MARKING OFF.

Oktoberfest season continues into the first, and sometimes the second, weekend of October.

Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

THE ART OF DISPATCHING IS NOT LOST.

It sometimes seems as though the freight railroad dispatchers do everything they can to frustrate Amtrak.  Amtrak, and to some extent, the current federal Department of Transportation and Executive Branch want to change that.

The westbound Southwest Chief is 6 minutes late out of Albuquerque, N.M., as you roll toward the junction with BNSF Railway’s Southern Transcon at Dalies. From Roomette 14 you wonder: What will happen to the Chief’s timekeeping when we hit the Gallup Subdivision that carries 80 freights per day?

The question is bigger than it may seem. Host railroad handling of Amtrak trains has become a thorny issue. Regulations that went into effect last year set new on-time performance standards and created a process to enforce them beginning July 1. And the Surface Transportation Board is bracing for a raft of Amtrak complaints about freight train interference in January, the first month when host railroads can be hauled before regulators for delaying passengers.

On the main stem of the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, currently the Southern Transcon of BNSF, the dispatchers are about their craft.

You ponder all this as the Sept. 9 version of train No. 3 leaves the quiet Glorieta Sub. The BNSF dispatcher in Fort Worth has lined your train for Track 2, and at 4:59 p.m., 11 minutes behind schedule, the Chief clunks through the interlocking at Milepost 27.3. Ahead lies 248.3 miles of the Gallup Sub, part of the former Santa Fe main line across the Southwest. It’s the busiest freight railroad in North America, and there’s no better place to judge whether freight and passenger can coexist.

Sure, the Gallup Sub is a splendid railroad built for heavy volume. Centralized traffic control, bidirectional signaling, and crossovers spaced 10 miles apart provide maximum flexibility. But the dispatching challenge is not merely volume. For this is a multispeed railroad, with the 90-mph Chief, 70-mph Z-symbol intermodal hotshots, a 55-mph limit on the heaviest trains, and grain trains that plod along at 40. Toss in grades – westbounds face a 96-mile 0.6% pull with short sections of 1% at the beginning and end of the climb – and it’s more difficult to keep freights out of the Chief’s way. And maintaining schedules by having the Chief and Z-trains overtake slower traffic chews up precious capacity in a hurry.

The time-sensitive intermodal trains take the place of the fleet of transcontinental passenger trains that used to converge on that subdivision, and the centralized traffic control with bidirectional signalling means the freight crews no longer have to duck into an outside siding so as to be in the clear at the time a scheduled superior train is due at the station immediately in the rear of the train.  That seems harsh, but in those days the train taking siding had to stop for a front-end man to throw the switch, proceed at restricted speed into the siding, and then have a hind-end man in the caboose line the switch for the main line, and then crews on both ends had to stand on the opposite side of the track from the switch stand to inspect the passing superior train.  If the fleet of passenger trains was due, that crew might have a long wait, a long way from any stations.  Getting out was no easy feat, either: the head-end man had to line the switch for the train to return to the main, then the train had to take it slow enough through the switch both for safety reasons and to give the hind-end man a chance to restore that switch to the main line and get on the train.  These days, the remote control comes in handy.

In the first 45 minutes out of Dalies, you see just a single freight train. A lull on the Southern Transcon means one thing: A parade is coming. Sure enough, the march begins at 5:49 at McCartys, where we swing over to Track 1 to overtake a pair of westbounds. Then at 6 p.m. it’s back into the flow of westward traffic on Track 2 at East Grants, where eastbound stacks on Track 1 had slowed to await the Chief.

That's the starter, the mains, in more than one sense of the word, are coming.

After this flurry there’s a welcome break in the action. A delicious dinner, fresh from the dining car’s galley, arrives in Roomette 14. The pan-roasted chicken breast with wild mushroom risotto, English peas, and Parisian carrots smothered in a morel mushroom sauce tastes every bit as good as it sounds. It’s a far cry from the microwaved meals Amtrak inflicted on you earlier in the pandemic.

Right after you join the Clean Plate Club – savoring the last bite of flourless chocolate torte – BNSF reminds you there’s a world of freight outside your window. Just east of Gallup, N.M., the first of two eastbounds fly by at 6:35 p.m. The Chief pulls into Gallup 8 minutes late as another eastbound roars past. A crush of coach passengers puts the Chief 15 minutes behind as we whistle west at 7:01 p.m.

Room service is more common these days, thanks to the corona mitigations, and on the Chief the dining car can be placed adjacent to all the sleeping cars, something that isn't always possible the way Amtrak switch trains. That the meals are again a cut above what Noodles would reject is also heartening.

Then it’s nonstop trains. Eastbound intermodal at 7:03, empty hoppers 16 minutes later, and at 7:33, the Chief swings over to Track 1 at East Houck, Ariz., where an eastbound domestic stack train holds on Track 2. The 2-mile-long train’s hind end sits just clear of the crossover at West Houck, where the Chief heads back to Track 2. Minutes later, two eastbound intermodals flash past.

Approaching Winslow, Ariz., and the Seligman Sub, the Chief is back on Track 1 to overtake a Z-train at Manila, then veers over to Track 2 at West Hibbard as more eastbounds roll by. The Chief eases into the station stop at Winslow 22 minutes late, a loss of 7 minutes from Gallup. In Roomette 14, it’s time to convert the seats into a bunk and get some shuteye after watching a masterful dispatching job that kept the Gallup Sub fluid while causing no unreasonable delays to the Chief.

The sharp dispatching, plus the recovery margin Amtrak provides in its schedules, gets the California passengers in without delay.

In the predawn darkness, you wake for your stop at San Bernardino, Calif., where the Chief’s 9 minutes early. No. 3 reaches its ultimate destination, Los Angeles Union Station, 46 minutes to the good. Yes, Amtrak and freight can coexist – so long as there’s a commitment to priority trains and first-rate dispatching that keeps traffic rolling. BNSF shows how to get the job done.

How much of that is the tradition the current dispatchers inherited from Santa Fe and how much of that reflects BNSF not drinking the precision scheduled railroading poison is left as an exercise.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

A recent Urban Milwaukee post asserts "the wealthy are not paying their fair share of the costs of government."  It's unclear how they determine what a "fair share" is.  The post includes a figure suggesting that the total tax burden is roughly proportional to income, which makes sense given that lower-income people devote a greater share of their income to personal consumption and incur sales and excise taxes accordingly.  There's a pattern of lower-income people receiving more in benefits than they pay in taxes, irresepective of the nature of their welfare state.

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy data as compiled by Urban Milwaukee.

Nowhere in the article, though, does the author suggest what the "fair share" of taxes among high-income earners ought to be.  I should be grateful, I suppose, for a pass at an incidence analysis.

DUMB.

