JUSTIN TRUDEAU WENT INTO HIDING.

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky is up against scarier people.

Scott Johnson posted a number of other dispatches from the front.

The situation is still developing.

THEY'LL NEVER LEARN.

The people who like to deplorable-shame motorists out of their pickup trucks are a perpetual source of fun.  "Pride and Gluttony are both Deadly Sins, but some forms of Pride are less Sinful than others, and environment-shaming sport-ute and large pickup truck owners has long been a cheap virtue signal among the Prius set."  Sometimes the shaming comes disguised as art criticism.  "Streetsblog's Angie Schmitt frets about the angry countenance of pickup trucks."

It's auto show time, and, predictably, the weenie aesthetic comes out.

Shortly after entering the Chicago Auto Show this past weekend, I saw a pickup truck that seemed almost comically large, so I asked my friend to take a photo of me standing next to it. As we continued through the show, the very large front ends with massive grills and headlights on pickups and SUVs were a recurring theme and we took photos of the two of us standing in front of a handful of vehicles from Chevrolet, GMC, Ram, and Ford.

I posted the photos to Twitter, expecting that there would be some kind of reaction to them, but the thread ended up taking a life of its own, with more than 8,500 “likes” and more than a thousand retweets. The responses ranged from declarations that all large trucks should be permanently banned from city streets, to cynical comments questioning my manhood.

Maybe make a dispassionate case for making crashworthiness standards compatible among all sorts of motor vehicle, or for tolling the roadways as if they are productive assets, complete with weighing in motion, or for special movement permits for any trailer longer than twenty feet, or, who knows, calling attention to the weight of the battery packages in those all-electric or hybrid-drive motor vehicles.

But perhaps, when the hybrid-car-scooter-and-bike-trail set devotes as much energy as it does to treating people who don't share their world-view or their aesthetics, the only possible response is a virtue signal of your own.  "People have been hauling boats and stacking plywood in pickup beds for decades, so why does a truck need to have a front end that comes up to my shoulders (and I’m 6’1″)? The sad truth is that it may just boil down to design language and aesthetic." Or perhaps to being better placed to survive an encounter with one of those triple trailer sets on the interstates, or to make some money in the gig economy?

Ask yourself, dear reader, does the first paragraph of this excerpt help advance, or detract from, the Cold Spring Shops recommended argument in the second?

From some of the responses to my thread, it’s clear that in this incredibly divided country the act of simply discussing truck design as it relates to the safety of bystanders can quickly devolve into a culture war. It’s sad that this topic can’t be explored in a rational way without the toxic polarization that taints so many other efforts to reach consensus. However, it’s clear that decisive measures are needed to make new trucks and SUVs safer for those outside of the vehicle.

In Illinois, trucks have separate registration and license plate guidelines, but there’s only a $5 difference between registering a pickup and a standard passenger car. However, within the city of Chicago, truck owners pay $225 for a city sticker, versus $95 for a typical passenger vehicle. And perhaps the Chicago City Council could impose other rules or restrictions for non-commercial trucks and SUVs with the intent of improving safety for vulnerable road users.

What good would a Streetsblog post be, though, without the scolding?

HOW UNSERIOUS IS PUBLIC RADIO?

Your tax dollars are wasted on squeaky streetcars 'neath the streets of Boston, and on reassuring the most privileged of woke wine women.  "Take a moment to do a deep clean or comfort decorating to create a cozier space, or even learn a new skill."  Now, if you followed Aaron Rodgers, a deep clean takes more than a moment.  Let's drop the hammer.  "Ukrainian ladies out there yelling at Russian soldiers to put seeds in their pockets for when they die in the dirt and we’re like 'I need 3 hrs of self care to recover from the video I saw of a Ukrainian lady yelling at Russian soldiers.'"  Simon Schama, who is no stranger to state-sanctioned violence, also calls out the tax-supported snowflakes.  "You NEED to be stressed and Distressed by atrocity, calamity and tragedy not breathe deeply and bury yourself in pasta."  That prompts Monica Showalter to quip, "And the soft, soggy, self-obsessed snowflakes out there still never learn."

