ON MY WORKBENCH.

A month ago, we looked at a string of freight cars in various states of restoration.  It's been a good month for relaxing on the back deck and quaffing beer, although the occasional humid day or slightly chilly night or, for a while, hockey on the radio, has provided opportunities to continue the work.

Two of the brass hopper cars are now on the railroad, earning income and paying per diem.

Norfolk and Western you're probably familiar with.  Milwaukee Racine and Troy is the model railroad staff of Kalmbach, the publisher of Model Railroader and Trains, are building in the break room of their office.  That railroad is an HO layout set late in the second-generation diesel, pre-Staggers Act era.  I got a little advice from Model Railroader staff on what a transition era hopper car would look like.  The herald is based on the New England Coal and Coke herald, and it foreshadows the contemporary MR&T herald that looks a little like something Robert Indiana might have come up with.

I found another brass tank car back on the shelves. These projects are not being worked on in any particular order, or it might be more accurate to say that the less challenging ones, requiring only minor soldering, drilling, and tapping, get the mechanical work done and go to the paint shop first.

I've also refurbished some unusual older style box cars, a ventilated fruit car and a short automobile car.  Those required additional weight, perhaps the right sort of couplers, and the addition of steps or grab irons that fell off over the years.  Note these are all cars from swap meets, which is to say, the work of other people perhaps out of the hobby or perhaps who have crossed the final summit, and they're still running.

WE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM.

That's sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic, a week into the house arrests.

As it turns out, the reality-based, science-friendly communities and information sources many of us depend on also largely failed. We had time to prepare for this pandemic at the state, local, and household level, even if the government was terribly lagging, but we squandered it because of widespread asystemic thinking: the inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics. We faltered because of our failure to consider risk in its full context, especially when dealing with coupled risk—when multiple things can go wrong together. We were hampered by our inability to think about second- and third-order effects and by our susceptibility to scientism—the false comfort of assuming that numbers and percentages give us a solid empirical basis. We failed to understand that complex systems defy simplistic reductionism.

Widespread asystemic thinking may have cost America the entire month of February, and much of what we’d normally consider credible media were part of that failure.

As of that writing, the Wuhan coronavirus still appeared to be scary.

Health systems are prone to nonlinear dynamics exactly because hospitals are resource-limited entities that necessarily strive for efficiency. Hospitals in wealthy nations have some slack built in for surge capacity, but not that much. As a result, they can treat only so many people at once, and they have particular bottlenecks for their most expensive parts, such as ventilators and ICUs. The flu season may be tragic for its victims; however, an additional, unexpected viral illness in the same season isn’t merely twice as tragic as the flu, even if it has a similar R0 or CFR: It is potentially catastrophic.

"Potentially," yes. Five months into "fifteen days to slow the spread," it's clear that the continued quarantine theater is no longer helpful.  Just go read Jeffrey Tucker.  "[S]chools should never have closed, ... [B]eaches should have stayed open, ...[B]ars, dance clubs, and professional meetings should have gone ahead. Calm and normal social functioning were necessary to deal a swift blow to the virus so that the vulnerable populations would not be forced to shelter in place for many months, much less a full year."  I recommend that you read and understand the whole essay, and follow the links to various epidemiologists and other health practitioners, and I concur with his conclusion.  "Lockdowns have done nothing to protect anyone while creating astonishing chaos and confusion all around, with no evidence that they have minimized mortality for any groups."

In addition, note the time series comparing deaths per million among countries, tests per million residents (not surprisingly, the small countries are testing more of their residents), the case fatality rates, and the infections counted.  In the United States, "Not only is the epidemic becoming less deadly, but its spread has slowed."  If, as this essayist suggests, the confirmed infections are a substantial undercount of total infections, the problem might be even less severe.

I note also that the last update of hospital capacity by the Centers for Disease Control was issued in mid-July.  The Institute for Health Metrics are still guessing at future loads on hospitals. but that chart makes no reference to hospital, intensive care unit, or ventilator capacities.

Taken together, dear readers, if the original premiss of the house arrests was to keep the hospitals and intensive care units from being overwhelmed, and the people who have the capability of or the responsibility for keeping track of the utilization rates are not sounding alarms about pressure on that capacity, is it not the case that those house arrests have long since served their purpose?

JUST REPEAL THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT.

I confess to not being a fan of several of the so-called Progressive Era amendments to the Federal Constitution. "Do we get to include all the policy failures as well? Direct election of senators? Prohibition of liquor? Income taxation? All the administrative state apparatus that came with two wars and the New Deal?"

Now comes Larry Hackney, suggesting that direct election of Senators and state Governors gives the thickly settled areas too much electoral power within states.  "Currently, population centers in many states — New York, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and California, just to name a few — can sway the vote for one presidential or statewide candidate (governor, senator), giving that state to that candidate even though the other candidate won the majority of the counties in that state."

I'm not sure whether determining a state governor on the basis of counties carried is a good idea or not: presumably there are state legislatures that ought to be exercising their powers, especially in states where authoritarian governors are arbitrarily extending the house arrests, and simulating the presidential election with a fixed number of counties is likely to cause the same sorts of electoral anomalies and ill will that the current assignment of electoral votes based on the size of a House of Representatives that was last changed in 1929 is producing.

But putting the authority to appoint senators back in the hands of the state legislatures?  That might be a good idea, as the direct election of senators simply generates a hundred showboaters who, once they have put together their in-state coalition and gone to Washington City, start thinking of themselves as potential presidents.  Yes, a legislatively determined senator might still immediately want to get into the presidential conversation, but legislators might be able to deliberate over whether sending a person likely to behave in that way to the federal capital is desirable.

WILL THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT HELP UNDO THE GLADIATOR ECONOMY, OR PERPETUATE IT?

At the writing of my most recent previous post on the gladiator economy,  there was still uncertainty about whether the professional basketball playoffs would continue.  As of now, the games are about to resume, although the pregame coverage I am listening to is more about the importance of the job action to the wider society than it is about matchups or the necessity of the Bucks finishing this round and moving on.

A coaching acquaintance from long ago alerted me to an essay by Washington State deputy athletics director Bryan B. Blair that, while notionally about the value of diversity and inclusion, really says the quiet parts about the gladiator economy out loud.

My mom made sure I was in the “gifted & talented” or honors classes all the way from middle school until high school. Being the only or one of a few minorities in those settings provided a daily lesson on how different my world was growing up compared to my white classmates. Over the years, I learned how to navigate that experience, and unfortunately learned how to cope with the feelings of isolation and loneliness that came with it. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the racial and socioeconomic disparities that led to me being one of those few.