Only in San Francisco, or other places overrun with silly aesthetes.  "Family-owned burrito chain El Farolito will have to change its branding or pick a new neighborhood to open up its 12th location if it wants to avoid being ensnared in the city's restrictions on 'formula retail.'"  Let's see, you protect the special identity of a neighborhood by placing limitations on how alike the coffee shops or restaurants under common ownership look.

That's because the city's "formula retail" restrictions prevent businesses with 11 or more locations from opening in some of San Francisco's designated Neighborhood Commercial Districts—including North Beach.

There was an open question of whether El Farolito—whose owners have 11 locations throughout the Bay Area—met the definition of formula retail, which turns on whether a business has standardized menus, signage, facades, employee uniforms, color schemes, interior décor, or trademarks.

(A business is considered formula retail if it has two or more of those features standardized across at least 11 locations.)

That puts me in mind of the logic-chopping the Civil Aeronautics Board once engaged in to determine that a charter air carrier was a legitimate contract carrier and not a subterfuge to get around the fare and frequency regulations the scheduled carriers were subject to.  It became a game back in the day; to the San Francisco zoners, it's the same game.  "El Farolito's owners had argued in a document submitted to the Planning Department that several of its locations were called El Favorito. Their planned North Beach location would only be the ninth El Farolito, and thus under the formula retail threshold."  Farolito, Favorito, not a subtle subterfuge.  But it's all rather silly, and maybe even in San Francisco the foodies have a modicum of common sense.  "El Farolito may not have to make a federal case out of its sign to get permission to open its 12th location. Neighborhood activists have already started a movement to amend the city's formula retail restrictions so that smaller family businesses like El Farolito aren't tripped up by this red tape."

NO.

Dave Zirin proposes the worst idea of the season.  "Maybe sports need to be off limits until this country—at a bare minimum—is sufficiently vaccinated."  Just goes to show you that you can be Dave, and a Karen, or perhaps a neurotic cat lady.  "The more I follow the second year of corona tyranny, the more I think that there's something to it.  Consider, dear reader, the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which, last year, was supposed to be The End of The World."  It wasn't the end of the world last year, it wasn't the end of the world this year (nor was the Minnesota state fair,) but Mr Zirin thinks that having no fun is For Your Own Good.

Now, even as we see breakthrough cases, mutations that act faster than the vaccine because of global vaccine inequity, and a section of the population that refuses to do its part to curb the virus, the sports world remains committed to the idea of normalcy. It acts as though it can bullishly ram through this idea of “business as usual,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

The NBA not only held a packed NBA Finals, it also celebrated the Milwaukee fans who gathered by the tens of thousands outside of the Bucks’ arena in close contact to watch the game on a massive screen. The Olympics were full steam forward in Tokyo, a highly concentrated city with a very low vaccination rate. Despite all efforts to keep the tens of thousands of visitors on lockdown, the results were predictable: a surge in new cases.

In the NFL, if there is a COVID-19 outbreak on a team, there will be no rescheduling. Instead, a team will be attributed a loss and every player on the squad will lose a game check. If this happens more than once or twice, the entire legitimacy of the season will be in question.

Then there’s college football. We have seen young students, much to the delight of the NCAA’s broadcast partners, gather 100,000 strong, blithely oblivious to their role in keeping the virus alive and spreading.

That Milwaukee Buck party? "I need a magnifying glass to see the day-on-day change in deaths in all of Wisconsin."  College football?  It's more likely that Mr Zirin and Dr Faustus Fauci and the president aren't happy about the mockery they're taking.  What is it about the self-styled progressives objecting to people having fun, anyway?

Perhaps we need to take an honest look at the mutations and absence of protections and shut it all down. Maybe sports need to be off limits until this country—at a bare minimum—is sufficiently vaccinated.  For many, that might be the only incentive that works.

If it were our kid, we’d say, “No sports until you are well.” We need to say the same thing to this country. If 2021 were the year the sports world decided that the show must go on, let’s sincerely hope that 2022 could be a time of sobriety and recovery. This almost certainly will not happen: the financial and personal imperatives are just too strong. But I’m still going to make the case. With our collective health hanging in the balance, let’s just shut it down.

No.  We can weigh the risks of getting infected against the merits of assembling to call attention to our grievances, whether with police conduct or the conduct of elections or the corona mitigations themselves.  We can weigh the risks of getting infected against the merits of assembling at a football game or Oktoberfest or family reunion.

Those of you who are not happy, deal with it.  "But if you're a neurotic cat lady, that's having too much fun, in an environment too drenched with testosterone and estrogen interacting the way Nature, or Nature's God, intended, and you have to shame it."

WHERE THERE ARE NO CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITS ON POWER.

A Cayman Islands newspaper editorial prays for the lifting of the corona tyranny.

In the same way that we don’t ban cars because some people drive without seatbelts, we can’t continue to close the island off to the world because of COVID-19.

The vast majority of people in the Cayman Islands have willingly accepted and respected enormous limitations on their own freedoms during the pandemic.

The right to travel, the right to a family life, the right to make a living are all fundamental entitlements that continue to be impacted. It is time for those rights to be restored.

The same is true in Illinois and the rest of the several States, where the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution presumably limit what governments can do.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Sometimes, no elaboration is necessary.  Sometimes, the idea gets reinforced in various ways, and again, it's a review session on regular Cold Spring Shops themes.

YOU CAN'T TALK ABOUT SEX DIFFERENCES THAT WAY.

The American Conservative's Bradford Tuckfield just did.

The top level of the chess world gives us strong evidence that men are mentally different from women, and that the differences are substantial, consistent around the world, and stable across time. So what?

The mental differences between men and women are important because huge swaths of our culture are built on denying them. Corporate and government affirmative action programs have goals, either explicit or implicit, of 50/50 gender balances in socially prestigious positions like corporate C-suites, Ivy League campuses, and Nobel Prize award ceremonies. In typical discussions of gender differences, the 50/50 gender balance goal is taken as a starting point, and discussions revolve only around tactics: How do we get to 50/50? What’s stopping us and what needs to change? But since men and women are different, the goal of a 50/50 gender balance itself deserves serious, skeptical scrutiny.

Perhaps corporate jobs and some parts of education and entertainment offer opportunities for more proportionate outcomes, particularly with proper development of the entire talent pool.  It might be that the cult of the genius turns promising kids of both sexes into reluctant mathematicians or chessplayers.  And yet, if you investigate the tails of a talent pool, there's a pattern.

(1) Gender differences vary by content area, students' educational levels, and students’ proficiency levels. The gender differences at the extreme tails of the distribution are often more substantial than the gender differences at the mean. (2) Exploring the extreme tails of the distributions shows that the situation of the weakest males in reading is a real matter of concern. In mathematics and science, males are more frequently among the highest performing students. (3) The “greater male variability hypothesis” is confirmed.

