new professions as the old ones fade away.

Yes, but if you think you have a social structure that fosters emergence, you probably don't.

ENABLING THE BAD BEHAVIOR.

Chicago Tribune columnist Cory Franklin issues the medals for U.S. Olympians Behaving Badly.  Swimmer Ryan Lochte for the gold, soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo, the silver, swimmer Lilly King, the bronze.  But they didn't win those medals on their own.

There was a time when American athletes went to the Olympics to represent their country proudly. Many still do, but the virus of narcissism has clearly infected some of our athletes. Perhaps it is to be expected, considering the fawning Olympic media coverage, the emergence of an enabling social media, and the glorification of self that has become de rigueur in sports. Some sportswriters, under the pretext of injecting more personality into sports, appear to encourage such selfish behavior, whether it is styling after a home run, calling attention to oneself after dunking the basketball or doing a sack dance after tackling a quarterback (even when your team is losing by 30 points).

So it should come as no surprise to anyone when "injecting more personality" morphs into boorish conduct, egregious sportsmanship and the Ryan Lochte early morning show. And make no mistake — during the Olympics, the rest of the world takes note. Unfortunately, the churls overshadow American athletes demonstrating sports' best qualities: Abbey D'Agostino helping a fallen opponent or Allyson Felix's heads-up reminder to her team to finish their relay race after a baton drop, thereby helping them win a challenge and qualify for a gold medal.

Much for students of social psychology or the so-called culture studies to investigate, particularly the pernicious cult of authenticity.  At tony Hamilton College, however, it's business as usual.

Hamilton College is offering courses this year exploring concepts such as “white privilege” and the role of masculinity, power structures, and global capitalism in competitive athletics.

According to the college’s current course catalog, at least one of the courses fulfills a requirement for an Africana Studies concentration, though none are required for students pursuing other disciplines due to Hamilton’s “open curriculum” approach.

I wonder if the actings-out of the three athletes honored by Mr Franklin become exemplars of privilege, or if Ms Felix's proper use of the rules as a shield becomes "internalized oppression."  Check out the wordnoise, in a description of another course that satisfies a Diversity prerequisite.

Dr. Nigel Westmaas offers another course, “Global Race and Sport,” that students can take in order to meet that goal.

The 200-level course “is designed to examine race and diversity issues in the world of sports from the early 20th century to the present” through “critical inquiry on the impact of race and racism in major world sports and the Olympic movement.”

The description further states that students will “[interrogate] issues of masculinity, gender, the structures of power, as well as new forms of global capitalism in sports.”

I'm not sure what expression the "interrogate" stands for. The term as used by the culture-studies weenies has nothing to do with keeping prisoners awake for days on end, and answering questions at midnight.  On the other hand, "act like you've won before" might be a tool of the power structure.

Come December, I doubt that any Hamilton students, upon completing the course, will be better equipped to explain why Athletes Behaving Badly leads to bad behavior among people less privileged.

REDISCOVERING THE INTERURBAN.

There's affordable housing, with less burdensome taxation and less corrupt governance, along the South Shore.  Yes, as in Mike Pence's Indiana.

When Beth Doherty found her future home in Indiana, it was by mistake.

Visiting property her sister-in-law purchased in 2002, she discovered Beverly Shores, Ind., where she and her husband moved in 2010 after living in Bucktown for two decades.

"You can see the skyline from the shore, and there's all these really cool houses," she said.

Doherty, a real estate broker, said many clients have no idea that such lakeside gems are available.

Regular readers have known about Beverly Shores for years.

Chicago Tribune photo by Keri Wiginton.

Sure enough, the train service is contributing to the real estate boom.

Puzzled by why Indiana isn't drawing more people who work in Chicago, local officials are touting newly revitalized downtowns and pitching a new train track to slim commutes.

"This area is the best-kept secret," said Michael Noland, CEO of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District.

Sometimes, it's as simple as installing a second track (the line through the Dunelands was originally laid out with two tracks in mind.)

Ogden Dunes, December 1972.

Note the pole lines, and span brackets in place for a second track.

Keep the following in mind the next time some politician rails about crumbling infrastructure.

With some millennials attracted to the area's beach access and low-key lifestyle, officials hope a new generation of residents will flow into town.

The linchpin in their plan to draw more people? Adding another track to a segment of the South Shore Line, which officials hope will slash the commute from Michigan City to Chicago to just one hour.

