SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT.

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

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

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

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

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

ATTEMPT AT EXASPERATION, UNSUCCESSFUL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember that?  I’m being serious.

Q    Mr. President —

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

Q    Donald Trump is not the President right now.

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

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

THE PRESIDENT:  What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently the REMFs have not yet received the memo.

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

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

UNVACCINATED IS UNPROTECTED. IS UNARMED ALSO UNPROTECTED?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She invited gun owners to be part of the solution.

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

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

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

HOW BAD COULD IT GET?

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

Here's Kurt Schlichter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FINISHED STATE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUILD BACK BETTER?

The most recent Cold Spring Shops excursion was to hang out with the Steel Mill Modellers, who understand the role a steel mill can play in keeping an operating session on a model railroad challenging.  The gathering included a boat cruise on the Detroit River, to look at the steel mill operations, current and past.  We start with a view of the Great Lakes Steel coke oven and blast furnace complex at Zug Island.

From a distance, that still looks (and smells) like heavy industry.  Get closer, though, and a passage from Solzhenitsyn comes to mind.

"But when you get there, you find that not the living but the dead greeted you from afar. The marquees and signage has been knocked off the roof or twisted out of place long ago. The spires have been stripped, and there are gaping holes in the rusty steelwork. Weeds grow on the roofs and in the cracks in the walls. The landscaping has not been kept up, and the flowerbeds are trampled. The broken windows may have been boarded over, with obscene inscriptions scrawled over them."

If that sounds a little bit like what has happened in Democratic-controlled cities such as Detroit and to a lesser extent elsewhere around the Great Lakes and east of the Alleghenies, you begin to understand the secret of the Trumpening.

The coke works are still working, although none of that coke will be charged into those blast furnaces.  Those covered hoppers on the high line?

The best use of a high line at a furnace that will eventually be demolished is as storage track for cars that would otherwise carry fracking sand.  The property is less of a financial burden that way.  Those remaining piles of rock will never be taken to a skip hoist and charged into the furnace.

Before the introduction of self-unloading freighters, these bridge cranes were a feature of Great Lakes ports.  One of them was stripped for parts to keep the others operable, although there's unlikely to be much call for unloading coking coal or taconite pellets in the future.

Downriver are the melt shops and rolling mills of the Great Lakes Steel Ecorse Works, now a U.S. Steel property.  From a distance, it still looks like the efficient size basic oxygen plant it once was.

The rolling mills got the U.S. Steel blue paint treatment of recent years.  Get closer, though, and the picture changes.

The Number 2 Basic Oxygen Shop is being turned into bite-size pieces for the likes of Nucor or Steel Dynamics to recycle.

Mill gondolas now relegated to scrap service.

The Number One Basic Oxygen shop is also being flensed.

For now, the eighty inch hot strip mill is still working, rolling slab brought in from elsewhere in the U.S. Steel system, although that is unlikely to be sustainable as a long term going concern.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's been a hot, humid week with lots of developments that only get me hotter under the collar.  I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word.

1.  We empowered the boy-rapers to protect Afghanistan from the head-choppers.

2.   Oregon has sent an unmistakable message that it has no confidence in the ability of its minority students to learn.

3.  You know what woke means. It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to shit. It’s true.

4.  People are tired of the facade.

5.  BOOM! "An administration exquisitely sensitive to pronouns, bathrooms and fictitious forms of self-identification has shown itself to be brutally insensitive to the fate of Afghans who have risked all by self-identifying as allies of the United States and everything it once stood for."

6.  Yes.  Next question? "Could it be that this is a waste of money? Could it even be that the [diversity programming] mania is counter-productive, with administrators stirring up racial tensions to justify their jobs?"

7.  They're not going to like the new rules.  "The shoe is on the other foot — and we need to kick some butt with it."

8.  Stop playing by their rules.  "The leftist machine knows how to manufacture outrage, but it has no real concern for the little guy."

9.  Truly.  "We are rudderless with Dementia Joe and effete intellectual snobs that surround him."

10.  Safetyism is stupid. "But for some health experts, there's no such thing as being too cautious."  It's also inefficient.