There might, yet, be strategies available to teachers, to raise the performance of the weakest males and the strongest females, and to recognize path dependence (which can include historical discrimination), and yet, the task is not trivial.

We argue that a third hypothesis has been neglected: the female success story is viewed from a “mean” perspective (i.e. based on gender equality, on average). If the most gifted boys still outperform the most gifted girls, the low rate of female students in mathematics and science fields in higher education, as the subsequent underrepresentation of women in the related occupations, is not so paradoxical.

Mathematics, experimental or applied science, and to an extent, chess, are cumulative in the way that other fields of intellectual endeavor are not.  Specifically, boys and girls are equally capable of picking up reading.  But there are more low-ability schoolboy readers than schoolgirl readers.  It's probably asking too much of educational researchers to consider the effect of all those female kindergarten and early grade teachers on those boys.

HOW MUCH AUTHORITY DOES THE VILLAGE HAVE?

We have motorcycle helmet laws, and seat belt laws, and mask mandates in part under the argument that public resources go to picking up the accidents and treating the sick.  For instance, "Evidence shows the economic benefits of universal motorcycle helmet laws greatly exceed costs. Most benefits come from avoided healthcare and productivity losses."  Recently, health care practitioners and their allies have offered a similar argument, going so far as to suggest that people who don't get their corona shots be last in line for intensive care.  Milton Friedman objected to that sort of reasoning, with a bon mot along the lines of "people do not bear a sticker identifying them as property of the government."

It might be that helmet, seat belt, and mask requirements are the least costly way to reach a more efficient use of medical facilities. It's the more general principle that interests me, that is, whether there are limits to governments treating people as if they were state property.

YOUR ELECTRIC CAR IS A FIRE HAZARD.

Seriously.

Chevrolet asks Bolt EV owners to practice the automotive equivalent of social distancing over concerns that their vehicles could catch fire. The automaker sent a notice to Bolt EV electric cars owners to tell them that they should plan to park at least 50 feet away from other vehicles and avoid parking garages or other structures until dealers can replace their battery modules.

Batteries made by LG Energy Solution can catch fire unexpectedly. The latest warning from Chevrolet parent General Motors is perhaps the direst yet after the automaker asked owners to enable a setting that prevents batteries from charging to 100% and to skip unsupervised overnight charging.

Moonbattery picked up the story; I also heard it on a local radio station, warning owners of those cars not to recharge them inside, and repeating the warning not to let them recharge, unwatched, overnight.  That's going to be interesting come winter, when those batteries are stressed the most.

WHEN GARRISON KEILLOR HAS HAD ENOUGH.

The kind of Excessively Earnest cosmopolitan who wants language to be sensitive, you know, the kind of person who kept listening to Prairie Home Companion after it got really stale, really shouldn't be tone-policing language.

[T]here are language vigilantes roaming the land and some of them carry a noose and know where they can find a scaffold.

A friend who is a Unitarian minister tells me that her church demands that she submit her sermons two weeks in advance "to make sure there are no problems" — apparently, the problem is that she has used the word "fellowship," which raised concerns on the church board, some members preferring the term "community," "fellowship" seeming too masculine.

Fellowship is the friendliness of people united in a faith. My Episcopal church has a woman rector and assistant rector and I feel fellowship with them. I don't feel community, any more than I'd address a male friend as "My good fellow" — — I'm not P.G. Wodehouse, I'm an American.

That's not a Unitarian congregation, that's a communist cell. But I digress.

When liberal New York Unitarians decide to censor their clergy, you know we're in serious serious trouble. Pretty soon the Freemans and Trumans and Petersons and Olsons will need to degender themselves and then how shall we make Los Angeles not threatening to agnostics? St. Paul will have to change its name to East Minneapolis. And why do we keep the name America, honoring the navigator Amerigo Vespucci who sailed our coasts and thought he was in Asia? Do we know for a fact that the man dealt fairly with indigenous peoples? No, we do not. Out it goes, and Columbia too, and Washington, for all I care.

That's as close to a "stuff it" as you're going to get from Pastor Inkvist.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES.

David Letterman used to have such a segment.  He's no longer on late night television, but presidents continue to contribute material.

Enjoy, or cringe, as your temperament allows you.

AN EXCESSIVELY EARNEST REMAKE OF P.C.U.?

I'm not in the habit of subscribing to streaming shows, and the following commentary is based entirely on secondary sources, without any observation on my part.  Netflix, apparently, offered a subscription show called "The Chair," about the personal problems of the head of the English department at some tony finishing school.  Figures, if you want a lot of neurotics, you check out the English department, and the tony finishing school is likely to be full of people with self-esteem problems because they're within biking distance of an Ivy but not at an Ivy.  Thus Atlantic reviewer Sophie Gilbert takes it Very Seriously.  "The near-perfect show elegantly skewers the subject of free speech on campus."

The show provoked a lot of commentary, and a mini-dissertation below the jump.

THE FEVER WILL EVENTUALLY PASS.

I'm not qualified to evaluate the arguments presented in the following.  They offer reason to be hopeful, if they stand up.

Upticks in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in central southeastern states such as West Virginia and Kentucky are considered signs that the pandemic is on its way out and shifting toward endemicity.

As more people gain immunity to the coronavirus, through either vaccination or infection, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread and mutate into variants that are better at infecting people. The pandemic’s demotion to the endemic level at which the virus circulates globally at manageable levels is likely around the corner, infectious disease experts say, but the delta variant is still ripping through states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, where immunogenicity is low.

“Delta speeds up that approach to endemicity,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. She pointed to California as an example of recently declining case rates due to a steady uptick in vaccinations over the summer as well as natural exposure of unvaccinated people to the virus.

The delta variant “leaves immunity in its wake,” Gandhi said. “So you get all this immunity, then you get it down to a low circulating level, and then that is a way to live.”

By contrast, new daily COVID-19 cases reported in West Virginia and Kentucky increased 20% and 36% over the past two weeks, respectively. They have the second- and third-highest cases per capita in the United States, outstripped only by Alaska. They also lead the U.S. in hospitalizations due to the disease, indicating that too few people in those states have received the vaccines that have been proven highly effective at protecting against severe infections.

Still, epidemiologists caution against viewing these recent upticks as a sign that yet another surge is brewing. Rather, they are part and parcel of the same delta surge recorded earlier this summer.

“What we're seeing in Kentucky and West Virginia is an evolution of what we saw in the South already,” said Dr. David Dowdy, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The areas that are more highly vaccinated, we haven't seen the same spread to, but this is still the evolution of that same outbreak … like what Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana were at the beginning of this surge.”