THE CORRELATION OF FORCES IS NOT FAVORABLE TO THE LUCINDA STRIP MALL.

A Northern Star columnist surveys the decay.

In DeKalb, one of the most treasured places for NIU students used to be the Village Commons Bookstore. The store was the top destination for students to purchase textbooks, NIU merchandise, art supplies and cute Christmas ornaments for their parents. But last year, VCB was unceremoniously shut down after 50 years partly due to a lack of student traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the store may be gone, the entire strip mall, 901 Lucinda Ave., needs to come back.

Within the span of a couple of years, Village Commons Bookstore, The Hot Spot and Pita Pete’s have all closed with nothing coming to replace them. While some businesses, like Cast Iron Coffee, have come out of the pandemic, it’s sad to see a once vibrant strip half full with one of NIU’s most prominent businesses shuttered forever.

The loss of VCB was sad enough, but The Hot Spot was a great convenience store that also provided great sandwiches and ice cream. Pita Pete’s had a great selection of food for students, most notably vegan students.

There are fewer students, vegan or otherwise, than there used to be, and that has been the case for years.  It doesn't help that Illinois was a tax hell long before pot-bellied dictator governor J. B. Pritzker used his corona tyranny to destroy restaurants and bars.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

Boston's public radio station, WGBH, devotes a long segment (fortunately, without the nose-flautist busking at Kendall Square) about trolleys screeching as they bend the corner around.

[Jeremy] Siegel: It’s like a horror movie! Yeah. So that's the screeching that we all know and do not love. But Paris [Alston], I looked into why there is that squeaking, why there's so much screeching and why there's so much noise. And to find out, I called up the MBTA’s chief engineer.

Eric Stoothoff: So my first name is Eric, my last name is Stoofhoff, and I'm the chief engineer for the MBTA.

Siegel: Now, Eric told me that the screeching happens when trains are going around a curve — where you have steel from the wheels rubbing against more steel from the tracks. And the Green Line in particular has a lot of these sharp turns.

Stoothoff: So the trains themselves, they have trucks, generally four wheel sets. And so there's there's a geometry to those. And as those navigate the curves, they put pressures on the rails. And in some cases, in really tight curves, we have what's called restraining rail, where we will have the running rails that the travel surface of the wheels will ride upon but then you'll have, inboard of those rails, you'll have restraining rails that the backside of the wheels will sometimes rub up against as part of the geometry and the way that the infrastructure works with the vehicles.

Siegel: To translate, in addition to the normal rail that the train goes on, where there are sharp bends like on the Green Line around, say, Boylston Street, there are extra guardrails that cause even more noise. But they help keep your ride smooth. So in effect, even though you hate the noise, the noise you're hearing basically means that the train is helping keep you safe and help keep your ride smooth. So it sounds bad, but it might feel better.

The turns might be tight enough that the inner sides (treating the truck frame as defining the outer sides) of the wheels rub against the check rails, although that's a good way to wear out wheels and rails. The problem arises more generally because a wheel set must rotate at the same speed at the axle ends, but the flange portion of the wheel wants to rotate faster on the outer rail of the curve, than on the inner rail. Either the outer wheel is dragging on the rail or the inner wheel is spinning.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Our Intellectual Betters told me that if I voted for Donald Trump a million Americans would die with coronavirus and Vladimir Putin would reunite the Soviet Union.

Raggedy Ann has to spin for a truly terrible president.  "It is Biden’s anti-fossil-fuel policies, his strangulation of American energy production, that not only are causing surging prices but, in so doing, are underwriting Putin’s aggression in Ukraine."  The usual amplification of Cold Spring Shops themes that have emerged over the past twenty years follows.

COOK ME A PROPER ELECTROBURGER.

I'm a fan of the gas stove, in part because the opportunity to preheat a wok on an open flame, and to control the heat delivered by the flame, matters a lot.  Conventional electric stoves aren't much good at heating up woks, and temperature control with a thumping big element runs afoul of the laws of physics.

Traditional electric resistance coil stoves, the most affordable option, have separate burners that plug in to recesses in the surface. Many families cook proficiently on this basic stovetop, though this option is prone to uneven heating, and it's difficult to quickly reduce its heat.