11.  "Equity" programs will end up hurting the disadvantaged most.

12.  The way High Priests of Public Health discredit science.  "That attitude is hardly consistent with the epistemological modesty that seems appropriate in light of the scientific uncertainty she emphasizes."

13.  Economically illiterate enough for a gig with the Gray Lady.

14.  We deserve better than elitist hacks.

15.  Sure, Jen.  "We’re not the ones doing the stranding."

16.  Precisely.  "The overall impression is that Biden, Harris, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jen Psaki are in over their heads, and utterly incapable of meeting the moment. History called, and they let it go to voice mail."  I've also seen a cartoon about that 3 am call coming in at 3 pm, and nobody in the White House is answering.

17.  The tragic vision, I.  "[Social media gatekeeers] drive people with mistaken beliefs further into echo chambers where their statements are less likely to be challenged. The alternative—rebutting false claims by citing countervailing evidence—may rarely be successful. But at least it offers a chance of persuading people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society."

18.  The tragic vision, II.  "Handing out the accoutrements of a middle class democracy does not mean it actually exists, in the same way, in failed domestic policy failures, we give people cars and mortgages and declare them to be middle class. And in a final trenchant illustration of the incoherence of the leftist project, we on one hand declared Afghan culture to be equal to ours, and then set about to change it to look like ours. Is this not colonialism?"

19.  "Getting a law passed is not the same thing as getting people to obey."  Think about it: people used to risk fines to bring colored margarine into Wisconsin.

20.  Pipe down, Donald.  "Trump runs the risk of changing the media coverage and reminding a large percentage of the voting public why they didn’t like him. Right now, they’re learning why they really shouldn’t like Joe Biden. Trump shouldn’t interrupt that class."

21.  Another reason to respect Kristi Noem.  "It's increasingly rare for a political figure to loudly proclaim the principled libertarian position, which holds that such restrictions should be neither mandated nor prohibited."

22.  How old are you?  "The dysfunction in our government is deep — the last time Congress could be bothered to carry out its regular appropriations process, Frank Sinatra was alive to see it, the Spice Girls were on the radio, and the face of sober Republican government was Rudy Giuliani."  That might be a reason for more modesty on the part of the political class, which might not be what the author has in mind: "Too much democracy, and too few institutions that can or will overrule the will of the people when appropriate."

23.  The fruits of rent-seeking.  "What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008."

24.  Reason's David Bier, "I don't care much for politically correct language. I avoid the euphemism treadmill."  Substantively, he's arguing for a country that buys into its immigrants, and immigrants who buy into their country.

25.  It's called p-hacking.  "With modern tools, it’s easy to torture a data set to produce some sort of interesting-sounding result, even if it’s not really valid."  (That "p" is voiced, unlike the one in "Psaki.")

26.  Indeed.  "Biden’s second hundred days have been an unmitigated disaster."

27.  A gentle reminder that you give yourself no powers you wouldn't want an adversary having.  "But it's shortsighted to imagine that only administrations you like will wield extensive and authoritarian new powers once granted."

28.  Resign.

ANALYZE THE CONTROVERSIES

Digging through the archives: let's consider induced demand.  Let's open with Strong Towns's Daniel Herriges, "The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic."  That post went online before I heard of Wuhan or coronavirus, and at the time it was Donald Trump sucking up to the highway lobby.

After a four-year reprieve, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has once again published its infamous Urban Mobility Report. So if you're seeing a spate of headlines about how the traffic is bad and getting worse, coupled with outrageous dollar amounts that Americans supposedly lose to congestion—like $166 billion in 2017—the source of those claims is almost certainly the TTI report.

This report is pure propaganda for the road-building industry, designed to elicit credulous takes from major news outlets that cement in the public's mind the idea that We Need to Spend More On Infrastructure™. It inflates the cost of congestion in a dozen different ways, by making unreasonable assumptions that don't reflect the real world. It has been debunked repeatedly by a range of transportation policy experts, and yet it just. Keeps. Coming. Back. And without addressing any of the substantive criticisms.