"The double tracking, I think, is going to be a huge game changer," said Leah Konrady, president of One Region, a group that promotes growth and quality of life in Northwest Indiana. She is 30, and says many friends in their 20s and 30s have moved to the area. She's monitoring the way other cities reach out to millennials, like Atlanta's New Voices campaign, with an advisory panel of millennials.

But making Chicago workplaces accessible is key. Right now, just one track runs between Gary and Michigan City. "We've got two-way traffic on a one-way street," Noland said.

Two tracks, Noland said, will allow trains to run more quickly — and with more options. He would love to see more rush-hour trains, for example.

There used to be more rush-hour trains, plus hourly trains for and from Michigan City, and half-hourly frequencies for and from Gary. Yes, on the single track with passing tracks equipped with spring switches east of Michigan City.

Click to enlarge.  In those days, the Morning and Evening Hot Shots, plus one additional South Bend Limited for Chicago in the morning and from Chicago in the evening, added cars westward or cut cars eastward to offer riders in the Duneland a one-seat, faster service to the Loop.  Today's Hot Shots pick up or set down only at Dune Park and East Chicago.  New Federal Railroad Administration safety procedures delay the adding and cutting of cars, which defeats the purpose of what we call electric multiple unit cars, after all, leading to a lot of empty cars for and from South Bend.

State officials and brokers — and young people eager for more peers — hope the train transports people ready to hear their pitch. "People really want that small-town atmosphere," Landers said. "You're an hour from a world-class city. And from our house, we're a block away from the lake. We can walk down to the beach, and we can see Chicago."

But with the South Shore Line again carrying bicycles, with the double tracking in place, keep on praying to Our Lady of the Interurbans, or perhaps to the Patron Saint of Traction, for more sensible rules on adding and cutting cars, and increased train frequencies in Duneland.

South Bend, August 13, 1966.

The article alludes to other commuter train services in the South Shore.  Yes, for a while Amtrak operated a successor to The Pennsylvania Railroad's Valparaiso trains, which well into Conrail's era featured classic P70 coaches for the riders.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

Footie is popular with eight-year-old girls in the United States, and adolescent males all over the Third World.  Perhaps U.S. policy contributes to its omnipresence.  In Brazil, by contrast, the resources tend to go to the adolescent males.

“This is a macho country,” [former captain Aline] Pellegrino says. “And soccer is seen as a male sport. Whoever plays soccer is a strong man, that is the image, so having a woman play soccer does not match that. They want women in the kitchen, all beautiful and sexy. Not in a soccer jersey kicking a ball around.” Brazil’s affinity for soccer is unmatched anywhere in the world.

While the rules of the modern game were drawn up in England, Brazil can claim to be its spiritual home, a place where the game and life intertwine effortlessly.

The 2014 World Cup, despite Brazil’s crushing 7-1 defeat to Germany in the semifinal, gave the world a glimpse of how the vibrant national personality draws inspiration from the planet’s most popular sport.

Women, however, have been lost somewhere on the periphery of that idyllic scene.

Even with the women’s game enjoying more global popularity than ever, Brazil has not caught up. The Brazilian women’s team is one of the favorites for gold in Rio, but the treatment of girls who want to play at the grass-roots level is disturbing, to say the least.

Old-style sex roles apparently hamper the development of youth footie for the girls.  Perhaps, too, there aren't enough minivans yet.

For all of the attention Brazil and the States pay to footie, and to beach volleyball, the winners in the Olympic women's footie tournament and on the beach were ... the Germans.  Deutsche Frauen, Deutsche Treue, Deutscher Wein und Deutscher Sang.

In the men's tournament, it was Brazil beating Germany.  By penalty kicks.

Doesn't that say something is wrong with an activity more suitable for kids running around a field with rudimentary equipment than as a worldwide sport?  You run around for ninety minutes, plus some unspecified extra time incurred because there are stoppages of play and out of bounds set plays and somebody who never went to clown college doing a bad parody of a pratfall, and after that, there is no score (nil-nil, for the purists) or it's tied (sometimes in the extra time) and then you go to a bad parody of overtime in college football?

And people say watching yacht racing is boring?

Why not try something else?  Emulate hockey's regular-season rules, in which each side plays with fewer skaters (yes, this too, goes to penalty shots, but the point of fewer skaters is to provide more room to shoot).  Because it's for a title, allow rotations in order that the side on the field at the start will each get a blow should the running around go on for ninety minutes or longer (as Chicago Black Hawk fans have experienced in the past few seasons).  Perhaps to expedite matters, go to the reduced sides at the beginning of extra time, but play it out as it's currently done; then it's sudden victory.