Put another way, had he been among the run-of-the-halls students picked last for basketball, he might still have found an opportunity to shine as a mathematician or musician or scholar of German, even though he might still think of himself as on the outside.  But he showed a talent for sports, and that was where he found something in common with people of other backgrounds.

Where I grew up, the races were often separated, from where they lived to where they socialized. The one space everyone came together was sports! This reality clicked for me at an early age and remained with me as I entered a career in college athletics. Seeing people from all walks of life high fiving and hugging after a touchdown was a powerful sight. On those Saturdays in the fall, everyone of all colors, shapes and sizes comes together to worship in the house of football, but the next morning they often go to completely different churches on completely different sides of town.

Ultimately, my why is based on the transformative power of sports: its ability to unify diverse groups, to change the life of a young person that would never access higher education, but for, [c.q.] college athletics, and the way young people often look up to our athletes as quasi-superheroes.

It is to that "but for college athletics" that I wish to turn.  In the school he attended, it's likely that the students who were up to it could thrive in college mathematics, or music, or Germanic languages.  What, though, would be the fate of Toronto Raptor star Fred Van Vleet's less athletic classmates at Rockford Auburn be?  The school has a graduation rate of 63%, with a 42% chronic absenteeism rate, which in the sugar-coat-the-ills language of public instruction, qualifies it as a "comprehensive school," the category for any school among the lowest-performing five per cent of schools in Illinois, or any high school with a graduation rate less than 65%.  Among the academic performance indicators, some 23% of the students are proficient under the science assessment, whatever that is, and 43% of their graduates require remediation at community colleges.

THE INSURGENCY COMES TO THE ROCK RIVER.

It's a Boat for the Blue boat parade, not a Trump boat parade per se.  There might have been some crossover of participants, although the photographs show a preponderance of blue balloons and thin blue line flags.

PUT NOT YOUR FAITH IN ALLOCATION CZARS.

It seems like no matter how many times I warn you, there's always going to be somebody who screws it up.

Last November, Gov. Gavin Newsom named his cabinet secretary Ana Matosantos the new state “Energy Czar.” Gov. Newsom is on record that Ana is a “genius” and a person of “unrivaled professional accomplishment.” Whatever Matosantos did since November failed to prevent the current round of rolling blackouts. That should come as no surprise.

Matosantos has a degree in political science and feminist studies but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed her state finance director, a post more suitable for a proven expert with advanced degrees in economics. Blacked out Californians might also wonder about her energy experience.

My Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster has already noted parallels between California's current troubles and the plot of Arthur Hailey's Overload. I never expected to invoke a Kurt Schlichter novel in a post about energy policies, but that "political science and feminist studies" is spot on (and the power goes off.)

In California, though, showing fealty to Gaia matters more than reliable power to the tract houses.

In a particularly obtuse report on NPR's Morning Edition [August 19], Union of Concerned Scientists energy analyst Mark Specht asserted, "the solution is definitely not more natural gas plants. Really if anything this is an indication that California should speed up its investments in clean energy and energy storage."

NPR reporter Lauren Sommer followed up by observing, "After all, he [Specht] said climate change is making heat waves worse, so burning more fossil fuels to deal with that is somewhat counterproductive."

Completely ignored in the reporting is that California has been shutting down a huge source of safe, reliable, always-on, non-carbon dioxide–emitting, climate-friendly electricity—that is, nuclear power. In 2013, state regulators forced the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant that supplied electricity to 1.4 million households. By 2025, California regulators plan to close down the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant that can supply electricity to 3 million households.

The problem of climate change, along with the blackouts resulting from the inherent vagaries of wind and solar power, are an indication that California should not only keep its nuclear power plants running but also build many more of them.

Let the record show, first, that any organization using "concerned" in its title is attempting to hide its real (and more dangerous) wishes behind an anodyne title.  Such is the leper's bell of people who affect to trade for the (it's never a singular noun, dear reader) public interest.

Then consider, dear reader, what is going to happen in Illinois, where Facebook are building a large data center just south of DeKalb, which they hope to power with a wind farm, while Exelon are going to close two nuclear generating stations in the next year or so.

IT'S NOT A BACKLASH, IT'S A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

I've spelled out my preferred position previously.  "When people get tired of things being broken, they seek to restore a state of good repair."  Four different public intellectuals with bigger platforms than mine are making the same point, in four different ways.

Lead off with American Greatness, and V. D. Hanson continuing his case for re-electing Our President.  "Trump, of 'Crooked Hillary,' 'lock her up,' and 'Sleepy Joe' infamy, was more likely to react concretely to the plight of the inner city and the economic aspirations of minorities and the white working-class, who were not just crushed by globalization but so often ignored by their supposed champions of both parties."

Next up is Andrew Sullivan, currently relegated to the blogosphere, hoping for a favorable form of Mr Biden taking office, but fearing the worst.  "If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue."  Particularly when Mr Biden's party has handed that issue to a master persuader.  "These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks."  Tossing Andrew Sullivan from The Atlantic, on the other hand?

Third comes Rod Dreher, observing that the kid militia in Kenosha might reflect that public desire for a state of good repair.  "I am reporting that [shooting suspect Kyle Rittenhouse] is fast becoming a hero among a lot of people who are sick of the rioting. This may be a terrible thing, but it is really happening, and there’s a reason for it. It’s a sign, I think, of a building backlash — one that could result in a lot more violence. It doesn’t do us any good to pretend this is not happening because it frightens or offends us."

Batting cleanup is Reason's Brian Doherty, "Bourgeois Libertarianism Can Save America."  Specifically, "State power simply cannot rule a people if even a small, energized minority refuses to let it. If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the 'right side.'" Left unsaid, suppressing that small energized minority is a possibility, but it is not likely to be a victory the winners can live with.

Alas, the past half century of deconstructing bourgeois norms, and the past century of the Cult of the Presidency and the administrative state, all provide a lot of inertia that any effort to achieve a state of good repair must overcome.

THE IDIOCY OF AUTHENTICITY.

The purists come for ... Kamala Harris. "Emerson College Associate Professor in American Studies Roger House, wrote an op-ed in the Hill sharing the “painful” experience of watching Black women pretend to be excited over Harris’s nomination."

What's his beef?

First, Harris’s selection revisits a stereotype of racial preference and social acceptance in America: fair skin, straight hair, a fluid racial background disconnected from the traditional Black experience, and an easy appeal to the inclusive sensibility of white liberals.

Second, the selection paints into a corner Black women leaders with more authentic experience. It forces them to embrace a historical first that undercuts their own natural beauty, culture and hard work to earn a place in the sun. At the same time, it allows Harris to ride on the coattails of the civil rights struggles and achievements. So, once again, the Black political class finds itself somewhat duped by its over-dependence on liberals; in fact, one could say that they are party to their own undoing.