Ceramic-glass cooktops use the same coil technology. Induction stovetops are also made of ceramic glass, but they use magnetic fields to create heat. This means they only heat up when a magnetic pan - think cast iron or magnetic stainless steel - is touching the surface, and they cool to the touch when the pan is removed. They also offer the temperature control that makes gas so popular: When a cook turns the heat down, the temperature drops quickly.

That's right, cooking better electrically might be a possibility.

Evan Hennessey, co-owner of Stages in Dover, N.H., designed his restaurant around the versatility and health benefits of induction cooking. He gently challenges any professional chef who thinks induction is inferior. "You can do so much more on induction than gas. The precision cooking allows us to do way more, without compromising the air quality in the kitchen for our guests or our staff."

At present, the induction stove is a high-end item, and the article from which I extracted the quotes is full of all sorts of aesthetic posturing for the kind of person who is into wine pairings and artisanal lettuce.

Let the record show, though, that one of the first inductive stoves was in use on the Electroliner.  There's something about contemporary fire codes, though, that precludes their use in preservation.  "Apparently the induction stoves in the tavern are not up to code; thus, although the restored 'Liner will have a stove, it will not be operable."  Maybe the museum ought bring a food columnist from one of the Chicago papers out to look it over and call attention.

MAYBE IT PAYS TO KEEP THE DEVIANCY WITHIN SENSIBLE BOUNDS.

A recent Rod Dreher meditation on the decline and fall (aren't they all?) of Christian Civilization includes a lament from a friend.

He said his 11-year-old son came home yesterday from their local public school, saying that all the girls in his class say they are either lesbians or bisexual. The boy doesn’t really know what that means. Probably the girls don’t either, and are just being provocative. Even many American conservatives are sitting back pretending this isn’t happening to our country.

Perhaps it came to this when an earlier generation of adults didn't get too bothered by long hair and wacky tobaccy.  And the suggestions from Rush Limbaugh and the like to be provocative by being conservative just didn't have much purchase.  But the professional-managerial classes' misrule has a fatal flaw.

I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants. If that makes me a reactionary troll, fine, I’ll own that. I love my country and would put my life on the line to fight for her against foreign invaders. But we are not the good guys I used to think we were. We can’t even protect schoolgirls in Louisiana and Alabama from this toxic ideology that is destroying their moral sense, but they expect us to gear up in case we are called to fight for Ukraine?

Read between the lines in the essay, are the Shapers of Opinion inadvertently rendering all the "-isms" and "-phobias" they throw around ineffective? (We had Mr Dreher on this point in the pre-corona tyranny years.)

Hungary today reminds this conservative of what we had in America thirty years ago, before wokeness took over all our institutions. It’s a place where normal people who believe in normal things that used to be normal in America — belief in God (even if, like most Hungarians, you don’t go to church), the traditional family, basic liberties, being proud of your country and its way of life — still exist in some recognizable form. It’s a country whose conservative leader and his governing party are willing to take risks to defend those things in law and policy, not just rhetorically. And so, when I see the liberal and neocon establishments trashing Hungary while at the same time presiding over the simultaneous demonization of normie conservative Americans, it’s easy to sympathize with Hungary. This is something normie conservatives in western Europe are learning too, by the way.

The comeuppance for the professional managerial classes in North America might be on the way, as well.

ACADEMIC TENURE IS USEFUL, IF YOU CAN EARN IT.

Inside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, a Troy political scientist, offers a refresher on what might go wrong if a state government attempts a restructuring of personnel policies in the universities it funds.  The short form is, if you substitute "critical race theory" for the "socialism" that was a bugbear to legislators long ago, the legislative management of curricular matters remains a bad idea.

Setting aside the fact that there are legitimate arguments to be had over tenure, what [Texas lieutenant governor Dan] Patrick is doing here illustrates why tenure needs to exist. He is explicitly stating that because an idea he and some of his political compatriots don’t like might be taught, he wants the state to punish anyone who might teach about that idea. Not only is the notion that politicians ought to be targeting specific ideas that they don’t like antithetical to a core purpose of education, but it is also blatantly authoritarian. This is all made the worse as Patrick and his ilk have no idea what “critical race theory” is save that they don’t like the political implications of deep examinations of America’s history regarding race.