IT TAKES SOMETHING TO BEAT EVEN DEMOCRAT FAILURE.

Yes, there's plenty of failure to go around, and Donald Trump has been attempting to pry some of the vassals from their squires.  Is it enough?  Not according to Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton.

The Democratic Party has failed African-Americans.

Ever since blacks forcefully abandoned the party of Lincoln in 1964 and turned out 94 percent of their vote for President Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats have enjoyed a cozy relationship with a dedicated constituency that has demanded very little in return.

Blacks have repeatedly given the Democratic Party a blank check to do whatever it chooses and still guarantee voter turnout of an average of 88 percent. Thus far, blacks have seen minimal economic return on their investment.

Yes, Trump spoke the truth. Too many African-Americans are living in poverty. Too many of our schools are no good. We have too few jobs. And large numbers of our youth are unemployed.So what the hell do we have to lose by voting for him, he asks? But the question most African-Americans have for Trump is what the hell would they gain?

African-Americans have no idea because Trump has been too much of a coward to look them in the eye and tell them. He turned down several opportunities to speak directly to African-Americans, declining invitations from the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Urban League.

Blacks are left to assume that he has no workable solutions to the unique problems that plague African-American communities.

Ultimately, she argues, both symbolism and substance matter.

So far, what the Democratic Party has done for blacks has been mostly symbolic. Maybe when the Republican Party figures out a way to put another Barack Obama at the head of its presidential ticket, rather than someone who fueled the birther movement, blacks would happily flock over to the other side.

In the meantime, it's certainly going to take a better candidate than Donald Trump to make that happen.

Substantively, Mr Obama has been a failure, certainly overseas, but the two-lies-for-the-price-of-one Affordable Care Act and the non-stimulus stimulus, both enacted with the help of reconciliation, a filibuster-resistant Senate, and a few political favors to Nebraska, for good measure.

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE.

The webmasters at National Review have to do something to justify their existence, and they're shutting Phi Beta Cons down.  The correspondents might be contributing full length articles, and they have their home bases to post from.

[Go] to the websites of Phi Beta Cons contributors, most notably the Pope Center, The College Fix, the Center for Individual Rights, and the National Association of Scholars.

Among their final posts, one suggesting that higher education ought be thought of more like the Roman Catholic Church than like a political party, let alone a business.

Instead, let’s compare the university scene to a large, highly respected, and powerful system that transcended the mundane world of the marketplace – the medieval Catholic Church. (This example, like the housing bubble, is not original with me; I’m just taking it more seriously now.) The Catholic Church was not a market-based phenomenon; it was a complex arrangement of forces—economic, social, moral, political, and, of course, religious—that had enormous control over the people of Christendom.

The Church was a universal (that is, across-Europe) institution, marked by solemn ceremonies in black robes and regalia; formal hierarchies (bishops, priests, monks, friars); promise of life in the hereafter; inquisitions to stamp out heresy; charitable hospitals; its own recondite language; and enormous wealth provided by proprietorship of vast expanses of land and by tithing by the masses.

Most of these aspects have counterparts in the university today. The robed rituals, the hierarchy of titles, the pressure against free speech, the medical facilities, the intellectual idiom, and the wealth – all are visible today in our colleges and universities. While universities don’t offer promises of the hereafter, they offer more immediate promises — material wealth in the near future. And today’s taxpayer must pay a tithe or more; in some states, 10 percent of the state budget goes to higher education, and the majority of schools are tax-exempt.

What knits these forces together into a remarkably stable system lasting hundreds of years? In my view, it was faith that gave the Catholic Church its power, and it is blind faith in the promises – from good jobs to economic growth — that gives higher education its power today.

And so far, that makes it pretty stable.

Yes, right up to the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door.

It is a corrupt system, and it stinketh.

For sackcloth and ashes, substitute virtue signalling.

For new orders of mendicant monks, particularly as the parishioners started questioning authority, substitute new diversity initiatives.

For indulgences sold for the remission of sin, substitute carbon offsets, or hybrid cars for the motor pool.

For carving your name on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica, substitute naming rights at the new classroom building, or, more frequently, the new athletic facility.

It is a corrupt system, and it stinketh.