It might be too soon to declare victory in California, although that state now has the lowest transmission rate among the several States.  When the virus becomes endemic, though, that means it has learned to live with people, and people have figured out how to live with it.  It might be that attending college football games, Oktoberfesten, and other outdoor events does not pose a significant risk, except to the killjoys who are troubled that people are having fun.

To get to that level means that many more people will become exposed to the virus as long as vaccine holdouts remain firmly against getting the shots.

“The current surge has likely peaked in the United States, but it may be a very slow off-ramp,” Dowdy said. “If the criterion is that we want to be back to where we were in June, that could still be a long way away, and by a long way, I mean it could be months. ... We're going to have to learn to adapt and accept some level of disease ongoing.”

Worldwide, the trend of increases in infections might have stopped.  According to World Health Organization reports, the delta variant is the predominant cause of infection; two newer variants  "have yet to cause widespread epidemics."

PEDESTRIANS ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRESPASS UPON THE RAILWAY.

Be advised that Operation Clear Track is under way.  "Nearly 500 police and sheriff’s departments across 43 states and the District of Columbia are joining the Amtrak Police Department and Operation Lifesaver Inc., to conduct Operation Clear Track, the single largest railroad safety law enforcement detail in U.S. history."  There is also a Canadian Operation Clear Track, presumably rendered in French and with metric warnings.  "More than 600 police departments across Canada are taking part in this year’s Operation Clear Track, and for the first time ever, community and bylaw officers will also be participating in the initiative."

A heuristic is useful: a freight train running at a typical track speed of 55 mph or 90 km/h will require about eighteen football fields to stop.

Digital cameras are marvelous for photographing trains.  Anything you see in Cold Spring Shops is taken from public property, or behind the yellow line if in a station, and cropped in the computer.  I don't want to contribute to the engineer's nightmares, nor should you.

WE SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION.

Every day should be Cross Crossings Cautiously Day.  We do have a Rail Safety Week, and apparently there are a lot of people taking their chances racing trains to crossings.  Burma Shave had a public service announcement about that phenomenon, almost a century ago.

In Canada, there is a poster contest for children of up to age eight.  "We’re asking children to create an original piece of visual art that shows their favourite Thomas & FriendsTM character, as well as Canadian railway signs and signals, and includes at least one of these important rail safety messages."

Some of the messages lend themselves to youthful imagination better than others.  I have a bit of a history with poster contests, and on occasion the kids in Metra territory come up with some gems in the Metra safety contest.

The winning entries will be displayed on the Operation Lifesaver Canada website.  The mind boggles, though, at those Really Useful Engines from the Island of Sodor being directed by North American searchlight signals.

THE FUTURE RESEARCH PROMISES TO BE INTERESTING.

It's likely that lockdown-happy corona tyrant J. B. Pritzker will defend his continued ukases as For The Good Of People Who Didn't Vote For Him.

The vote to responsible Covid behavior correlation is shocking, and the overlay shows the trends of the redder an area gets, the dumber it gets, and the opposite for bluer.  A lack of education leaves these people vulnerable to efficient sophistry, and they end up as nothing more than political putty for hate radio and those that set this country back.

Our data supported facts are superior to their ill-informed opinions.  I know this because many that would have otherwise argued this with me can no longer, because they are dead of Covid.  I am not guaranteed safety from Covid, but an intelligent person does what they can to listen to science and make rational decisions.

That's a dyspeptic Kos diarist ringing the usual liberal chimes.  There might be lower vaccination rates downstate, and there is more pressure on the intensive care beds available in the sparsely settled areas.  "New COVID-19 hospital admissions have slowed down amid Illinois’ Delta variant coronavirus surge, but hospitals are still being pushed to the limit in southern Illinois — where all ICU beds were filled Monday night."  There aren't many beds to fill.  "It’s worse in 20 counties spanning the southern tip of the state. All 88 ICU hospital beds were occupied Monday night for a region that’s home to more than 400,000 residents and that has a testing positivity rate of 10.3%."  No doubt, the boffins who issued certificates of need for the construction of an intensive care unit carefully calculated that the public interest would not be served by an 89th bed, or an even hundred for those counties.

Intensive care units, though, are not solely for taking care of people in distress from coronavirus.  "Clearly many patients right now are seriously ill. We also know that overcrowding of hospitals by COVID patients with even mild illness can have negative implications for patients in need of other care. At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two."  The establishment's narrative builds on those "negative implications."  Those people who couldn't bother with getting vaccinated are now making things more difficult for people who get into car crashes or have strokes.  "That means any of the 400,000-plus residents of southern Illinois who need critical care — even those without COVID-19, such as stroke victims and car crash survivors — could have to be sent to hospitals hours away to get the treatment they need."

A year and a half ago, hospitals postponed elective surgeries and some treatments the better to keep capacity available for a surge of coronavirus patients in distress.  After each of the previous lulls in coronavirus infections (the next lull is about to begin) they started catching up.  Thus, some of the current occupants of intensive care units are people who had to defer treatment in one of the earlier increases in infections, and the latest surge of coronavirus infections is adding to that pressure on capacity.  Once the dust settles, the research projects could be interesting.  But for the coronavirus lockdowns, how many people could have had their conditions treated before they worsened enough to warrant hospitalization or intensive care?  Intensive care units aren't supposed to be sitting idle in any case; how much inefficiently idle capacity was there during the initial lockdowns, and how much inefficient stressing of the capacity is there now? Hardest question: how many quality adjusted life years might people have lost as a consequence of deferred early treatment, and how many quality adjusted life years did the corona lockdowns gain people?  (That is, if being deprived of freedom of association and movement is any kind of quality of life.)  On net, have the corona mitigations reduced economic welfare?

PRIVILEGE IS CIVILIZATION.

That's a straightforward conclusion.  Morale Conditioners at Iowa State can engage in all sorts of logic-chopping, and yet, they're conceding the point.

“Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups,” the handout said. Privileged people in the United States include “White people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Christians,” “Men,” and “ English-speaking people.” The handout also criticizes the concept of a meritocracy.

Privileged people “often believe that they have earned the privileges that they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them,” the handout said. “In fact, privileges are unearned and they are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”

People in the “dominant groups” often do not even know or recognize their own privilege.

Because of this ignorance, according to the document, privileged people become “agents of oppression.”

The oppressors “knowingly or unknowingly exploit and reap unfair advantage over members of groups that are targets of oppression.” These oppressive groups “are also trapped by the system of institutionalized oppression that benefits them and are confined to roles and prescribed behaviors.”

How hard is it for the diversity hustlers to take a more positive tack, say, getting people to recognize that any social organization is going to have insiders and outsiders, and that there might be evolutionary advantages for insiders receptive to good ideas from outsiders?  Denigrating people for their benightedness only gets you so far.

EXPECT VICTORY.