I've seen nothing in the past six years or so to convince me that the position I took then is in error.

Although I still maintain that academic freedom too often serves as cover for trendy grievance scholarship, and that the diversity boondoggle is creating an academic environment devoid of intellectual diversity, none of which is consistent with the public interest, I must also object to Missouri's board of curators conceding powers to a legislature that will almost certainly be used in a situation where curricular integrity, rather than excessively zealous protesting, is at stake.

The reason for the "if you can earn it" in the post title arises when we contemplate the academic job market. "If Texas were to eliminate tenure for new hires or to create laws that allow the revocation of tenure based on what ideas one discusses then it would disadvantage itself in terms of attracting faculty."  That's true in the abstract, and it might be valid among universities competing for a place atop the U. S. News league tables.  It's an abstraction for search committees constrained, whether by legislative stinginess or by falling enrollments, to replace three tenure line positions with one, or to replace tenure track faculty with contingent faculty.

Yes, tenure contracts bundle lower return with lower risk.  "There's an argument in labor economics over whether the opportunity to gain tenure protects people whose skills might otherwise be rendered obsolete rather quickly and lowers their salaries relative to those of people who bear all the risk of immediate discharge in case of obsolescence, or failure."  Here's how Professor Taylor puts it.

From the point of view of the faculty, the idea of the chance at tenure is part of their compensation package–there is a trade-off of security for more pay. The brutal nature of the academic job market (for anyone other than the top of the top) is such that having to prove oneself over a particular set of years in exchange for not having to go back on the market unless one wants to is appealing in ways that are difficult to fully give justice to here. The willingness to accept what will be a fixed salary with modest, at best, increases over a career in exchange for enhanced job security is simply a key part of the appeal of these jobs that cannot easily be discarded without consequences to colleges and universities (more on that in a moment). It is also hard to overemphasize that the culture of this profession dictates that the key goal is a tenure-track job with the acquisition of tenure as proof of value after the probationary period (along with promotion to Associate Professor). Taking that away because some politicians don’t want Prof X talking about subject Q is more major of a blow to the structure of American academia than is appreciated.

In passing, he notes that changing the terms of tenure changes incentives to serve the institution.

I would note, too, that a huge chunk of the work (beyond teaching) of a college/university is done by the faculty and tenure creates long-term buy-in that has real value. (If I know I am going to be at State U for a long time, that incentives certain kinds of work that I might not engage in if I don’t have the time perspectives that tenure creates).

There might be a less appealing side to that argument, in which tenured careerists might devote inordinately much effort to committees and institutional politics.  That is, if there are any tenured careerists left.  That's where his essay breaks down.

Do away with tenure and those schools will have to pay more to retain more.

There are really only two ways to get a major increase in income in academia: change schools or go into administration.

Now, I could leave and look for another job, and I might. But keep in mind that one of the reasons I don’t is because I am tenured and giving that up is a risk. Most schools don’t want to risk giving tenured status to a new hire unless a person is a superstar of some kind. So, again, tenure is part of the broader compensation package and actually has benefits to the institution granted it, not just to the holder of tenure. Note that in this scenario the university does not have to offer me more money to stay, I decide to stay because tenure is too valuable to give up.

Note, too, that if a lot of the faculty are in this boat, it keeps overall labor costs down. If faculty were moving around all the time, each new hire that replaced someone who left would have to be higher, causing increases in personnel budgets. Sure, if everyone, everywhere got rid of tenure a new equilibrium would be reached in the broader labor market for faculty, but there would be definite short-to-medium term issues. It would change the labor market for faculty in ways that people like Patrick simply don’t bother to think about.

Or, perhaps, the lieutenant governor has the employment-at-will model in mind, and relies on anecdotal, or perhaps more systematic, evidence of the shift to a more contingent faculty already well under way.

MIGHT NOW BE A GOOD TIME TO CONSIDER FUEL ECONOMY?