In these racially divisive times, the VP choice sent a not-so-subtle message to the Black folk: It expressed that Black lives matter to the Democratic Party elite, but that the elite may value those Blacks of light skin and untraditional background a little more.

I have two gripes, one aesthetic, one substantive.

Note that he didn't mention the senator's voice, which puts me in mind of Charlie Brown's teacher, every time she opens her mouth.  (I ask again, why are people whose career success so often depends on making speeches so reluctant to hire voice coaches?)  But I will concur or differ with the senator on what she says, not on how hard it is to listen to what she says.

Substantively, I wonder if the professor inadvertently confirmed what The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers have alleged for some time, that is, there is a liberal plantation; and that Democrats garner votes in part by using the continued misery of their constituents as grounds for continuing the policies that keep their constituents miserable.

To the professor, though, the phony authenticity matters, at least at the margin.

Surely, some in the Black political class were crestfallen when the Biden campaign bypassed numerous women representing authentic Black communities? These included Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass, Florida Rep. Val Demings, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms, Stacey Abrams, the 2018 gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, and, to a lesser extent, former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice.

Even more, the talented women politicians were put in the position of runner-up contestants in a Miss America pageant. They had to stand in the figurative public spotlight with awkward smiles and applaud as media pundits crowned Harris with the rambling description as the “first African American, first Asian American, and first woman of color” vice presidential nominee.

It's unlikely that any of those possible candidates will sit the election out because having a less authentic black woman dominates risking the return of an orange man in their personal scales of happiness.  For my part, it wouldn't matter, as I would agree or disagree with the public positions of any of those candidates on the basis of current positions and past stances.

Perhaps, dear reader, that obscure academicians are taking to The Hill to raise aesthetic objections suggests that despite pandemic and quarantine, unemployment and urban unrest, hockey playoffs in August, things are not as bad as the most pessimistic sorts would have us believe.

A FUN POLL ON A HOT AFTERNOON.

Sorry, that is a lot of gloomy content this afternoon.  Sometimes life is like that.

I'll close with the observation that Oktoberfest season approaches, and if you have the appropriate hardware at home, dear reader, you can make do under house arrest conditions.

In addition, Appleton's Post-Crescent have an elimination tournament featuring Oktoberfest beers from various Wisconsin craft brewers.  Go, give it a shot, if you are able.  Don't drink and drive!

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE SEASON.

"Models are error-prone at best and fundamentally flawed at worst."  That's Aaron Gordon, transportation analyst, displeased with the state of the art in transportation demand modelling, one of the required steps in getting matching funds to build useless roads. In addition, he notes, "Either way, nearly everyone agreed the biggest question is not whether the models can yield better results, but why we rely on them so much in the first place," and "In other words, the model shuts people up. It may not be honest, but in the world of transportation politics, there’s nothing more valuable than that."

The extension is straightforward.

TELLING NORMAL PEOPLE THEY SUCK ISN'T A WINNING STRATEGY.

The continued house arrests, economic stagnation, and wilding in cities and states dictated to by Democrat governors is leading people to relocate, sometimes despite great capital losses.  That's got some libertarian and Republican strategists worried that these refugees will bring their bigger-government policy preferences with them.  Maybe not, suggests Don Surber, after a review of coverage of the Republican convention, which is welcoming the yeomanry, irrespective of creed or color.  "Those people fleeing the Democrat Chaos are not going to vote Democrat in their new environs, any more than someone fleeing Cuba registers as a communist."  The messaging seems to be working, it's troubling Never Trump social director S. E. Cupp.  "And while we’ve been hammering away at Trump’s obvious racism and fomenting of white supremacist rage to gin up his base, we may forget that some of his voters really do just care about the fate of their small businesses, the burden of unfair trade deals on their manufacturing industry, the ravages of an opioid crisis in their community."  It's possible to be put off by the rage of black nationalists or whatever description you want to apply to the woke mob without looking for extra large sheets or Sam Browne belts, young lady.

THE GLADIATORS GO ON STRIKE.

Kenosha and Wisconsin officials might have scheduled the Wednesday press conference on events in Kenosha to wrap up in time for a little bit of summer relief, in the form of a basketball playoff game.  (What can I say, it's a weird year, with the 2019-2020 title, if there is to be one, being determined about the time training camps ordinarily open.)  Then came word from Orlando that ... the Milwaukee Bucks were not warming up in advance of the tip-off.  They had other things on their minds.

Bucks players issued a joint statement, read by George Hill and Sterling Brown outside the locker room hours after the game was scheduled to be played:

“The past four months have shed a light on the ongoing racial injustices facing our African-American communities. Citizens around the country have used their voices and platforms to speak out against these wrongdoings.“… Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we’ve seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, and the additional shooting of protestors. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.

“When we take the court and represent Milwaukee and Wisconsin, we are expected to play at a high level, give maximum effort and hold each other accountable. We hold ourselves to that standard, and in this moment, we are demanding the same from our lawmakers and law enforcement.

Mr Brown had an unpleasant encounter with Milwaukee police a few seasons ago, and more than a few basketball players come from rough neighborhoods where the law enforcement might rub people the wrong way.  The Bucks were willing to forfeit their game with Orlando's Magic; that team declined the forfeit and sat out in solidarity.

LAW ENFORCEMENT EMERGED TO PROTECT SUSPECTS FROM THE PEOPLE'S JUSTICE.

That's a point various participants at Insta Pundit have been making ever since the "abolish the police" crowd started exploiting arrests gone wrong earlier this summer.

For the most part, it has been a theoretical point, although what happened Tuesday in Kenosha ought to be a warning that attempts by revolutionaries to overwhelm law enforcement in a perverse sort of Cloward and Piven strategy will not lead to the disappearance of the police: rather, the law enforcement will be spontaneous and perhaps even more dangerous.

Adam Rogan photograph retrieved from Kenosha News.

Armed teenagers, not somewhere in the former Yugoslavia or south of the equator.  Kenosha.  Wisconsin.  Supposedly the land of the free and the home of the brave.  I'll let people with more range safety experience than I comment on their form.

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

The Railwayblogger asks a number of prominent British ferroequinologists, "How did you get interested in railways?"  A number of them grew up railroad-aware from an early age, and a few caught the bug later on.  Enjoy.

BACK TO SCHOOL.

Classes have resumed at Northern Illinois University.  There's some sort of a bubble for students living on campus, and as far as I know, class meetings are still virtual.  I might be wrong, but I have no incentive to study more.