And in the same way that the ability to mass-produce Gutenberg Bibles turned Martin Luther into first an advocate for universal literacy and later for finding God in your own way, the ability to mass-produce information content to read and understand on your own, without the interference of a brainwashed social justice warrior to interpret, the reformation will come.

REALLY USEFUL ENGINES.

Last weekend, Thomas the Tank Engine and Percy the Green Engine entertained youngsters at the Illinois Railway Museum.

That's from a year ago, and again we have rain overnight and a blue norther blowing to report.

The Karlson Brothers Circus also brought out a tank engine to switch the wagon shops.

That's Ludwig der Starke, a Prussian tank engine, switching a horse car.  Two sleeping cars for workmen are behind.  Any resemblance of the paint job to the Chicago Aurora and Elgin is deliberate.  I had some visitors to the show asking if I had a lineup of Republicans.  Nope, these elephants are in too orderly a line ...

DECAYING CITIES, RUN BY DEMOCRATS.

Pry the vassals from their squires.  John Kass of Chicago's Tribune concurs.

For decade after decade, Democrats have controlled policy and politics in the broken cities. This is the proof of Democratic success.

The broken schools have been run by Democrats for decades. The broken institutions are run by Democrats.

The political corruption in these cities is Democratic corruption, where government is the hammer used to beat others into forking over their cash.

The corruption tax presses down upon the economic wastelands, where there are no jobs to be had.

Roger Kimball concurs, seeing Donald Trump attempting to pry the vassals from their squires.

As patronizing Democratic programs stifled freedom and individual initiative, and erected an increasingly burdensome (and expensive) governmental cocoon around their minority charges?

The black vote has been largely in the pocket of its new plantation owners.

The "Great Society" did not abolish poverty. That was never the intention. It institutionalized poverty.

Jennifer Rubin of Washington's Post cautions, pointing out failures is easy, suggesting improvements is harder.

Trump doesn’t say, for example, if he’d be willing to spend more on worker training, education and other targeted programs that might address youth unemployment; he does, however, favor a tax plan that hugely benefits the rich. Until Friday, he hadn’t talked much about his plans to fight poverty and discrimination and we still don’t know what he would do, for example, to increase the success rate of African Americans in college or increase access to capital for African American entrepreneurs.

But liberating the vassals isn't only for conservatives.  Witness Jake Johnson's "The Scourge of Neoliberalism: Why the Democratic Party Is Failing the Poor."

Though Democrats were happy to take their votes on election day, lower-income Americans were increasingly faced with a party that had taken on a managerial posture, one characterized by both a growing commitment to market principles and an abandonment of the notion — fostered by the New Deal period — that government could play a significant role in improving the material conditions of the population.

Mr Johnson puts his marker down in favor of more explicitly redistributionist policies, including the creation of more "affordable housing" in prosperous neighborhoods, something that the Democrat-voting squires have none of.  "[P]rogressive attempts to lift poor families in the city — to provide better opportunities for housing, education, and other means of upward mobility — have been met with strong resistance from wealthier communities that, though they increasingly vote Democratic, are wary of attempts to integrate poor and rich neighborhoods."  There are merits in allowing housing markets to work in such a way as to expose poor people to the life-management skills of the middle class, rather than warehousing them in high rises or clustering them in decaying neighborhoods.  That's a post for another day.

At the same time, as Right Wisconsin's Savvy Pundit notes, too frequently policy responses to poverty come in the wake of riots.  "We do all these individuals and organizations a disservice if we act as if the recent riots need to somehow 'spur the community into action.' They’ve been in action for decades!" Generally not in a good way.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is now better known for his late-night pub crawl with some buddies than for his ability to swim faster emulating an eel rather than performing his assigned stroke.  National Review's Maggie Gallagher notes, "His antics don’t speak well of American culture in the age of Trump and Clinton."  She goes on to describe his behavior as a "man-boy problem."  Actually, it's what happens when you enable dysfunction for some people, but on performance-enhancing drugs.

“Let’s give these kids a break—sometimes you take actions that you later regret. They had fun, they made a mistake, life goes on,” Mario Andrada, communications director for the Rio Games, whom the Washington Post described as the “human shield of Rio,” said on Thursday.

But of course, as many have pointed out, Ryan Lochte is not a kid — he’s a 32-year-old man, or man-boy.

Standard enable-the-sports-stars stuff, which Mr Lochte probably benefitted from starting in middle school.  But there will be consequences.