The Energy Information Administration produce a useful series, comparing nominal and real gasoline prices dating back to 1976.  For all of 2021, they reckoned the nominal price of a gallon of gasoline at $3.10, that has to be a national average, and it averages over all sorts of state consumption taxes.  That's off the all-time high, which came in 2012, when the national average nominal price was $4.39 per gallon, converting to $3.63 in January 2022 constant dollars.

That site might be worth bookmarking, dear reader, and an observation I made in 2008, with the annual real price sitting at what we call $3.26 per gallon in January 2022 constant dollars, stands up pretty well.

At $4 or $5 a gallon, many people are going to want something else. But there are depressingly many commentators who would have you believe that opening the Outer Continental Shelf or the Arctic Ocean to exploration (both of which I endorse) will bring back that $1.50 a gallon unleaded regular. Unlikely. If those sources were worth developing at those lower prices, the political pressure to permit it would have been present at those lower prices. Permanently higher gasoline prices are also where the reward to innovation will come from -- not from public investments. Battery-electric cars and other technologies do not make economic sense without permanently higher gasoline prices.

The increased oil extraction that was possible under the previous presidency, and remains, in modified form, under the current presidency, did not restore that historically cheap motor fuel of the American High.  Whether at existing levels the incentive to improve battery-electric cars, hybrids, and more exotic power plants is strong enough remains to be seen.

JUST A LITTLE BIT AHEAD OF MY TIME.

Remember this story?  "I can't claim to have invented the railroad right of way as a bike trail, but abandoned stretches of the Milwaukee Electric's Muskego Lakes Division and Lakeside Belt Line near my house were sufficiently well-graded that I could ride my coaster-brake bike on them, making interurban noises as I accelerated."

I subsequently made this argument.  "But as a pioneer of the use of abandoned interurban rights-of-way for bike trails (in those days I was trespassing) I fully endorse the use of interurban rights-of-way as bike trails."  Other neighborhood kids also trespassed upon the former railway.  "I claim to have invented the use of abandoned railroad grades as bike trails years ago, although numerous other South Side kids also used the former Lakeside Belt Line and Muskego Lakes branch for such purposes. In our old age, we get to see those rights-of-way being made less rough on bicycles."

Now, look what Milwaukee County is doing with ... the Lakeside Belt Line and Muskego Lakes branch.

The 10-foot-wide, multi-use trail will be suitable for activities such as walking, running, cycling, dog-walking or in-line skating.

Future plans call for the trail to extend east through Milwaukee and St. Francis to Lake Michigan, as well as north into West Allis.

The trail will be part of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Route of the Badger, a plan for a 700-mile inclusive regional trail network in southeastern Wisconsin.

I wonder if any contemporary ten-year-olds know how to make interurban noises.

Portions of the Northern, Watertown, and Muskego Lakes lines were previously adapted for trails.

PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THE STUPID.

Tom Knighton suggests that some self-styled progressives have been a little slow to distance themselves from the most lunatic among them.

Politics isn’t made up of people in little camps. Instead, they exist on a spectrum. Some people are more conservative or libertarian than others and others are more liberal than others.

Few people completely coexist on the exact same point.

In San Francisco, people are pretty liberal. They favor a lot of liberal policies that wouldn’t fly in most of the rest of the state, much less the nation as a whole. However, even for such liberal folks, there’s still a line.

The woke crowd, epitomized in The Squad, doesn’t seem to get that. They expect everyone to hold a particular line or else they might as well have voted for Trump.

Frankly, people get sick of that crap. They’re tired of seeing just how ridiculous the left can get.

They support trans rights but take umbrage at claims that if you don’t want to date a woman with a penis, you’re really a transphobic bastard who should be beaten to death.

They support equality but get kind of tired of being told just how racist they are simply because of the color of their skin.

While they’re clearly on the leftward end of the spectrum, they’re not in danger of falling off unlike some folks, and they’re sick of being denounced for it. They’re sick of seeing debate about renaming schools—even schools named after the man who freed the slaves—rather than getting kids back in classrooms.

That might be, but such people ought still be judged by the company they kept.

Democrats are trying to distance themselves from the woke rhetoric like defunding the police and [critical race theory]. They say they’re not like that and are desperate to make voters aware of that fact.