I'm wondering whether this illustration, which has come out in a variety of forms, might have some value in teaching the survey of political economy class.

My first puzzlement is with the premise of the picture, that has the youngsters sneaking a peek into the baseball stadium from beyond the center field fence.  What would happen if a class contemplated how those buzzwords would apply to getting the kids inside the stadium?

There's a straightforward first cut at "equality."  The baseball stadium shall issue tickets to all comers without undue preference and prejudice.  In its simplest form, anyone with the means to buy a ticket gets to buy a ticket, provided the ticket is available.  "Equity" gets more challenging: are we looking at ensuring that any kid has the means to buy a ticket, or, if it's a game with a large crowd, that they get the same chance at standing in line as everyone else?  Or is it equitable that the kids queue first?  Or that children should be seen and not heard?

Now the "capitalism" panel: and I've been around this stuff long enough to be leery of using "capitalism" to refer to anything.  Perhaps we're looking at trade-tested betterments: the boxes are available in such abundance that the kids can put bigger stacks up.  But then, I live close to Chicago, where, long ago, building owners saw the value of putting grandstands on the roofs of buildings with a view of a baseball park, and then the baseball club and the building owners get into litigation over who pays how much for the right to use the grandstands, and how much the baseball club gets.

Taking the deeper view, though, isn't the point of trade-tested betterments to have better seats for the kids, at better prices, inside the stadium, where a better team is on the field?

AFTER THE PRUSSIANS MARCHED UP WHITEHALL.

In reality, that never happened, although you might get what happens if you put exaggerated arm-swinging in Stechschritt, and show your proficiency with the pace-stick.

I suspect every military has some version of a pace-stick, as getting everybody in step is easier if everybody is taking the same length stride.  (Those who spent any time with marching band understand the same thing: now imagine taking exactly eight steps or whatever it is to go five more yards across the football field, while playing in tune.)  It's the British, however, who seem to have made a competition of it, and that's something picked up enthusiastically by these senior drill instructors in India's army.

The cockades on those hats identify drill sergeants with highly regarded regiments.

It's not the first time I've discovered interesting adaptations of one country's military practices by another. If you want to see parading in the Old Prussian style, check out the Chileans.

That noted, let me also note that the most effective field army of the late nineteenth century made do with nothing fancier than a route step.

A SMALL GATHERING OF SOCIALISTS IN MILWAUKEE.

No, that's not a reference to the just-completed Democratic Party telethon produced in a control room there.  There's no reason to infer anything about the politics of the guys in the control room.

 

Michael Ramirez cartoon retrieved from Power Line.

Rather, it's a historical reference.  The Socialist Party of Norman Thomas (they'd likely be cancelled by any of the sectarians who call themselves socialist, communist, or Marxist these days) held their 1932 convention in Milwaukee.

When the Socialists gathered in Milwaukee in 1932, the White House seemed up for grabs. The Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover, was flailing against the Great Depression. The Democratic front-runner, Franklin D. Roosevelt, faced opposition from conservatives in his own party.

And the Socialists, whose candidate Norman Thomas barely made an electoral dent in the 1928 election, believed their message would register with voters faced with a capitalist system that seemed to be crumbling.

Milwaukee was a logical place for the party to meet. Milwaukee Mayor Dan Hoan, Milwaukee's Socialist mayor since 1916, also was considered a serious presidential candidate — even though he said he wasn't running.

Yes, there was sectarianism. You might expect a spat over how closely to align with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Ukrainian famine still a secret and the Kirov purges in the future, but it's only a socialist who can object to advocating in Milwaukee for the repeal of Prohibition because fighting hunger is more important. "But for the Socialist Party to mouth such platitudes as 'food is more important than beer' is to evade an issue of interest and importance to the American people." So said New York Times columnist Heywood Broun, a delegate to the convention. Socialist Party operatives with bylines. Imagine that.

THEY'LL EVENTUALLY GET TO THE ROOT CAUSES.

Common Dreams columnist Sam Pizzigati would like to penalize college football for hoarding. He makes one of the easy points: it's a strange sort of amateur athletics that's all about the money.  "How did we end up with this mix of privilege and entitlement, with college football teams that more and more run, in one critic’s words, 'as discrete commercial animals living tax-free and happy in the wilds of the American university system'?" Tax free, perhaps, but not necessarily happy.

It being a Common Dreams post, the rent seeking is there, if not specifically so named.

[Oilman and corporate raider T. Boone] Pickens resolved to blaze a more noble pigskin future. In 1983, after a tough Oklahoma State football loss to Kansas State, he gave the OSU football program $100,000. Twenty years later, he upped his giving ante, donating $20 million for renovating Oklahoma State’s football stadium.

The next big Pickens move would rewire the college football economy. Early in 2006, Oklahoma State announced a $165-million Pickens donation to the school’s football enterprise, the largest single donation in college football history. By the end of 2009, the seating capacity of Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens Stadium had climbed to over 60,000 and players were marveling at their dazzling new state-of-the-art amenities for everything from dining and studying plays to lifting weights and passing time.

Now deep-pockets had been bestowing their largesse upon college football programs long before T. Boone Pickens started cascading dollars. But never at the level Pickens was suddenly playing at. To compete in the new Pickens era, college football programs would clearly have to up their games. Donations of a few million here and few million there would no longer suffice. College athletic directors had to be enticing eight-digit donations, not seven, nine-digit donations, not eight.

That is often the way of positional arms races, but like any other arms race, it ends up badly.

College football fans saw other consequences of the new economic order that Pickens and his fellow plutocrats had ushered in. Saturday afternoons in the fall had traditionally been the time for college football games and all the pageantry around them. In college football’s new reality, football conferences began signing TV deals that had them playing their games on fan- and student-unfriendly weekday nights.

Conference officials felt they had no choice. How else could they keep the money flowing in at anywhere near the new rates that America’s richest had made the new must-meet standard?

Short answer: they can't. Is it any accident that the Mid-American Conference bailed on football first? I leave to others with a closer understanding of their conferences to contemplate the correlation between Democrat governors and locked down states and the Big Ten, er fourteen, and Pacific Twelve also bailing, whilst the developmental leagues with party schools attached continue to play.

Finally, though, he gets to the Neglected Actor.  "Things like uncompensated college football players getting asked to jeopardize their health playing a game that’s catapulting their coaches into the ranks of the nation’s richest 1 percent."  Make that, and uncompensated, while participating in a risky investment in which somewhere between one in fifty and one in a thousand participants gets that call on draft day.

Where is the observer of the sports labor markets who will get people thinking about the connections between performers in the professional leagues showing their sympathy with protests against police who come off like occupying armies in the big cities, and the urban school systems that might not produce much literacy and numeracy, but they sure turn out pro players.