Winning, carousing, having lots of sex, being sort-of famous, lying to cover up one’s own misdeeds; these are the values of all too many “successful” Americans in the age of Trump and Clinton. I hope Lochte experiences some consequences in the form of reduced value to those corporations who help him cash in on Olympic fame by using his name and face to sell their products: Speedo, Gatorade, Mutual of Omaha, Nissan Altima, Gillette, Proctor & Gamble, are you listening?

Rod Dreher would at least like a plea-bargain.

I wish they would send Lochte back to Brazil to face up to what he has done. Maybe the Brazilians will agree to stand down from extradition in exchange for Lochte spending the next month here in the subtropics, helping people muck their houses. Maybe it will teach him something. Sounds like this 32-year-old has a lot to learn about manhood from a 10-year-old Louisiana boy named J.J.

As for the news media, who have made Ryan Lochte and his spoiled-child act into days of headlines, well, I’m afraid they are beyond rehabilitation.

Ah, but the Nothing But Clinton network, which was also covering the Olympics, devoted several segments to an interview with Mr Lochte. He sounded positively Clintonian, in a parsing-words sort of way.

But, as with Crooked Hillary, the enabling began long ago.  As National Review's Patrick Brennan notes, there is a massive sports infrastructure in the United States, involving a lot of public money, even if there's no Soviet Style Ministry of Sport doing the coordinating.  No.  The enabling begins as the stars emerge.

Other countries do have nominal university sports programs, and Nick Saban’s salary certainly isn’t boosting us at the Olympics. But even a tiny slice of the budget of NCAA programs would dwarf the budgets of, say, Great Britain’s UK Sport, and possibly China’s own opaquely funded sports efforts.

Meanwhile, at the high school level, numbers are hard to come by, but Americans almost certainly spend much more money and time on promoting sports in our K-12 educational system than our peer countries do, too.

And then there’s the U.S. Olympic Committee and the whole range of nonprofits, like USA Swimming or US Sailing, that help organize and train athletes outside of our schools. In addition to program fees and revenues, they rely on donations from foundations, individuals, and corporations – all subsidized by the federal government up to 40 or so cents on the dollar, thanks to our charitable tax deduction (which is uniquely generous on an international level).

Now, I’m not saying this all adds up to sports socialism. I’m not objecting to any of it in particular, really: Supporting civil society with tax incentives is certainly a good, American idea; college and high school sports are great, etc. Voters and politicians like sports, and publicizing how much public money goes to support them may not change policies one iota.

It's not the money, it's not even the reliance on the small platoons. Rather, it's the message the young people get.  All the accolades go to the successful athlete, not the successful 4-H tinkerer or chess player; and we have the vulgar "mathlete" for competitions in algorithm-slinging.

Yes, Mr Lochte stands to lose a lot of endorsement income he might otherwise have earned.

The revelation that he allegedly lied about the incident—feeding into the stereotypes about crime in Brazil and pumping himself up with his nonchalant “whatever” attitude in response to a supposed gun pointed to his head—may “virtually eliminate him from future endorsements,” Bob Williams, chief executive of the celebrity-endorsement deal firm Burns Entertainment & Sports Marketing, said to the Wall Street Journal. “Advertisers have become far less tolerant of controversial behavior of any type, and this is yet another type of controversial behavior that doesn’t reflect well on a brand.”

This just in. Speedo to Ryan Lochte: You're fired.

Here's Betsy Newmark, this morning.  "There's a moral lesson for your children when you're trying to teach them not to lie. You can't look to today's political leaders, but you can sure point to Ryan Lochte."  That was a talking point on conservative radio on Friday: why are Olympic athletes held to higher standards for celebrity endorsements than political figures, particularly Democrats, are?

Two possibilities.  One, companies that hire celebrities for endorsements are sending a signal of permanence and probity.  A cheating athlete undermines the message.  Two, there is a much deeper bench in athletics than there is in politics, or in much of business and education.  Think about it: a century of the Womens' Christian Temperance Union and second wave and third wave feminism and the League of Women Voters and the American Association of [Democrat] University Women and the starting lineup is Naggin' Crooked Hillary and Preachy Elizabeth Warren?

Seen: the lineup of Olympians and medals in the dozens.

Not seen: political leaders, of any party, with probity.

A FIRE IN THE LIBERAL PLANTATION?