Personally, though, I can’t help but notice how silent they were on that when it really mattered. They didn’t speak out against defunding police departments or even anti-cop rhetoric. They were silent when people started talking about renaming schools and tearing down statues.

They. Said. Nothing.

Now, they want people to know they’re not the same as The Squad. Frankly, I’m not convinced.

If they had an ounce of principle, they’d have called it out. They didn’t, so I find I lack any sympathy for their plight.

Let's just take names now, and kick the required tails in elections and when it comes to donating to charities and universities.

SEE THE PROJECTION INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM.

Thom Hartmann aimed at Donald Trump but might have hit Justin Trudeau.

We've always had authoritarians among us. These are people who paradoxically love to submit to an authority figure above them while at the same time desperately need to assert their own authority over others "below them" in order to feel safe.

They see the world in binary terms: there are those in control and those who are controlled, those who lead and those who follow, those who dominate and those who are dominated. And when a severe authoritarian leader has significant success in society, authoritarianism becomes, essentially, a contagious mental and cultural illness.

Yes, for the past two years of two weeks to slow the contagion, there have been a lot of people who don't use spray tan or comb their hair over who fit that description.

While the vast majority of authoritarians are authoritarian followers, a small percentage are authoritarian leaders. They exist together with their followers in a symbiosis like pilotfish and shark, gang leader and gang, alpha dog and pack.

When authoritarian leaders emerge and are celebrated in the broader society authoritarian followers are drawn to them, realigning their worldview, value system, and behavior to mirror those of the authoritarian leader.

Authoritarian followers submit to control by their chosen leader because it makes them feel like they're drawing power (and, thus, authority) from that person.

You can find the usual suspects enumerated in his column. His claims, though, are more general.

In their personal lives, authoritarian followers are constantly on the lookout for people they can assert their own power over, particularly people they think should either serve them (like a restaurant server or flight attendant) or should simply defer to them because they think they have higher social status (whites going off on people of color, tyrannical bosses, husbands beating their wives and/or children).

That "higher social status" bit is rich, what with the governing professional managerial classes thinking their Ivy League degrees or their ability to call out the right secular sins confer the right to exert power or demand deference.  That includes more than a few elected officials, whether as mayor or governor, or on school boards.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

Stop washing your jeans.  There's nothing like calling attention to the reluctance to treat water like the commodity it is by letting your clothing get nasty and stinky.

A new study found that the mega-drought in the western U.S. is the worst it has been in 1,200 years, with a lead author telling NPR that roughly one-fifth of that current drought — which is shrinking reservoirs, depleting aquifers, lowering rivers and contributing to wildfires — can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

According to Levi's 2025 Water Action Strategy, which aims to save water on the manufacturing end, "By 2030, an estimated 45 cities worldwide (that’s nearly 470 million people) will be categorized as high-stress — which means the demand for water is higher than what’s available."

Gosh, if only there were a way to equilibrate supply with demand.  I mean, maybe you could even give totalitarian doofuses like John Feffer their climate emergency measures by calling the water rate a corrective tax.  That's apparently not something worth discussing.

Annie Mills, a young entrepreneur in the U.K. who received a Circular Economy Award for her final year projects, including one about how to save water, tells Yahoo Life, "I don't think many people know there's an issue, really, with water.”

Mills references an article in The Guardian, "England could run short of water within 25 years," and says that one of the issues is that water is very cheap in many parts of the world, including the United States and Europe. "So," she adds, "saving water is not incentivized."

We've called attention to that before.  I might be more sympathetic to youngsters running around in dirty dungarees because of the expense or inconvenience of washing them (hand washing, seriously??) than as some virtue signal.

THE ETIQUETTE OF FINISHING A BASKETBALL GAME.

In the closing minutes, if the game is one or two possessions, generally the teams will play it out, perhaps using whatever time outs remain to set up plays.  See the end of the fifth game between the Bucks and the Suns in last summer's championship series.