TODAY'S REMINDER TO REJECT THE FALSE BINARY.

"You Don’t Owe Your Vote to Anyone," writes National Review's Isaac Schorr.  His focus is on the pundits pushing turnout for its own sake, and it perpetuates the false binary.

I’ve never understood the fetish for increasing voter turnout. Voting is both a right and a responsibility; it should be easy for all Americans. But each additional vote is not some kind of victory for democracy; those who care enough to show up should and those who don’t should stay home. The sanctity of each individual vote, on the other hand, should be sacred. Americans who head to the polls should not allow themselves to be bullied or shamed into voting one way or another. Pundits of all stripes have increasingly fallen back on such tactics instead of working to persuade people to their side. Their understanding of who owes what to whom is backward: It is the job of candidates for public office to appeal to voters with their values, policies and behavior, not the responsibility of voters to get in line to prove their righteousness to Tom Nichols or Geraldo Rivera.

That supporters of both Biden and Trump would call you complicit in the other man’s victory if you decide to write in a candidate or vote for a third party should tell you everything you need to know about the quality of their arguments; they can’t both be right. This November 3, Americans should do what an earlier, better version of Ted Cruz told them to do in 2016 and vote their conscience.

Precisely, and unless there is an increase in the number of battleground states, voters who have an opportunity to vote for who they want, rather than for who Our Political Masters might want them to vote for, and who take advantage of the opportunity, are, in addition to revealing their preferences, letting their discontent with a major party system that screens, from some two hundred million possible aspirants, a reality television host and a corpse, be made clear.

You'll get better nominees when the party establishments have incentives to provide better nominees.

WHAT GOOD IS A TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD THAT COMES UP A SMALL PROVINCE SHORT OF THE COAST?

None, and Canadian Pacific apparently finally figured that out.

Some background: once upon a time, Canadian Pacific ran from coast to coast, and its easternmost ports were Saint John, in New Brunswick, with a carferry operation across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia.  (The all-rail passenger service from Boston to Halifax used Canadian National metals to the east of Saint John.)

Evidently, the eastern end of the railroad wasn't performing up to the standards headquarters wanted, and the lines east of Montreal were sold off to various operators, including most notoriously the Montreal, Maine, and Atlantic that the whole world heard about when a crew failed to properly secure a tank train, and the resulting runaway, derailment, explosion, and fire lead to massive loss of life in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Canadian Pacific again own some trackage east of Montreal, and their intermodal trains are exchanging containers with the ships at Saint John.

The inaugural train carries containers from the Hapag-Lloyd vessel Detroit Express bound for intermodal terminals on the CP network in Canada and the U.S.

"The new Port of Saint John service offers shippers a compelling value: a congestion-free port with a world-class operator, matched with CP's precision scheduled railroading model," said Keith Creel, CP President and Chief Executive Officer. "CP has been without access to a deep-water Atlantic Ocean port for a quarter-century, and today I'm pleased to deliver a simple message: We're back."

CP originated westbound train 251-11 this morning for the Montreal region at Brownville Junction, Maine, with the first Port of Saint John containers on connection from the New Brunswick Southern (NBSR) and Eastern Maine (EMRY) railways. From Montreal, CP will move containers from the vessel Detroit Express on connecting trains to destinations that include Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Chicago and Minneapolis.

The first eastbound intermodal train to the Port of Saint John departed Montreal on Friday, Aug. 7.

CP gained access to the Port of Saint John through connections with EMRY and NBSR with CP's purchase of the Central Maine & Quebec Railway (CMQ), completed in June. CP has committed to investing $90 million over three years into the CMQ property to enhance safety and efficiency over the corridor. Complementing that investment is the port's $205 million West Side Modernization project, which includes a new wharf, a terminal upgrade and a deeper shipping channel.

CP's route is the shortest between Atlantic Canada and key North American markets. By year's end, CP anticipates it will be able to offer 24-hour service between Saint John and Montreal.

Time for me to ask again, what is the point of the additional more than a day sailing into the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, let alone transiting the Seaway to Toronto or Buffalo or Chicago or Superior for Minneapolis, Winnipeg, Calgary or Edmonton?

BLACK PEOPLE DON'T HAVE TO VOTE DEMOCRAT.

Kim Klacik is running for the House in Maryland's Seventh District.  She posted a campaign message that has apparently played pretty well, particularly among the insurgent blogosphere.  Power Line's John Hinderaker suggests there might be a "growing rebellion among African-Americans against one-party rule."

In Baltimore, the Sun's editorial board are less impressed.

If Ms. Klacik were running to be Baltimore’s next mayor or at least a member of the City Council, her claim that Democratic leaders had ruined the city would at least be understandable. But she is actually running against Democrat Kweisi Mfume for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives formerly held by the late Mr. Cummings. Whatever one may think of members of Congress, they don’t run cities, counties or even states, they represent one of 435 votes in one chamber of the federal legislative branch. Maryland’s 7th extends far beyond the city to Howard and Baltimore counties.

And while complaining about city leaders, current and past, is fair game for anyone (and among our favorite pastimes), it’s ludicrous and overly simple to blame the city’s ills on party affiliation. Concentrated poverty, substance abuse and a war on drugs that disproportionately criminalized low-income African Americans, racism and red-lining, the loss of blue collar jobs, collapsing public infrastructure, broken families and failing schools, these are among the major culprits. We’re all ears if a Republican, Democrat or, frankly, interplanetary visitor, has immediate means to correct any or all of them. It’s telling that Candidate Klacik offers no remedies in her video. Not one.

Let the record show that the Sun's editorial board endorsed Mr Mfume.

Substantively, the remedies the board hopes for begin once the regime changes. Although Ms Klacik is waging an uphill campaign, seeking to capture the seat recently held by the late Elijah Cummings, and currently by Kweisi Mfume, himself a civil rights lion with serious chops, the first step in correcting the ills of the big cities, which will take a long time, and that time is likely to be longer with the taxpayers leaving, is to put those long-time Members of Congress on notice that their constituents are no longer mascots whose continued suffering is essential to the continuing tenure of Democrat politicians.  "[B]usiness as usual has rendered [destitute] generations of Black and Latino inhabitants of Democrat-controlled territory. It's the way ward-heeler politicians always operate.  And the clients of ward-heeler politicians sometimes figure out that they're being played."  The lady is telling potential voters they've been played, and to their disadvantage.

Then, perhaps, we can have a serious discussion of the ways in which, fifty years ago, privileging the Kerner Commission's report and ignoring the Moynihan report has not turned out well for the people the Great Society programs and civil rights legislation and comprehensive immigration reforms of that era intended to help.