The affirmative action asterisk is real, and preferential admissions set less-prepared students up for failure.  Perhaps administrators can attempt to squelch inconvenient recognitions of these realities on social media.

It's another matter when the social work faculty at Smith College catch on.  In this case, the Distressed Material is applying to do the Master's in Social Work.

“Why do you, as administrators, continue to offer differential outcomes to students of color, in spite of overwhelming data that demonstrates that many of our students, including white­-identified students, cannot offer clients a social work intervention that is based upon competence, skills and ethics,” [professor Dennis] Miehls said in his letter. Miehls went so far as to call the admissions process “tainted” because of how willing it was to admit unprepared non-white students.

A second letter to the administration, from the adjunct faculty (who are probably on the front line dealing with the Distressed Material -- in a graduate program?  Downsizing is a false economy even among the Seven Sisters.) goes so far as to suggest that social work requires skill sets. "But beyond that, we must acknowledge that social work — like every other kind of work — is not for everyone, and we have to stop pretending that it can be."

Predictably, the social justice warriors are on the case.

Christopher Watkins, a protest leader, complained that a “disproportionate amount” of black and Hispanic students at the school have been placed under academic review, which seems to reflect the situation the letters complained about. The protesting students, though, believe their poorer performance reflects systemic racism in the school, rather than lower overall readiness.

That "disproportionate amount" says everything the literate reader needs to know about college readiness.  But after all the rhetoric, it's business as usual in social work.

On Wednesday, after this article was published, Marianne Yoshioka, dean of the social work school, released a statement that said in part, "The Smith College School for Social Work is one of the most selective social work programs in the country. Our standards are exceptionally high for those we admit, and we take pride in each of our highly intelligent, capable and compassionate students, particularly throughout the recent campus involvement they have encouraged. For the past year, prompted by these students, we as a community have been engaged in important, productive and collaborative work to continually evolve as an antiracism organization. Social work is not a profession that effectively operates within the status quo. We are clinical professionals specifically committed to social justice and systemic change. The determination brought by our students, the courage they have shown and the accountability they have demanded will challenge us to fulfill our commitment alongside the next generation of social workers."

We have much to look forward to.  The Daily Caller coverage leaves as undetermined the status of disciplinary action against those troublesome letter-writers.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, CHILDREN OF ALL AGES!

See you on down the road.

EVERYTHING ELSE IS DETAILS.

Milwaukee's Frederick McKissack reflects on the different life outcomes of his nephew and the latest casualty of street life.  "One was nurtured on the street; the other was expected to do well by family and teachers."  Joanne Jacobs, ruminating on Hillbilly Elegy, sees the same dynamic at work in the hollers and in the 'hood.  "If Mama ain’t functional (and Daddy’s gone), ain’t nobody functional."

Not much that public policy can do, when the village has all the redeeming features of the trailer park, the projects, and the hippie commune.  It's the trashy culture, stupid.

CONSERVATIVE INSURGENCY: THE SEQUEL.

Kurt Schlichter's original effort envisioned two terms for Hillary, with conditions getting worse.

Now, he's envisioning regime change after one term.

The Tea Party was a polite request for fairness and respect, but the elite and its media lapdogs spat on you.

Donald Trump’s movement was an impolite request for fairness and respect, but the elite and their media lapdogs spat on your and, as we now know, rigged Hillary Clinton’s election.

Today, we are no longer demanding fairness and respect, and we will have it … by any means necessary!

For too long, the elites looked down on us even as they stole our labor and our heritage to enrich themselves. For too long, they hid behind laws that apply only to us and not to them, behind a media that lied to us to protect them, behind an economic system that stole from us to protect them. That ends today!

Enemies of the people and their lapdogs in the media, it is time for you to be held accountable!

It's a hypothetical inauguration address, framed as "a warning of what could come should the ruling class continue to at best ignore or actively oppress a large chunk of the citizenry."  That's cathartic, and it might keep the base involved.

Ultimately, though, "throw their briefcases into the Potomac" doesn't replace bad policy with good policy.  On the other hand, emergent opting-out in a variety of ways might lead to improvements.

MORE FALSE ECONOMIES.

Six years ago, I took a ride on the Coast Starlight.  In those days, there was a wine tasting in the Pacific Parlour Car, for a small extra charge.  I skipped on that ... paying money to indulge in Arch Deluxe, which is what the whole wine thing is, is contrary to my Yankee principles.  But the Parlour Car, a converted Santa Fe high level lounge, is a good place to hang out before dinner.