The post provides links to those substantive criticisms.  Go, read, understand.  Some of the substance follows.

Glaring problems with the report include that it assigns the value of time lost sitting in traffic based on prevailing wages, which is a nonsensical practice to economists: the alternative to losing 6 minutes on your commute is virtually never that you could have otherwise earned 6 additional minutes of pay at your job. And very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has been studiedand people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well under minimum wage.

Another error: the study defines “delay” (congestion incurring a cost) as any time vehicles are moving less than free-flow speed. But on some roads, the free-flow speed is actually greater than the legal speed limit. Drivers simply obeying the law are counted by the TTI as evidence of congestion.

The glaring errors in the report go uncorrected because correcting them would defeat the report’s purpose, which is to make congestion look bad and always worsening. Because others have done such a thorough job deconstructing the report's definitions and assumptions, though, I'm going to attack it from a more root philosophical angle that helps explain why this report is asking and answering the wrong questions.

Yes, and Burma Shave had the right idea about what commuters would do with six additional minutes, years ago, plus it's difficult to attribute "delay" on a road moving at slower than the speed limit without considering how much slower, if at all, travel would be on other roads available for that trip.

CRIKEY, MATE, WE GOT OURSELVES A CONVOY.

There's something about the sight of massed trucks that makes the liberal weenies quail.  That might have started with the organized protests of the 55 mph speed limit, during which over-the-road truckers used their citizens band radios to alert each other to the presence of speed traps and to organize convoys with more than a little speed limit civil disobedience.

You might have to open the video in You Tube in order to enjoy it, good buddy.

In the comments I find the lead to today's story.  "Our Aussie Truckers are about to shut down the nation... yes it will be an inconvenience but they may just save a million lives."

Australians are suffering under technocratic overreach far beyond that suggested by the 55 mph speed limit.  Their gear-jammers are going to call attention to it.  "Australian Truck Drivers Vow To Block Every Major Highway In Radical Anti-Lockdown Strike."

August 31 promises to be an interesting day, beginning with the Australian job action, and continuing with the Taliban's deadline in Afghanistan.  "Them chicken coops was full of bears, and choppers filled the skies."

NOBODY NEEDS TWO OR MORE RAIN BARRELS.

Ordinarily,  Reason's J. D. Tuccille might simply qualify for a Friday short take with his "The West needs markets in water, not allocations based on political considerations."  I make no apology for suggesting that water is a commodity and ought be allocated the same way any other commodity gets allocated, or for mocking the arid West for its unwillingness to do so.  Similarly, there's nothing new in noting that trade unites and politics divides, something that the water regulators seem to have trouble grasping, e.g., "You have to have markets that actually work, that allow competing users to resolve their competition amicably and efficiently rather than through political allocation of water."  Nor is it any surprise that people who think they are smarter than you will come up with ways to introduce excessive complexity and conceal it behind wordnoise.

"The Tier 1 declaration gives states and local communities reason to remove barriers to transferring water," observes Robert Glennon, law professor and water rights expert at the University of Arizona. "Market forces are playing an increasingly critical role in water management in the West. Many new demands for water are coming from voluntary transfers between willing sellers and desperate buyers."

That said, Glennon doesn't advocate a completely free market for water, since he fears that farmers, who consume the lion's share of the region's water, wouldn't be able to compete with urban users. He supports "a process to ensure that transfers are consistent with the public interest," though it's unclear how to keep that from degenerating into the political allocation of water against which Watson warned. He also may confuse "public interest" with sentimentality over inefficient use of a scarce resource.

Still, Glennon co-authored a piece for the Brookings Institution in 2014 advocating that "sensible water policy should allow someone who needs water to pay someone else to forgo her use of water or to invest in water conservation and, in return, to obtain access to the saved water."

That's true whether or not your tax dollars are making possible the cultivation of sugar beets on the eastern plains of Colorado.

But, seriously, there are limits on the placement of rain barrels.

Harvesting rainwater is also becoming more common as people embrace the practice—and as the law gets out of the way.