ANOTHER SITUATION POORLY FORESEEN.

The summer housecleaning continues, with the March 1989 issue of The Atlantic going to the recycle bin. Not, though, before I skimmed through "Cotton Mather Democrats" by Mark Shields.  The reference is to the Cotton Mather of Technocratic Wisdom, not the Cotton Mather of witch-burning, and the puzzler Mr Shields was dealing with was common among the intellectual journals of the era, namely, how was it that Michael Dukakis, selling himself as a technocrat (anybody else remember Andrew Cuomo's "not ideology, competence?") whilst the elder George Bush, even more of a technocrat, sold himself as some sort of good old boy.  And note, dear reader, the Hungarian border was still closed in March of that year.

In the article, though, was this observation by William Schneider, who I think still turns up from time to time as Elder Political Analyst,  He asked, "When did the Democrats plunge into the fatal error that somehow it is acceptable to be rich, virtuous to be poor, and that the only sin is to be a member of the middle class?"  Recall, dear reader, that thirty years ago the massive shakeout of Big Steel and American Cars was still fresh in people's minds, and Robert Reich's "symbolic analysts" were still working off mainframes and relying on fast modems.

Read, though, this observation by Matthew Continetti, after the close of the Hollywood and Silicon Valley produced and urban poor catered to Democratic convention from anywhere but Milwaukee.  "Time and again, Americans have elected Democratic governments only to find themselves shocked and appalled two years later. The Democrats campaign as a worker's party, but govern as a Bobo one."  Yes, and Donald Trump became president running against both the entertainment elitists of the Donks and the rent-seeker elitists of the Pachs.  No surprise that more than a few moderate Pachs phoned in their support for Mr Biden.

James "Clusterf**k Nation" Kunstler also echoes what Mr Schneider warned about, only more pungently.  "The Democrats are crazy people with a mostly crazy policy program — which a large number of non-crazy Americans actually see for what it is: the drive to run America on sheer coercion, pitting the supposedly under-privileged against the supposedly over-privileged, telling everybody what to think and punishing all non-correct thinkers."  He fears that it's all an act.

I don’t see how this amounts to a winning election strategy. And the Democrats themselves may not either. Rather, their aim may be to generate as much disorder as possible from the election process itself to paralyze governing the USA at every level and paint Mr. Trump as Hobgoblin-in-chief in order to keep their hustle going: the mau-mauing of America. It’s a really dumb and reckless game and it will bring on a whole lot of not-good trouble for a country reeling into full-blown economic collapse.

There's a further problem: in Mr Schneider's formulation, it's acceptable to be rich only if you Pay. Your. Taxes.  President Clinton even stressed that, early in his presidency, when he had the votes to repeal tax rate reductions.  But thirty years of gutting the middle class means that there's less upward mobility as well as fewer examples of what life without dependency on the government looks like, and the only money that's left to tax is that of the rich people.  And even woke rich people have their limits.

California is home to 12 percent of Americans, but over a quarter of the nation's homeless. It also has the highest share of noncitizen residents, according to the Census Bureau, a group disproportionately likely to be less educated and more reliant on welfare benefits. The state is the nation's sixth most generous, in terms of public welfare dollars per capita—an arrangement funded largely by its wealthiest taxpayers.

But as state Democrats bear down on them, regular Californians and the uber-wealthy alike may reconsider if this bargain is really worth it.

"It's very tempting to look at [other] states and think how cost of living could be a lot better, and income could go a lot further, and you could grow your business a lot faster in different environments that may not even have an income tax at all," [Tax Foundation policy analyst Katherine] Loughead said. "So I think those types of states are going to look more and more appealing to Californians."

California's borders are still open for out-migration, although the legislature would like to impose exit taxes in the form of a wealth tax that applies even to expatriate residents.  But their technocrats make life more difficult for Uber drivers and the uber-wealthy alike.

By their fruits shall ye know them.

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE SCHOOL-OPENING SEASON.

A few campuses are attempting to open up, at least in part, and, collegians doing what collegians do, they mix and mingle and the Wuhan coronavirus shows up, uninvited.  Then the administrators have to figure out what mix of persuasion and coercion comes next.  "'I do not think messages to the student body that take a scolding tone to all students are useful and may be counterproductive to the many who are doing the right thing,' [said Sherry Pagoto, a professor and director of the UConn Center for mHealth [c.q.] and Social Media at the University of Connecticut.]"

Is anybody really surprised that when you peddle the residential campus experience as a social experience, and the classroom stuff might be secondary, that people might take you up on the offer?

Perhaps, though, there is another opportunity for reflection among the deanlets and deanlings.  "Instead of looking for people to blame, [Washington (St. Louis) assistant psychiatry professor Jessica] Gold wishes higher education communities -- and the nation at large -- would work together to come up with solutions. That strategy would work better than telling students you're disappointed in them, she said. Some students will hear that message and follow it to the extreme, she said. But they probably aren't the population the college is trying to reach."

In particular, does it pay to wage an all-out onslaught on supposed systematic racism and other social ills, when doing so also preaches to the converted, and the scolded and shamed might blow it off, that is, if they're even paying attention?

DID THE COASTAL ELITES JUST WRITE WISCONSIN OFF, AGAIN?

This time a year ago, civic boosters in Milwaukee were looking forward to hosting a Democratic nominating convention, with all the live coverage and the opportunity to show off the fun stuff.  At one time, CNN had intended to hire the Turnverein best known for its fish fries to base its coverage.

Didn't happen, nor did anything else involving Democrats and the media.  The Democrats even spun their invisibling of Milwaukee as truth in packaging.

Wisconsin was abused again by the Democratic National Committee’s decision to reduce the party’s national convention to the size of a typical Wednesday night softball league tournament. The Democrats actually removed Wisconsin from the logo for the national convention.

We don’t rate a visit from the Democrats’ candidates. We don’t rate a visit from their delegates. We don’t even rate a silhouette on the convention logo.

Because some Democrats don’t want to give the false impression that they were in Wisconsin among the peasants, Wisconsin was removed from the logo.

That quote is from Right Wisconsin's James Wigderson, and he might have political reasons to toss that "among the peasants" in.  But then comes late evening political commentator Stephen Colbert, offering to show his viewers what they missed.  (It would be schadenfreudelicious for that clip to have come in his show before the Donks wrapped up, meaning his self-selected audience would have missed it.)

The voice-over guy sounds like he came from Bridgeport, and the stock footage is from anywhere but Milwaukee.  I mean, with a small gathering of socialists in Milwaukee taking place, you'd think somebody might have found this, or taken a walk around the area outside the secure zone.