If the score is a little less close, there comes the ritual of fouling in order to stop the clock, and getting the ball back with the opportunity to score up to three points as against as few as zero, if the player who was fouled is a poor free throw shooter.  (There are, however, limits.  Wilt Chamberlain was a notoriously poor free throw shooter, but I believe he still holds the professional record for free throws made, as part of the 100 points he scored in that game.)  That parenthetical was as long as the last three minutes of a basketball game can become, once the trips to the free throw line and the times out, and if the game is televised, the station breaks, take effect.

It's good form, though, that if the team being fouled consistently makes its free throws, and continues to prevent the trailing team from scoring, for the trailing team to stop committing fouls.  See the end of the sixth game between the Bucks and the Suns.

If the outcome seems clear, it's good form for the team ahead to let everyone play, and the team behind might do the same thing.  But whether the players put full effort forth, or go through the motions, isn't so well codified.  And thus we get the unpleasantness at the end of yesterday's college game between Michigan and Wisconsin.

A post-game scrum in the handshake line led to Michigan head coach Juwon Howard striking Badgers’ assistant Joe Krabbenhoft.

Howard, who will almost certainly be reprimanded, was set off by a late timeout called by Greg Gard.

Howard isn’t the only one at fault here, though he should shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility.

Multiple things can be true.

Howard absolutely should not have slapped Krabbenhoft. Period.

That being said, Gard has no business calling a timeout in that situation.

You’re up 16 with 15 seconds left. I don’t care if your backups are in. Take the 10-second violation, win the game, and move on.

Gard also shouldn’t have physically confronted Howard the way that he did in the handshake line.

Krabbenhoft shouldn’t have escalated the situation.

Another Badgers assistant shouldn’t have gestured a crotch chop toward the Michigan bench.

These are supposed to be the adults in the room. They all acted like children.

Wisconsin partisans will complain that Michigan's coach leaving two regulars in and working on their pressure defense during garbage time is putting full effort forth, which is fine, but then calling time out to craft a response to that full effort ought also be permissible.

The conference will be assigning the basketball equivalent to game misconduct penalties in the next day or so.

THE CORONA TYRANNY IS THE FIRST ACT?

Dear reader, you might be inclined to think of Pajamas Media as excessively critical of what you understand as public health mitigations.

Finding meaning in life by wearing a mask proves Thoreau’s point of the “mass of men living lives of quiet desperation.”

But losing the mask also denotes losing control of the rest of us. For a left-wing authoritarian, that’s got to hurt.

Tou might find Batya Ungar-Sargon overwrought.

Liberal media are on the side of the government and they take political dissent personally. And what leftist elites are doing with their power is setting a new standard for who deserves basic civil rights. If you’re working class and spent the pandemic braving the plague and delivering food to their doorsteps so they could stay at home tweeting, you can forget about your rights. Whatever money you have left in your coffers is theirs for the taking. If the pandemic began with the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich, political power and civil rights seem to be following. The elites are sending a clear message: civil liberties are the exclusive rights of the pyjama class now.

If the past two weeks have taught us anything, it’s how hollow the accusations from elite media leftists should ring, how quickly accusations of fascism are followed by the cheering on of political arrests, and how deep their projections run. It has revealed how quickly support for dissent and peaceful protest evaporates when it threatens those in power. And it has told you exactly who has that power.

You might find the following cartoon too fearful.

And yet, we had warnings. Some of them were general and ancient.  "At a time when those limits [on government power] have been eroded to the point that people can wonder if there are any surviving limits in many areas, we could benefit by relearning the wisdom [Richard Henry] Lee helped pass on nearly three centuries ago."  For example,  "The first maxim of a man who loves liberty should be never to grant to rulers an atom of power that is not most clearly and indispensably necessary for the safety and well-being of society."

Others were specific and recent.

The Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau has become a dictatorship. The leader of that party does what he wants, when he wants, and no one dares question him.

Now that we know that Trudeau runs his party like a dictatorship, we must ask ourselves: is there any indication he wouldn't do the same as the leader of Canada?

Would a Prime Minister Trudeau arbitrarily whip the vote and outlaw certain moral questions? Could Prime Minister Trudeau be trusted to make decisions for the good of the country, not just for his personal self-worth? Would Trudeau call in the police to enforce his vision?