"Colorado's longtime ban on residential rain barrels has come to an end," Colorado State University celebrated in 2016. "Now most homeowners in the state are allowed to collect precipitation for later outdoor use."

Colorado still strictly limits households to two rain barrels, but other states are more relaxed.

"In the state of Arizona, it is legal to collect any rainwater that falls on your property for future use," the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center notes. The center offers a guide advising on how to do just that.

Still, graywater and rain barrels are only going to chip away at the problem so long as federal agencies allocate massive amounts of water based on political considerations. In a land where water is scarce, its use will be most efficiently determined by the prices that users are willing to pay in an open market.

A rain barrel might be a useful way to cope with higher water rates. Review the comparison of rates in those enlightened European countries that get plenty of rain with the flood-irrigation of Phoenix lawns.

THE TACTIC MIGHT WORK WELL ENOUGH.

Two years ago, Michael Barone called out the foolishness of fact-checkers letting the self-styled progressives get away with hyperbole during campaigns, who really weren't firing up their oppressed communities.

Maybe instead they're virtue signaling to the white college graduates who are the dominant segment of the Democratic electorate these days. What "sounds like an exclusive appeal to minority voters," writes the New York Post's Michael Goodwin, is "just as likely to be aimed at those whites embarrassed by their race."

Enough changed in two years that the virtue-signalling, and the denunciation of the police, might still be a winning issue, never mind the reprise of the Carter years that seems to be taking place as I write.

MAKE THEM PLAY BY THEIR OWN RULES.

Sometimes it is easy to be dyspeptic, because the stories almost write themselves.  Take the California recall election.  "Progressives don't really think that the recall process is illegitimate or unconstitutional. They simply don't like that it's being used against one of their own."  Years ago, they had similar problems with the Proposition Thirteen property tax limit.

Our state's problems entirely are the making of its U.S.-citizen politicians and the voters that have empowered them.

Nevertheless, the recall process—like the two other cornerstones of direct democracy, the initiative and referendum—is dyed into the fabric of our state. Today's progressives, who claim to stand for the power of the people against special interests and the political class, despise a process that was devised by early 1900s progressives for that explicit purpose.

I'm sure advocates of initiative, referendum, and recall saw only upside potential at the time, much like their national counterparts saw only the upside of prohibition and direct election of senators.

Their opposition is situational, an outgrowth of their fear that the public isn't nearly as given to liberal pipedreams as they would like. Note the results from November, when the same California voters who reliably send Democrats to Sacramento rejected initiatives that would expand rent control, increase commercial property taxes, and re-impose race-based college admissions. They supported a measure that exempts drivers from a ban on independent contracting.

This special election is entirely legitimate. State law clearly spells out the rules. Recall supporters gathered the requisite signatures, submitted them for approval, and have legally placed it on the ballot. By contrast, California Democrats toyed with the schedule, as they passed a law designed to speed up the election date because they believed an earlier date would help Newsom.

As news reports note, they previously passed a law to protect Sen. Josh Newman (D–Los Angeles) from a recall in 2018 by moving the date to a more Democratic-friendly primary. Their goal in both situations was to rig the rules to benefit their candidates, so they ought not to lecture us about their, er, principled opposition to this time-tested election innovation. Their only principle is whatever helps them the most.

The article contains three passages that could merit Friday short take status:

1. Their opposition is situational.
2. Their only principle is whatever helps them the most.
3. Progressives apparently no longer trust the people they claim to represent.

Everybody understands that entrepreneurs and capitalists act in what they perceive to be their best interests.  Why anyone would think that elected officials, particularly career politicians, are capable of putting some higher principle ahead of their own interests continues to fascinate me.

NICE JOB, BIDEN.

Common Dreams's Abby Zimet sees the consequences of the left's Islamophilia, up close.