The local convention and visitors bureau types pushed back.  Maybe they could take up a collection to bring Mr Colbert out for a visit.

Read more about what's going on in that picture here and here.

Or maybe Mr Colbert could visit Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Chicago) at his dacha.  "Chicago has removed Wisconsin from the mandatory travel quarantine order. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker can visit his family home here again, and half the population of Lake Geneva can return."

Let the record show that Harley-Davidson got its start in Milwaukee, and that Harley riders also vote.  "Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox told Fox News reporter Vince Tobin the group wasn’t in Milwaukee to 'poke the bear, but we’re here to keep an eye on things.'"

They are also politically aware. “We’re not here to shout. You will never see a biker lighting a pharmacy on fire, looting a sneaker store, calling for the death and destruction of private property and police officers. We are here to stand with law enforcement, to stand with our servicemen and women, not only active duty, but the veterans and to support our president.”

One day, the election will be settled, the virus tamed, and perhaps Tourist Milwaukee will again be open for visitors.

LET'S GO FOR A TRAIN RIDE.

Glen Brewer had opportunity to observe the Chicago Aurora and Elgin and the North Shore Line in the declining years of the interurban era.  Some of the rolling stock, and, on occasion, the ride and the feel, of those cars, is still available at the Illinois Railway Museum.  In particular, the Electroliner is back in running condition, although the plush seats are incompatible with quarantine restrictions, and it might be a while before passengers can again board.

At the North Shore’s small main station on the Loop elevated at Adams and Wabash, I caught the 8:00 am, bright salmon and turquoise stripped Electroliner for Milwaukee. We traveled over the sooty Loop structure with its contrasting bright silver rails around some pretty tight curves, then on to the straight, fast, ground level Skokie Valley line, one of Insull’s costly improvements.

At the Milwaukee end, he revised his travel plans.

The trip was swift and uneventful, but on it I noted that the ideal place for a railfan like me was the first seat on the first car – just to the left of the motorman’s tiny compartment.

In Milwaukee I had one hour to wait for the return of the same Electroliner. My original plan had been to wait for two hours over lunch in order to take a conventional train back. But now I was determined to stake out that perfect seat.

The first few miles out of the Milwaukee terminal were street running complete with traffic lights. I was surprised that the Electroliner had a foot-operated bell, just like many slow, conventional trolleys I have seen.

Then we entered private right-of-way, and the speed began to rise.

Yup, that sounds about right.

I kept my seat for quite awhile fascinated by the speed and the view. A little boy joined me, his father remaining in the seat behind. The boy sat transfixed, staring into the window, as I snapped the camera shutter, hand rolled the film ahead and lined up the next subject — always in a hurry to be ready when the next opportunity presented itself. I photographed the other Electroliner and conventional trains we met, but it was past lunchtime, and I was anxious to sample the famous Electroburger in the Tavern/Lounge.

I hope the 'burger was good. Apparently the induction stoves in the tavern are not up to code; thus, although the restored 'Liner will have a stove, it will not be operable.

I have often wondered if that young interurban enthusiast remembers to this day that blazingly fast ride and the privileged view we enjoyed together. I wonder if the experience changed him for life; I know I’ll never forget my only ride on the Electroliner.

I cannot claim to have been THAT young interurban enthusiast. I can claim to have been in that situation.

Find yourself a preservation railroad, and support it.  They're operating again, if under safe distancing and limited capacity restrictions.

KINDLY BE ADVISED THAT NORMAL PEOPLE SUCK.

Last night, Wisconsin governor Tony Evers (D - Public Instruction) opened the telethon with the night's talking point.

"So even though we can't be with each other, I know we have a shared sense of purpose," Evers also said. "That is, to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.This November is about returning kindness, respect, empathy, and civility back to the White House, and that's who Joe and Kamala are, because they know — especially during challenging times like these — the problems we face can only be solved by all of us together."

The "kindness" tropes were the thing all night, and that's what the disgruntled Republicans who were making their pitches were all about.  Our President is, to put it mildly, unconventional, and his lack of manners often hurts him more than it shakes up his critics.  From that perspective, the restoration of what might pass as a state of good repair in national politics seems desirable.  At the end of the day, Joe Biden will return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear when politicians could reach across the aisle and make bipartisan compromises and comprehensively reform away those challenges, and the Sunday shows will be predictably more boring.

The populist insurgency is having none of it.  Derek Hunter writes, "Democrats really don’t like this country and the people in it."  John Kass wasn't fooled.  "Yet as the DNC infomercial makes plain, this new left Democratic Party of 2020 sees only two types: The Oppressed and The Oppressors, a formula that invariably leads to rising conflict and anger that can't be covered over with virtual kindness and virtual empathy."  Perhaps, he continues, the Democratic messaging is working.

The Democrats aren't appealing to Trump's base. They're targeting suburban voters in swing states. Their convention is designed to give those voters a comfortable place to call home in what is shaping up to be a close election. They don't respond well to Trumptastic bombast, something Trump can't grasp.

Yes, if you turn the sound off.  Turn on the sound, and here's what Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball hears.

I wonder what the viewership of this dog’s breakfast is? For the Democrats’s sake, I hope it is low. It will not convince anyone who is not already convinced. The truth is, this was mostly not a convention, but a series of political ads. The Dems are against your Second Amendment rights and for the Green New Deal (which means they are against America’s energy independence). They are for open borders, higher taxes, Black Lives Matter brutes and urban squalor (they do not use the word ‘squalor’).

Michael Goodwin is more direct.  "Perhaps the Dem Downers are right, that a majority of Americans see their country through the darkest possible lens. But I suspect the party is too much in the thrall of the activists who want to overthrow most of our institutions."

Oh, absolutely.

A participant in Common Dreams's service called Julie Hollar elaborates on the internal squabbles to come among the Democrats.

Attentive readers might also have noticed a word glaringly absent from [New York Times columnist Reid] Epstein’s article: white. 94% of voters in [Pennsylvania congressman Conor] Lamb’s race were white, which means that the working class observers of Lamb’s race are referring to is a white working class—hardly representative of the working class as a whole in this country, which is more than 40% people of color (and nearly half female).

As FAIR (11/13/18) has pointed out before, this erasure of people of color and women from the working class is rampant in corporate media, and it conveniently serves to frame the answer to winning over the “working class” as moving rightward, rather than the more obvious and straightforward strategy of addressing the economic needs of this entire diverse class—through policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, and support for childcare and public education, as well as supporting unionization and workers’ pensions.

That essay suggests the efforts, such as they are, to reassure normal people they don't suck might turn off the dependent base the party regularly relies on.