At the All Star break, the Milwaukee Brewers were in a position that the usual suspects could roll out their "If somebody had told you before the season" rationalization.  Then the Crew took a series from Cincinnati, establishing a larger lead in the division right after the break.  Thus, although the Brewers are in the playoffs, and Cincinnati will have to overhaul the Cardinals for a wild-card spot, it is not time to pour the champagne.  "But let’s not take for granted what they accomplished on Saturday night, and just how far they’ve come in such a short period of time."

TOSSING HIS RANK ON THE TABLE.

A few weeks ago, a Marine light colonel called Stuart Scheller very publicly expressed his discontent with leadership, all the way to National Command Authority, complete with a chess problem for his superiors.

Now, an Army light colonel called Paul Hague has also submitted his quit letter.  The letter listed the coronavirus vaccine requirement as his first reason for leaving, although the main points of his complaint might be what come after that.

The values that our nation was founded on, has lived under and thrived under, have been utterly decimated by the current presidential administration and the leadership of the military; to include the Army. We are watching the fall of liberty at this moment. Governors and mayors forcibly locking down millions of Americans, restricting them from their unalienable right to pursue happiness; forcing them out of their jobs and their ability to participate in the most basic and fundamental rights life offers because of their personal beliefs and values.

Two observations do not a trend make, although if current service members advise their children to consider something other than a military career, Our Political Masters might have a real problem on their hands. 

OKTOBERFEST.

The original, in München, is on hold again under Germany's corona tyranny.

In the States, local Oktoberfesten are under way, perhaps with capacity limitations and other mitigations.

Those are the opening ceremonies from Milwaukee's German Fest in 2018, that event is also on hold for another year.  Other events in the area are ongoing, or scheduled.

Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

This week, the pithy comments mostly don't require elaboration.  On occasion, though, there's a Cold Spring Shops theme to remind you about.

LEANING INTO THE SCORN?

I'm not sure when and how personal transportation morphed into adults replaying "Cool and Nerds" with the hope of flipping the script in high school.  Streetsblog, which seems to be populated with particularly soy-poisoned bike and rapid transit advocates, has decided to use the cool kids' fetishes as a tool against them.

Contrary to what the all-powerful truck nut lobby would have you believe, the kind of car you drive (or don’t drive!) connotes literally nothing about your gonads, genitals, or secondary sex characteristics, much less the infinite range of gender expressions and sexual orientations that have existed since the dawn of the species.

Unfortunately, the average American auto ad exec never made it to gender studies 101.

Today, we’re looking at two commercials that harness some of the blandest flavors of heteropatriarchy to shame insecure people into buying death machines — and while these two happen to be from Chevy, most automakers featured in the contest are guilty of it, too.

The pickup truck scrotum is so Bush Administration, and I want somebody to explain how Gillette's advertisements are better for the writers having taken gender studies.  Whatever.  Streetsblog, though, are having their own version of bracketology, voting on the most toxic automobile advertisements (apparently of all time.)  One contestant was a Chevrolet truck commercial from the era of truck scrota that the company subsequently withdrew!  The other was a faux-focus-group commercial from 2015.

This 2015 campaign for the new-and-improved (and-20-percent-heavier) edition of the Chevy Colorado doesn’t scream offensive “no homo” stereotypes quite as explicitly as its 2005 counterpart.

But it’s not that far off.

In the spot, which aired during 50th Superbowl and remained in circulation for at least two years, a focus group of selectively edited everyday Americans are shown photos of the same actor standing in front of two cars: the extremely awesome and tough Chevy Colorado, and a puny sedan for weak emasculated babies.

Then they are asked a series of leading questions about these two drivers — who, once again, are literally the same person.

Who they find more sexually alluring? (All choose the truck driver, including, alarmingly, the focus group composed entirely of children).

Nowhere during the faux-focus-groups did anybody ask about using the pickup truck for hauling 4x8 building material sheets or other useful stuff around, it was more about selling the image, and the choice of "literally the same guy" was with that in mind.  Car-culture culture wars aren't going to turn out well.  Strong Towns participant Daniel Herriges elaborates.

Where there is partisan polarization, it's not surprising to see a corresponding increase in polarization around the cultural signifiers of that divide—the things that make you think, "These are my kind of people." But it's a tall order to claim that cultural hostility to "walking places" is what's causing conservatives to live in low-density areas. The reality is much more complex and multi-factor. A survey that says that conservatives prefer spread-out environments might simply be reflecting the reality of more conservatives having grown up and lived in such environments.

But this doesn't really tell us, in a constraining sense, what kinds of places people actually would enjoy living, or could enjoy if their lives put them in a context where a different set of choices made sense.

The problem, and Mr Herriges notes as much, is that neighborhoods come as bundles.  That walkable neighborhood might come with more aggressive panhandlers or less functional schools, for instance.  Identifying toxic car commercials doesn't do much to make the bundles more desirable.

GEORGIANS UNDERSTAND MEMORY-HOLES.

A pay-per-view show called "Queen's Gambit" purports to tell the story of a girl with some talent for chess.  The producers, however, decided to present the adversities facing her in too scary a light. “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”

Grandmaster Gaprindashvili, who also served in the Georgian parliament, is still very much alive, and not amused with the revisionist history.  "In fact, by 1968, the year the fictional episode was set, Gaprindashvili had 'competed against at least 59 male chess players (28 of them simultaneously in one game), including at least ten Grandmasters of that time,' according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in Federal District Court in Los Angeles."  Her lawyers are not amused. “Thus, in a story that was supposed to inspire women by showing a young woman competing with men at the highest levels of world chess, Netflix humiliated the one real woman trail blazer who had actually faced and defeated men on the world stage in the same era.”

Netflix appear to be taking the attitude that anything can happen in a cartoon.  "'Netflix has only the utmost respect for Ms. Gaprindashvili and her illustrious career, but we believe this claim has no merit and will vigorously defend the case,' Netflix said in a statement to the Daily Beast."

JUST PLAY IT FOR LEASTER.

The professional football season got off to a bad start for the old Black and Blue Division, where all four teams are tied for the lead, at a loss apiece.  Rick Telander wants to make the best of it.  "But the NFC North is looking like a race to the mid-bottom, and the Bears are in the pack."  The Packer performance is not good enough for Bryan Dee.  "If you’re bothered by the criticism directed toward this team, don’t be."

The Packers play the Lions on Sunday.  At least one team will not be winless after that.

PENNY-WISE, POUND FOOLISH?

It's been close to a hundred years since the House of Representatives added more seats, and it's my sense that the electoral vote anomalies of recent years reflect in part that constraint.  There's a lengthy Geoffrey Skelley essay on the merits, or not, of adding seats to the House.  The article notes, in passing, how the country came close to one of those electoral vote anomalies just before Congress got its 435 seats.  It makes reference to Matthew "Fruits and Votes" Shugart and his useful cube root rule for determining the size of an elected body.  There's a lot more technical stuff in the article, it will reward careful study.