Prosit!

The wine-tastings are still on offer, but travel writer Jim Loomis wasn't impressed with his experience.

I was anticipating the kind of presentation I have enjoyed literally dozens of times before, with the attendant pouring one wine at a time and offering a brief description of each. This time, however, he placed three small plastic “wine glasses” on the little table in front of me and poured a red wine into the first glass, another red into the second glass, and a white wine into the third glass. And thus ended the wine tasting. A woman seated across from me–this was also her first long-distance Amtrak ride- rolled her eyes.

This half-assed stuff is really starting to piss me off. Sleeping car passengers are already being nickel-and-dimed. I don’t like it, although I understand why the Amtrak brass thinks it’s necessary. But obviously the on-board staff has seen it and it’s affected how some of them do their jobs: cutting a few corners here, saving a little time there. It is by no means universal, but I think it’s understandable. After all, management is doing it.

But it’s deplorable. A car attendant or a dining car server taking shortcuts and not providing the kind of attention and service passengers deserve and for which they are already paying top dollar — that’s not helping to improve Amtrak’s bottom line. In fact, when a family of four takes their first overnight train ride, it’s their interaction with those on-board employees that can boost the overall experience rating “good” to “memorable” … and result in another Amtrak trip next year.

Downsizing is a false economy. It's rampant all over Amtrak's network, including periodic withdrawals of the Parlour Cars for "maintenance."  (That's another way the old Soviet Union concealed that they were running out of everything, pretending that facilities were being "rehabilitated."  Only slightly more positive than rehabilitating enemies of people shot in Stalin years.)

And it puts staff in a difficult position: make the effort right, and after a while, it's a grind to have to apologize or explain.  Or cut corners and make do.

[S]omewhere on the To-Do list has got to be a serious effort to boost on-board employee morale and restore consistency and quality-control to the standards and procedures that have been successful in the past. Case in point: the parlor car attendant I mentioned above. Yes, he did a half-assed job with the wine tasting, but otherwise he was, in fact, friendly and personable.

The on board crews need to see and hear some optimism from the Amtrak leadership. They’re still doing their jobs capably and professionally, but they’re discouraged. Somehow, that has to change.

Yes, and the people who have other options will explore other options. Despite the depredations of Hope and Change, employers continue to seek people of ability. Some might even equip their hires with the right working conditions and the tools to do the job.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY IS ONE THING; CULTURAL RENEWAL IS ANOTHER.

That's today's Trenchant Observation, coming midway in J. D. Davidson's Federalist essay, "The Plight Of The White Working Class Isn't Economic, It's Cultural."  It's really time to revisit the Moynihan Report, with deviancy being defined down for all.

Trump supporters are not in fact suffering disproportionately from the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas, or competition from immigrants. They might not be poor themselves, but they live in places that are in a state of crisis, where the pathologies of the white working class are manifesting themselves in visceral ways: heroin overdoses, single-parent families, rampant opioid addiction, vast swaths of adult men on disability and out of the work force. It’s no wonder they feel like something has gone horribly wrong in their country. It has—but not quite in the way they suppose.

Indeed.  Stop enabling the dysfunction, you get less of it.

On the other hand, fifty or sixty years of affirming the authenticity (a euphemism for "behaving badly") of people in straitened circumstances behaving badly, rather than as a matter of education and public policy, inculcating the habits of the middle class, brings us to a pass where the "successful people feel so different."

National Review runs another excerpt from J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy -- it's on the Cold Spring Shops shopping list, but there are car repairs first -- from which it becomes evident that the one transgressivity that isn't celebrated is great ambition.  (And that might include in sports, too, something that isn't true in the 'hood.)

I may not have known multiplication that day, but when I came home and told Papaw (my grandfather) about my heartbreak, he turned it into triumph. I learned multiplication and division before dinner. And for two years after that, he and I would practice increasingly complex math once a week, with an ice cream reward for solid performance. I would beat myself up when I didn’t understand a concept, and storm off, defeated. But after I’d pout for a few minutes, Papaw was always ready to go again. My mother was never much of a math person, but she took me to the public library before I could read, got me a library card, showed me how to use it, and always made sure I had access to kids’ books at home.

In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.

Hillbilly attitudes took a long time to emerge.  Recognizing the evolutionary disadvantage they confer might also take time.  As might a populist Republican Party, and a more explicitly technocratic and gentrified Democratic Party.