In Kabul, thousands of people, even those with U.S. visas or passports, are unable to reach the gates of the airport, never mind get on the flights they've been promised; instead, they are among packed crowds "trapped in hell," with little food or water, amidst a rising stench of garbage, at the mercy of Taliban soldiers on all sides who have already killed over 20 people. "There’s horror in everyone’s eyes,” says a stranded woman, one of over 14 million Afghan women most in peril from extremists already tearing down beauty parlor images and whipping women at the airport who don't obey their orders fast enough - this, in a country long deemed one of the most dangerous in the world for women. As many women hide at home, fearful of what comes next and burning any evidence of links to the West, others have taken to the streets as the "face of resistance," intent on keeping freedoms hard-won in the over 20 years since the Taliban was in power. "They have one message - this is not the Afghanistan of 1996," said a reporter for Gravitas as she showed video of "braveheart" women marching, chanting, wearing the Afghan flag as a hijab, often at the point of a Taliban gun. "Have you wondered what courage looks like? This is what courage looks like." Arguing "Afghan women know exactly what is in store for them," she urged the rest of the world to help protect them. "Their stories are heartbreaking," she said, "and they must be told."

Protection is unlikely without any rough men who understand chivalric codes present to enforce them. That doesn't strike me as descriptive of Common Dreams readers, and those codes are too modern for Taliban types.

UNIVERSITIES CONTINUE TO FAIL AT THEIR MISSION.

I've filled up a weblog documenting the ways, and it's the gift that keeps on giving.

The nation’s foreign-policy and Middle East “experts” have blown it again, and academics are part of the problem. In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, many are simply silent while others are expressing surprise. Still others can’t transcend their default position of blaming America.

Let’s start with silence. What is the Middle East Studies Association up to? Its Committee on Academic Freedom is very active when it comes to writing letters to governments that restrict access to education. Where is the letter to the Taliban demanding that women be allowed to learn how to read and write and universities should remain open?

Islamophilia is a convenient pose for the academic left, as it is a way to call out others for wrongthink with respect to third world people, while it's not their spouses, daughters, or neighbors being stuffed into burqas.

Many academics are simply reluctant to say or write anything at all critical of Islam or Islamism for fear of being branded an “Islamophobe.” Amazingly, this even applies now to the Taliban. According to ABC 6 Rhode Island News, Faiz Ahmed, an associate professor of modern and Middle Eastern history at Brown University, said that “it will take more than just one side to begin recovery efforts, including the U.S. and neighboring countries as well as the Taliban to honor universal and Islamic values.” Newsflash to Ahmed: The Taliban are quite confident they are restoring Islamic values to Afghanistan after 20 years of Western influence.

Not surprisingly, Juan Cole merits mention.

Thus far, the worst of the bunch is Juan Cole, who teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. Cole calls the U.S. project in Afghanistan a Ponzi scheme. Leaving aside the weak metaphor, Cole’s faulty logic and inaccurate claims stand out. Seeking to let the Taliban off the hook for 9/11, Cole claims, “There is no reason to believe that the Taliban leadership was aware of what al-Qaeda was planning.” But it gets worse. He also believes that “not only the Taliban but many in al-Qaeda felt deeply betrayed by bin Laden’s use of their hospitality to stage a brazen attack on a superpower.” This is the kind of bad advice that academics have been giving U.S. presidents for decades.

Cole’s relativism is so pronounced that he actually wrote this sentence: “U.S. troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the U.S.” If Cole can rationalize the idea that the men of Afghanistan had only the binary choice between growing poppies and selling their daughters, what might be going on in his classroom lectures? This statement should earn Cole a place in the bad expert advice hall of shame. Maybe Joe Biden will hire him to replace some of the others giving him equally bad advice. I suggest deer-in-the-headlights National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, or clueless Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Cole would fit right in.

The cluelessness began, dear reader, years ago when former president George W. Bush pivoted from being skeptical of nation building to installing democracies around the world.  Institutions have to be emergent to have any success.  It's unlikely that much could be done other than taking out a few terrorist leaders and destroying their training camps, then leaving with a warning not to host such people again upon pain of experiencing the full rage and power of the U.S. military.  No civilian social workers left in harm's way, and no military hardware abandoned.

WHY SHOULD ROAD SOCIALISM BE DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER FORM OF SOCIALISM?

Waiting in line is one of the identifying features of socialism.  Here's a look from last week.