My post title calls attention to what I see is the wrong sort of objection, deeper into the article.

For instance, a larger House would by necessity mean a bigger government and more spending. House members make $174,000 per year, and after five years of service they are also eligible for a pension. Combine that with new staff, new construction for office space, perhaps even a roomier House chamber and you’re talking about many millions or even billions of dollars.

With a trillion dollars in infrastructure waste and several trillion dollars in attempting to resume the War on Poverty those additional dollars on Congressional salaries are a rounding error.  I heard something on one of the opinion shows, on the other hand, that might speak to where the real waste is.  Namely, with Congressional districts as populous as they are, your Member of Congress, who spends much of the morning fund-raising, only has the opportunity to get to know a few of the most influential constituents.  A smaller set of constituents might be more conducive to getting to know what's bothering the less influential ones.  And it might be easier to comply with those civil rights provisions that require drawing districts without diluting minority populations if there are more districts to draw.  You might even get districts that look more like the simplest polygon, rather than the convoluted shapes that bipartisanship gets us (majority-minority here and here, cluster of Republicans there) and perhaps that might be reason for the Democrats and Republicans alike to work toward making their messages more appealing to people who disagree with them.

REPAYING CONTEMPT WITH DEFIANCE?

From time to time, I note the popularity of transgressive flags at county fairs and threshing bees.  Variations on the Gadsden rattlesnake and Trump flags have been popular of late, but from time to time you'll still see the Confederate battle flag on offer.

That's a flag and tee shirt stand at the Walworth County Fair, Labor Day weekend.

Will Wilkinson attempts to draw Serious Political Generalizations about the Deplorableness of the Country Class.

I didn’t understand this when I was a kid, but the lived experience of growing up halfway between Branson and Lake Woebegone gave me my cultural bearings — supplied the contrasts that defined a distinct and salient Iowan identity. As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang. (Larry the Cable Guy is from Nebraska, FWIW.)

The material decline is real, nudged along by improvements in information technologies, and poisoned by painkillers and booze.  It doesn't do much good to sneer, though.

Before it could be successfully organized politically, America’s increasingly ethnocentric non-urban white population needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.

What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened. Now, I have few doubts that it did happen and is still happening. Indeed, it’s hard to think of better impressionistic evidence than the spread of Confederate flags far from the South into all parts of white rural America. But that doesn’t seem like quite enough.

It might be as simple as "you wear your X, I'll wear mine."  Or, perhaps, it's about owning the libs.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests there might be something to Wilkinson's hypothesis, although getting solid empirical evidence is another matter.  "Proving that this has happened, beyond anecdotal observations about accents and flags, is difficult."

AMERIKA, ERWACHE.

Isn't that the rallying cry of the Angry Right?  Not always.  It's Robert Reich raising the battle cry, "It is imperative that America wake up."  What to?

Yet even as Trump’s attempted coup gains traction, most of the rest of America continues to sleep. We’ve become so outrage-fatigued by his antics, and so preoccupied with the more immediate threats of the Delta variant and climate-fueled wildfires and hurricanes, that we prefer not to know.

Mr Reich is in California, which, last time I checked, has a governor who successfully characterized the recall attempt against him as a "Republican recall" and described the replacement governor had the recall succeeded (according to California's weird recall procedure) as a Trumpian.  That comes in the wake of Mr Trump being his own worst enemy, injecting his grievances into the Georgia Senate runoffs (using a somewhat more sensible runoff than California uses) in a way that gave Democrats an opportunity to get more of their ideas made law than would otherwise have been possible.

Never mind any of that, the coup plotters are still at large.

Federal legislation that would pre-empt state voter suppression laws is bogged down in the Senate. Biden hasn’t made it a top priority. A House select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s possible role is barely off the ground. The U.S Justice Department has made no move to indict the former president for anything.

But unless Trump and his co-conspirators are held accountable for the damage they have inflicted and continue to inflict on American democracy, and unless Senate Democrats and Biden soon enact national voting rights legislation, Trump’s attempted coup could eventually succeed.

It's a strange world we live in, where voter identification and signature verification provisions, and periodic audits of the voting rolls are voter suppression.

NOTHING GOOD COMES OF FISHING OFF THE COMPANY PIER.

No, dear reader, this is not the script of a bad rom-com.

Ten years ago, Alyssa Reid landed her dream job: assistant director of the speech and debate team at James Madison University (JMU). She also became a faculty member of the School of Communication Studies, where she met a student named Kathryn Lese.

Lese took Reid's speech class in the spring of 2013. The two quickly became best friends. The following year, Lese graduated from JMU and accepted a graduate teaching position with the speech and debate team. The pair worked closely together as friends and colleagues, and traveled together for events.

One night, during a trip to New Jersey for a forensics tournament, Lese told Reid that despite being in a relationship with a man, she was a lesbian, and had developed feelings for her, according to Reid. Though initially reluctant to put their friendship at risk, Reid says she eventually came to reciprocate Lese's feelings.

"When she first told me that she had feelings for me, I immediately told her that we can't be in a relationship," says Reid. "But she was very persistent and eventually it just became a reality after time."

They dated for two and a half years, living together for much of that time.

The relationship ended badly, causing both women much consternation. Almost a year later, on December 4, 2018, Lese filed a Title IX report with JMU. This report then became the basis of a sexual misconduct complaint, and Reid was accused of engaging in a nonconsensual relationship with her former girlfriend.

Well, maybe it's a rom-com with a Franz Kafka script.

One of the oddest aspects of the complaint against Reid was that the university had already settled the basic question of whether the relationship was inappropriate—and settled it in Reid's favor.

In May 2016—while the couple was dating—someone else at the university lodged a complaint about them. The university investigated the matter, and the communications department determined that since Reid and Lese were colleagues and not part of a supervisor-employee or teacher-student arrangement, they were free to date.

"They had already investigated this relationship," says Harriet Hageman, Reid's attorney and a senior litigation counsel at the nonpartisan New Civil Liberties Alliance. "Under the existing rules, there was no problem with this relationship between two consenting adults."

Lese's December 2018 complaint, however, asked the university to reconsider the matter. According to Reid's lawsuit, Lese was highly vengeful following the breakup, and out to ruin Reid's life. Nevertheless, the complaint did not allege any specific violation of JMU policy, according to Reid. (Lese did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Lese] never used any of the terminology that JMU subsequently used in the Title IX proceedings," says Reid. "She identifies our relationship as a romantic relationship and she admitted that it ended on not good terms. I think that's pretty much her exact expression. That somehow became JMU's open door to file a non-consensual relationship claim."