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar sees the same tensions.  The party establishment appears to be pretending the restoration is at hand, even though the lot of people who are not tech moguls or otherwise able to ride out the house arrests at home deteriorates.

Both are betting on anti-Trump animus to propel them to victory instead of making concrete promises toward the working-class voters who grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party in recent years. The big ideological tent that Biden has pitched at the convention has been geared mostly at the upscale end of the electorate, and less toward the culturally traditional working-class voters who defected from Barack Obama to Trump in the last presidential election.

The missing piece from the convention is any semblance of Biden’s governing agenda. He’s the working-class Joe without the policies designed to appeal to the average voter from his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Take away Trump from the Democratic message, and the party would be left speechless.

The further problem is that the more socialist elements of the coalition of the ascendant are wrecking lives in the precincts that the Democrats rely on for turnout.

The former vice president is heading a party anchored in the deep-blue cities and Democratic-trending suburbs of the country, one that’s held together by anti-Trump rhetoric and overtures to a diversifying America. Picking Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate was designed to appeal to this multiracial coalition, centered more in the affluent suburbs than in the working-class Midwestern towns where Clinton badly struggled in 2016.

The convention messaging to date has been focused mainly on these cosmopolitan voters, from Michelle Obama’s lacerating indictment of Trump’s character to Jill Biden’s captivating promise that her husband will make the country whole again, just as he rebuilt his family in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

That might be so, and yet, is the party's woke component making light of the efforts of petit-bourgeois residents of those precincts to rebuild their businesses going to affect voter turnout more than any invented complaints about missing mailboxes?

GIVE YOUR MATH MUSCLES A WORKOUT.

Instead of getting into the culture-studies weeds about the social construction of arithmetic, just warm up with this.

Cribbed from Right on the Left Coast.

THE HIPPIES PASS THE TORCH TO THE TRANSVESTITES?

I haven't been paying much attention to the political conventions. That has long been a practice of mine, as dour people with faces made for radio and voices made for print who take up prime time, this week to scold us, next week to scare us, don't interest me.  (And why, dear reader, do people whose career success depends in part on delivering speeches, never engage the services of a voice coach?  But I digress.)

That means I missed Monday evening's closing segment, in which Billy Porter sang Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" with old Stephen Stills on the guitar. That amused the insurgents at Twitchy.  Years ago, the Democrats nominating Michael Dukakis replaced the primary colors of red, white, and blue, with the nuanced colors of salmon, gray, and mauve, and that might have been almost as much of a faux pas as putting the candidate in a tank.  The odd color combinations on the Stars and Stripes in the song might be just as off-putting as those nuanced pastels were back in the day: as a way of winning over swing voters, not so much.

Red State's Brandon Morse noted that the video really didn't let everybody look what's going down, so he added the relevant content.  Note: Town Hall registered the video as not suitable for children; you will have to sign in on You Tube to play it.

Here's why Mr Morse modified the show.

Only we at RedState couldn’t help but find the performance a bit dishonest. It didn’t really give you the 360 look into what Black Lives Matter really was…so we thought I, RedState’s resident video maker, should lend a hand.

I think this remix of the performance is a bit closer to reality than the one Porter and the DNC were trying to sell.

I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word.  Sometimes, like with lumber yard fires or chain-reaction crashes, you just have to stop and look.

THE ONUS IS ON THE REGIONAL COMPREHENSIVES AND MID-MAJORS TO LIFT THEIR GAME.

Joanne Jacobs counsels, "Don't overpay for a prestige degree."

The pay-off for a prestigious college degree is smaller than you think, write Frederick M. Hess and Joseph B. Fuller on The Hill. Hess directs education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor, is a visiting scholar.

The argument, dear reader, ought be familiar.

[I]t’s not clear whether elite colleges’ high graduation rates are “due to terrific teaching and support, or simply to student bodies composed of hand-picked high achievers,” write Hess and Fuller.

They advise students and parents not to overpay for “bragging rights” or future networking possibilities. That’s especially true now that “the promised intimate mentoring has been reduced to the occasional Skype session.”

I tend to agree that it is the interaction of high achievers that is the source of the premium, although it's possible that the institutions elsewhere on the academic food chain are complicit in the U. S. News problem.  "[A]s long as the regional comprehensives, the mid-majors, the land-grants refuse to act as if they are in the same business as the Ivies, the Ivy premium inflated though it likely is, will continue."

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE CONFIRMS WHAT TWITCHY READERS HAVE LONG KNOWN.

A month ago, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, a woman who takes no cr@p off anyone, correctly described Chicago's mayor Lori Lightfoot a "derelict mayor."  The mayor eschewed profanity, preferring to refer to the press secretary as a Karen.

More recently, the mayor has been an indefatigable source of fun for Twitchy's writers, for instance, getting angry with a reporter for asking about city officials failing to prosecute looters after the first round of wilding; then Jim Treacher of Pajamas Media had a Clapback of the Vanities moment while more traditional members of the press had reason to be dismayed with her performance; then she sought Federal assistance in enforcing gun laws (news flash: any crook worth his lawyer knows how to get around Chicago's existing laws); and the latest round of wilding began not 24 hours after the mayor decided shutting down a beach party was Necessary for Public Health.  I wonder if the Log Cabin Republicans saw a recruiting opportunity in that bit of quarantine theater.

That might be passed off as the populist insurgency alternative media having some fun with such a tempting target.  The editorial board of Chicago's Tribune can't be so easily dismissed. "Not good enough. Not even close."  No kidding.

So you can listen to the words of the politicians. You can look at the conflicting data. And you can sweep aside both and assess the situation outright: chaos. Lawlessness. A city forced to raise its drawbridges to protect residents and businesses. Perception is reality in Chicago, and the perception is that this is not a safe city — anywhere. The long-term damage of that reputation is incalculable.

Tribune columnist John Kass, who has been facing down the cancel culture himself, interviews Paul Vallas, who has been involved in Chicago and national Democratic politics for years.

“I don’t think she likes criticism,” Vallas said of the mayor. “And I don’t think she knows what she’s doing quite frankly. … She’s always looking for a scapegoat. There’s got to be a scapegoat. And you know that she doesn’t like tough questions.”

Vallas said Lightfoot was unprepared for the mass looting downtown a few days ago. And most people would agree, including many Chicago aldermen. She was woefully unprepared. What happened downtown on Monday morning was a repeat of what happened a couple of months ago when looting erupted during the George Floyd protests.

Vallas has been quite active on the public policy front, writing op-eds for newspapers and posting on social media. His latest was titled, “The city burns, the mayor goes to a ribbon cutting.”

Rookie politicians making rookie mistakes. The damage to Chicago as a place to live or to do business well might be long-lasting.