I doubt that anybody is going to make an issue about that semi in the left lane.  It's just another Wednesday going around the southern tip of Lake Michigan.  In the forty years or so that I've been driving that route, there has ALWAYS been some sort of construction going on somewhere between where Interstate Eighty ties into the Tri-State Tollway and where the Kingery Expressway, or Borman Expressway, or whatever Indiana now calls that stretch of road, hives off Interstate 65 for Indianapolis, then the Indiana Toll Road with Eighty and Ninety for points east, and finally 94 for Detroit.  Doesn't matter what the construction is: adding a lane, replacing a bridge, blinging out an interchange, there's always some construction going on.

Sometimes the notion of remont comes to mind.  That was a Soviet trick by which an eatery offering better than the usual government-issue food in more pleasant surrounding at proletarian prices was perpetually closed for repairs, or by which a seaside hotel was never taking reservations.  You pretend that the service is there, only it has to be brought up to the standard Brezhnev approves of, but everybody understands it's more pokazhuka.  I'm not going to go so far as accusing the highway commissions of perpetually fixing parts of the interstates as a way of admitting they'll always be a mess, and yet I'm not convinced that the "infrastructure" is ever going to be better.

UNDERMINE THEM WITH MOCKERY.

You could be scolded by the likes of Robin DiAngelo.  Or you could laugh in her face.

Written by a manic new age Wiccan who gives off major crazy ex-girlfriend vibes, White Fragility makes the case that any time a white person defends him or herself from hoax accusations of racism, that is a sign of fragility; self-defense as proof of weakness and guilt. White people are so fragile! So easily broken! Pale and icy cold, they crumble at the slightest pushback, like the pathetic snowflakes they are!

But then you keep reading, and you discover White Fragility actually makes a pretty strong case that whites are the opposite of fragile. In fact, they are so powerful, so strong, so superior to other lesser beings that the only way anyone else can get a chance is if more whites volunteer to be weaker.

In the face of such totalizing white dominance—or supremacy, if you will—all the weak can do is beg the whites to take a knee, step aside, apologize for and mute their own wondrous superpowers that no one has yet made a dent in, for centuries!

It gets better. I recently learned that it's impossible to be a good woke cat lady. Must sharpen my knives first!

IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS IN IVY-COVERED HALLS.

Tom Lehrer might have gone to Harvard, but the bad teaching is everywhere, and another cohort of critics tills soil that has been plowed repeatedly, probably antedating ProfScam, which shook up the deanlets and provostniks thirty years ago.

The arguments never seem to change.  Teaching is basically acting, and if thespians can learn how to act, the extension to teaching is immediate.  It might be that educational institutions are not developing human capital, they are selling credentials (signals, in Econ-speak.)  "One gets the impression that colleges figured out early on that they were selling credentials and whether the students learned much or little didn’t really matter."  It might be that there's a conflict of interest between teaching and scholarship.  "Many of the faculty who have gone through those education classes are still lousy in the classroom. That has a lot to do with their incentives. To advance, they need to focus on their research. Time devoted to the classroom and students is largely seen as time wasted."  Nothing new there, either, and given the creativity-destroying innovations the colleges of deaducation have attempted to impose on the arts, sciences, and professional disciplines (rubrics, objectives, assessment) that doesn't surprise, either.

That article misses a recent development that you might soon be hearing more about.  With the corona tyranny and more online classes, what happens to departmental divisions of labor?  Apparently "productivity" (which might mean grants and publications) has not suffered over the past two years; but are the work-from-home faculty throwing more of the advising and committee work on the faculty who are present on campus?

HARSHING THE MELLOW IN ADVANCE OF RUSH WEEK AND HOMECOMING.

Under Illinois law, the former teachers colleges commence instruction on the fourth Monday of August.  In honor of the occasion, let's look at the idiocies that return to campus along with the students.  Consider James Madison University labels ‘heteroromantic’ Christian men ‘oppressor group’.

I don't make this stuff up, dear reader, I only link and quote.