Not only was somebody telling lies about Alyssa R., but she doesn't even get to confront her accuser.

For the next two months, JMU compiled a case against Reid. Investigators instructed her to begin preparing her defense, though they did not spell out the charges. They also asked her to find witnesses to speak on her behalf, which was a challenge, since Reid had no idea what aspects of her behavior were under scrutiny. She was not given access to Lese's statement until after her witnesses were interviewed, she says.

A hearing was set for March 13, 2019. Reid was told that she could not cross-examine Lese directly; she would need to pose her questions to the hearing's chair instead. She was denied the right to have an active attorney present: The Title IX coordinator permitted a "support person" to attend, but this individual was barred from playing any role in the hearing, according to Reid's lawsuit.

Prior to the hearing, Reid thought long and hard about what kinds of questions she would ask the panel to pose to Lese—indeed, her entire defense rested on this line of inquiry. But it was all for naught: neither Lese nor any of Lese's witnesses attended the hearing.

And thus does Title Nine of the so-called Civil Rights Act become a tool by which higher education's managers can deprive people of their civil liberties, and, in this instance, their careers.

TAKE THE LONG VIEW.

Saturday evening, the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Cleveland Soon-Not-Indians 3-0, with starting pitcher Corbin Burnes issuing one walk and no hits over eight innings, and closing pitcher Josh Hader retiring the side in order.  That's only the second no-hitter in Brewer history, and some people are second-guessing Brewer manager Craig Counsell for changing pitchers.  "Brewers Twitter erupted, irate at Counsell for not leaving Burnes in the game to finish what he started."

Yes, complete games are rare, and complete game no-hitters rarer too.  The Brewers, however, are in a good position with October looming, and wearing out a starting pitcher on a hot evening just for the record books doesn't make sense.  "Another unforgettable moment in what appears to be a season of destiny for the Milwaukee Brewers."

On Sunday, the Brewers again defeated Soon-Not-Indians to move one win closer to clinching the division.  No regression to the mean here, unlike the Cubs, who earlier this year recorded a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers, which might have been the high point of their season.  The Dodgers won the next two games, then the Cubs had to play the Brewers, the Cubs subsequently dealt a number of players away, including Craig Kimbrel, who participated in the no-hitter, to the Chicago White Sox.

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY.

Municipal governments can change their property assessments to pay for what they think of as improvements.  Consider Milwaukee's streetlight upgrades, for instance.

What happens, though, when what the selectmen think of as improvements look like public overreach?  Here's an excerpt from Charles "Strong Town" Marohn's new book.

As I write this, my city is seeking bids for what they say in the official notice is a “street improvement project.” It does not seem like an improvement to me, nor to many people who unsuccessfully fought against it, yet formally it is called an improvement.

The project involves the widening of a residential street. The many young families who live there believe that the changes will dramatically increase automobile speeds, which already seem too fast. To widen the street, quite a few mature trees will be removed, and the city has acquired part of the front yards of many of these neighbors, often against their will. To add insult to injury, to help fund the project, these aggrieved property owners are being forced to pay the city a special assessment fee of thousands of dollars.

There's a reason "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" doesn't always inspire confidence.  The street widening gets into the budget, and perhaps qualifies for some infrastructure pork, because the existing street doesn't meet whatever the current engineering standards are.  "From the perspective of the design professional, the current street is 'substandard' because, given the design speed the professional has chosen and the number of vehicles they want to accommodate, it does not meet the recipe in the design cookbook."  Never mind that higher property taxes, perhaps permanently, combined with lower resale values for those houses, as parents recognize the neighborhood is less suitable for bringing up the kids, and flee to other neighborhoods where perhaps the road experts are subject to more constraints.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 12,307.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,138,017 infections and 14,662 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,573,538 infections and 26,969 deaths.

Just before Labor Day, the governor issued a new indoor mask requirement, although it doesn't apply in bars, coffee houses, or restaurants once people are served, and there's no obligation to keep a mask on between sips or bites.  The summer reopening of the state, subject to local mask mandates or businesses requesting customers to mask up, commenced on Friday, 11 June. 

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the good news is the bad news might be wrong: "Delta variant of COVID-19 ready to ravage unvaccinated in Illinois: ‘Some areas are going to blow up’"  The sensationalist journalists are still claiming there will be a surge, but it's not yet showing up in the reports.

As of this afternoon, the state counts 14.2 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they're still not disaggregating among finished and partial vaccinations, and the state's total count of the scary variants includes maybe four thousand Delta, up from around two thousand a month ago, and still under three thousand Gamma infections diagnosed. 

Note that since last month's post, Worldometers counted 41 additional corona deaths in Sweden.  A year ago, a Foreign Affairs article suggested "Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s."  In the early going, that didn't look like a good idea, particularly to people keeping score, but a year on, we're seeing headlines like "Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths."  The longer view, according to Johan Ahlander of Reuters, is

Sweden, which has shunned the strict lockdowns that have choked much of the global economy, emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries, an analysis of official data sources showed.

Infectious disease experts cautioned that the results could not be interpreted as evidence that lockdowns were unnecessary but acknowledged they may indicate Sweden’s overall stance on fighting the pandemic had merits worth studying.

In the past week, Germany and France have extended lockdowns amid rising coronavirus cases and high death tolls, moves that economists say will further delay economic recovery.

While many Europeans have accepted lockdowns as a last resort given the failure to get the pandemic under control with other methods, the moves have in recent months prompted street protests in London, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

Sweden, meanwhile, has mostly relied on voluntary measures focused on social distancing, good hygiene and targeted rules that have kept schools, restaurants and shops largely open - an approach that has sharply polarised Swedes but spared the economy from much of the hit suffered elsewhere in Europe.

Try freedom, it just might work.

If we are going to recover from this anytime soon, Americans must rediscover our founding principles. And people all around the world must insist that their governments place at least as much trust in its citizens as Sweden has. But to do that, we must first learn to trust ourselves as a society of individuals. And to do that, it would help to learn some economics: especially the concept of spontaneous order

Or, as I put it, dear reader, bet on emergence.

These post will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.

At Roller Coaster Day, the governor trailed by 11,502.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 11,187.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 10,944. 

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  The details for the past seven months are on page 2.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I wonder what sort of mushroom Jonathan Chait enjoyed before writing this.  " If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start."  I'm not sure how putting executive impedimenta on domestic oil exploration, then importuning the petro-states to pump more oil, or continuing to move the goalposts on the corona tyranny, or bugging out of Afghanistan, then importuning the new government, such as it is, to provide safe passage, give the impression of sanity and competence.  It's not enough to do stuff by the book, you have to understand what stuff has good effects, and what stuff does not.

So far, I have not encountered anyone working for this administration who acknowledges that there will be some difficulties, but patience will be rewarded with good outcomes in a year or three.

This is not necessarily to deny that the mainstream media has some kinds of liberal bias. It’s certainly true that, as the electorate has grown more polarized by education, the mainstream media’s near-total reliance on college graduates has made it much more socially liberal than the overall country. (One stark example of this bias was the stampede last year to dismiss the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis as a “racist conspiracy theory.”) For the sake of argument, I am willing to concede that this liberal bias outweighs other cross-cutting biases. I would simply maintain that liberal bias is not the only determinant of media coverage.

Above all else, it treats bad news as more important than good news. And so, while mainstream media often covers Republican presidents critically, it metes out the same treatment to Democratic presidents. For instance, the American media’s coverage of COVID — which a study found to be more relentlessly negative than coverage in almost any other country — probably hurt Trump, but now it’s hurting Biden.

The government's experts, during the final year of the Trump presidency and in the first year of the Biden presidency, have been consistently wrong in handling the pandemic. But where is the mainstream media voice suggesting that maybe the government should do less?  Their promotions depend on being able to present themselves as Shapers of Policy, and such a voice is unlikely to get much of a platform.

IT CAN'T BE EFFICIENT IF IT'S NOT EFFECTIVE.

Northern Star columnist Ally Formeller correctly recognizes that "Laptop notes keep students from learning."  The key, and it is important for students to recognize it, is that playacting at court transcriptionist isn't the same thing as engaging the material.

Note taking sucks; it’s slow, tedious and easy to miss exactly what the professor said.  Taking the time to write your notes by hand, though, is actually how you learn— not with a blank page of Google Docs in front of you.

With laptops being nearly ubiquitous in 2021, most students can probably type faster than they can write. Taking notes on a laptop is faster, arguably more efficient and it’s easier to carry around a laptop than multiple notebooks.

It's not more efficient if all you're doing is keying stuff in, and if you're trying to write everything down, you can fall for a sucker play in the fashion of "After the battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon understood he could not occupy Britain, so he dropped an atomic bomb on London and invaded Russia." I've heard of this gambit being used, with nobody raising a hand for a "Could you repeat that?"

ROUNDHOUSES IN OUT OF THE WAY PLACES.

The engine terminal is an important feature of the railroad, important enough, indeed, that the facilities will be extensively revised as the railroad modernizes.  Consider, for instance, this Union Pacific shop and engine house in North Platte, Nebraska.

There's not as much call for a turntable when Union Pacific routinely run two to five diesels on a freight train, and there's almost always one facing the right way to hand.  At right are the tracks for fueling, sanding, light inspection, and getting them on the road again.  If for some reason a diesel has to be turned, there are wyes and loop tracks elsewhere in the yard complex to do that work.

A few turntables still exist, and there are people who recognize their historic value.  Much more, with illustrations, below the jump.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

This week has been a good one for doozies.  We'll open with something different, and elaborate on some of the themes the clip raises, as we go along.  We'll have the usual pithy summaries and a sting in the tail.

Americans stiff arm Fauci pic.twitter.com/pPh7ggvf3Q

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 8, 2021

That clip includes "Jump Around" from Camp Randall, where having fun even when the football team is underwhelming its opponent is a tradition.  Maybe it's not exactly a short take, but then, some of the entries that follow are short only by Chicago Great Western standards.

1.  The corona tyranny ends when the people decide it ends.  That starts with college football.  "The full stadiums across the country, in both red and blue states, signaled an end to another part of the pandemic. Skeptics viewed packed stadiums as one of the final steps to normalcy, and Americans took that step this weekend. We will see how long our leaders allow it to last."  The article also notes, "The more Americans ignore Dr. Fauci, the less power he wields. College football fans are already starting to ignore him."  Anthony Fauci, and killjoy politicians generally, become fretful whenever they think somebody is having a good time.  "So what’s the Democratic response to joy? Liberal tears. They would like you to continue to cower in your home."  FJB. The panic porn peddlers are upset but are powerless.

2.  None of this is normal.  "In fact, the only thing the Biden presidency has done most effectively is prove that we are not on the path to normality under his administration."  Joe Biden is a total failure.

3.  It's all a muddle.  "We are trapped in a COVID Hotel California. We can check out at any time, but we can never leave."

4.  Scientific socialism.  "The homicidal policy of reopening the economy and letting the pandemic rip—rejecting science-based policies to eradicate the virus because they cut across corporate profit-making—is bound up with the termination of the meager social relief measures imposed at an earlier stage of the pandemic."  What's the shorter list, viruses that have been eradicated, or socialist governance that has actually worked?  Ask vaccine developer Andrew Pollard.  "[T]he push to reach 'Covid zero' is a fool’s errand, for the virus,according to many such competent professionals, is like the seasonal flu and the common cold and will be with us in perpetuity." Common colds, common socialists, common liberal scolds.

5.  Disingenuous arguments and fake narratives.  "[H]istorians today prize emotion over evidence and fiction over fact." So it is when the Primitive returns!

6.  The progressive thing to do with regressive rules is retire them.

7.  The withering away of the Rule of Experts? "If there is one thing each one of us can do to hasten this day of reckoning, it is to treat progressivism for what it really is: the deceptively credentialed face of self-serving stagnation."

8.  Speaking of self-serving stagnation, "Inflation, crime, American retreat — these hallmarks of the 1970s have returned. And they have joined postmodern threats, such as a worldwide pandemic, unchecked migration, climate change, and the global jihadist-Salafist movement. Biden has been president for less than a year. The number of crises buffeting American politics, economics, society, and culture already has multiplied beyond his control."

9.  We became arrogant, loud Americans for a good reason: we’re better.

10.  Turf them out.  "As they are increasingly perceived to flout values cherished by most Americans and as the perceived return on a degree becomes more uncertain, decreasing public support will force colleges to face the creative destruction commonplace in the Real World."

11.  They're not going to like the new rules.  "The truth is that in just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger directed at Donald Trump. And it may be vented through the very protocols that the Left invented for its own short-term advantage."

12.  I'd be safe and warm, if I weren't in L.A., California bleeding.  "[T]he opportunities are slim, and live-and-let-live has been replaced with a stultifying 'progressive' orthodoxy and weaponized Karenism."

13.  They don’t know much, but they know what they hate.

14.  By any definition of which I am aware, Fauci lied.

15.  Don’t play. Don’t sign up. Not until this nonsense stops.

16.  Biden and Blinken's leadership failures and the State Department's ineptitude have created a prolonged hostage situation.

17.  "Race advocates and feminists claim that statistical disparities reflect racist and sexist discrimination. This is a factual question, and so we must consider the evidence."

18.  "[M]uch economic instruction is too mechanical."  Yes, and more complicated than Scooter McLean's playbook.