Are you able-bodied, between the ages of 30 and 50, a man or cisgendered person, heterosexual, heteroromantic, and Christian? Are you white, of western European stock, American, and middle or upper class? Do you have a thin, athletic build?

If you are all of those things, then you get a perfect score on the Harrisonburg, Virginia university’s official criteria for “privileged,” according to two charts shared with student employees.

You mean critical studies really is the splay kids attempting to intellectuallize their ressentiment of the sleek kids?  Read on and judge for yourself.

Conversely, if you have physical, mental, emotional, learning, or other disabilities; if you are younger than 30 or older than 50; if you’re a woman, transgender, nonbinary or genderqueer; if you’re a lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual; if you are homoromantic, aromantic, or bi/panromantic; if you are Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or pagan; if you are Black, Asian, or Latinx; if you are of non-western European stock; if your nationality is anywhere outside of America; if you hail from the working or lower class; if you are overweight or underweight; if you are any significant combination of those things then you might belong to the “oppressed group.”

I'm over 50, unchurched, comfortable around power tools, and more than a little stocky. On the other hand, I've got plenty of F.U. money.

The Morale Conditioners who hoped to demoralize the Normals apparently have stashed their work in the memory hole.

Over the course of the video, student employees of the university are asked to take some time for “self-reflection” on the messaging, write their reflections down, and save those reflections to be looked over by their supervisors later.

“After the training was completed,” Fox News reports, “student employees were sent an email instructing them to ‘not share these materials with others.’”

Editor’s note: James Madison University appears to have removed the video in question from YouTube. Fortunately, The College Fix saved screenshots from the presentation, which we have added above.

Is it also a state secret that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people?

WHY DRIVE-BY JOURNALISTS ARE THEIR OWN WORST ENEMIES.

Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump held a rally during which he took a dig at current president^(*) Joe Biden's botching of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, something that lots of other citizens not holding office have also been doing of late.

A radio newsreader opted to append, by way of a fact-check or something, that the Trump administration had some sort of settlement with the Taliban and other Afghan tribal leaders under which United States forces and advisors would have been out by May 1.

As fact-checks go, that's a self-own, as we might expect an extension to have led to a better result, particularly with the adults Our Intellectual Betters keep telling us are Back In Charge adding their wisdom.

It might be, as my Member of Congress, who has experience in theater, noted, that the Trump foreign policy team made the botch possible by negotiating with terrorist overlords in the first place.  He continued, "The Republicans are putting out talking points to make Biden look bad. The Democrats are putting out talking points to point out the past administration. In truth, they're both responsible.  Both parties have failed the American people."

The news reader did not offer that, or any other elaboration.

MARKING OFF.

Let Facts be submitted to a Candid World.

I'm taking another break.  Thanks for looking in.  It's likely there will be more Official Nonsense to document when I get back.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

It's been at least a month since the Milwaukee Bucks won the professional basketball championship.  The usual neurotic cat ladies made the usual neurotic noises about all those celebrating fans crowding into the Deer District to enjoy the game and the victory celebration.  Superspreader event?  You decide.  "As of [August 3], the Wisconsin Department of Health Services had identified almost 500 attendees who later contracted covid."  That gets a dyspeptic Daily Kos diarist (is there any other kind?) excited.  "If you choose to remain maskless and unvaccinated while packed in like squeaky cheese curds with thousands of screaming strangers, you might be a COVID-riddled dumbfuck."  I need a magnifying glass to see the day-on-day change in deaths in all of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, the insurgents at Twitchy want to dunk on Dukes County, Massachusetts (where the Obama birthday party took place) as another superspreader event.  Sorry, no.  "An average of 6 cases per day were reported in Dukes County, a 2,050 percent increase from the average two weeks ago. Since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 1 in 12 residents have been infected, a total of 1,502 reported cases."  Yes, and if you start from a low base, you can get what looks like a massive percentage increase, in much the same way that allowing four earned runs in two-thirds of an inning can destroy your earned run average.  I'd need a microscope to see the day-on-day change in corona deaths in all of Dukes County, let alone on the Vineyard.

Will all of you neurotic cat ladies stop trying to scare us?