Let's hope we never have the opportunity to ask those questions.

Once upon a time, there was Canadian specific content on Huffington Post, and that appeared in 2015.  We now have our answer.

What will happen now that the ordinary working stiffs of Canada have been so casually abused by their native ruling class; threatened with having bank accounts frozen, their means of earning a living confiscated, themselves arrested, while their pets and children given over to the tender care of animal shelters and the child “protection” authorities? How far will this protest go now, bouncing down the Odessa Steps like a runaway baby carriage? It could be that Canadians, with the ethos of being polite, courteous, and truthful, may be truly shocked, shocked to the point of open rebellion over being consistently lied about and bullied by their ruling elite. In America, our own flyover country residents are perfectly accustomed to being abused as stupid, red-necked rubes by our own elite class. It’s what we have come to expect of NPR, the political ruling class, the New York/Hollywood cultural axis and the inside-the-Beltway-Washington DC denizens; what we have come to expect of them anyway. It may be a new and shocking development to ordinary, working-class Canadians, this contempt for the working class, though.

That's Sgt. Mom from Chicago Boyz, still hopeful that the Normals will stop the corona tyrants.  No, says novelist John Feffer, you will bend over, it is going to come again, and you're going to like it.

The Ottawa variant will pass. Other, more powerful mutations will inevitably appear as governments try to impose mandates of one sort of another, particularly in response to climate change. It's no surprise that immense gas-guzzlers are the vehicle of choice to bring an anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-science message to the capitals of the world.

He's not kidding.  We've already seen people who should know better attempt to turn "freedom" into hate speech.  That includes the alleged president of these United States with his "I have the freedom to kill you with my coronavirus."

Never mind that we could, oh, have a reasoned debate on whether focused protection for older people, and people on prescriptions that suppress immune response, makes more sense than injection passsports and the continued masking of children. 

Likewise, it would not be much of a stretch for the brain-brothers of Mr Feffer to go after those "immense gas-guzzlers" with "I have the freedom to run you over with my suburban assault vehicle."

Never mind that if you don't run everybody's money through Washington to build roads that the localities are not capable of maintaining, maybe there are fewer people buying motor vehicles, and fewer neighborhoods being platted from scratch for motorists only.

Or, if the second act is incremental, sort of like the "two weeks to slow the spread" led to New Zealand being isolated for almost two years, the likes of Mr Feffer will snark about your "freedom to despoil the air with your leaf blower."

Never mind that the least costly way to get your kids into a school district with decent test scores might come bundled with a granite countertop and a large lawn.  I know that sounds crazy, but compared with a condominium in a big city and a spot at the likes of Sidwell Friends for your spawn, it is.

Now is not the time to be celebrating mandates, let alone calling for more.

WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR THE CORONA TYRANNY?

A lot of discontent, and not much by way of results.

There is no doubt that tens or hundreds of thousands of people died prematurely from untreated ailments, avoidance of healthcare out of fear of getting COVID-19, and to a lesser degree things like overdoses and suicides. Because of all the looseness in reporting, the highest integrity data point measuring the pandemic and lockdown impacts is looking at how many people in total died against expectations. If three million people died annually from 2015-2019 and then 3.5 million people died in 2020 and 2021, the increase is obvious. This is how we measure the pandemic and interventions holistically.

If California had fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than South Dakota, but 3% more total excess deaths during the pandemic from all causes amidst the strictest lockdowns, was it worth it?

It's not that we didn't notice.

That's a yard sign Walworth County Republicans were selling to call attention to the ineptitude of their governor, Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D - Public Instruction).  His corona response was a failure.

Governors John Carney (DE), David Ige (HI), Janet Mills (ME), Tim Waltz (MN), Steve Sisolak (NV), Michelle Lujan (NM), Roy Cooper (NC), Kate Brown (OR), Ralph Northam (VA), Jay Inslee (WA), Tony Evers (WI), Larry Hogan (MD), Charlie Baker (MA), Chris Sununu (NH) and and Phil Scott (VT). Millions of their students were locked out of schools for over a year, thousands of businesses closed and they were defiant in opening up when it was clear where the science stood. The only salvage for Ige, Mills, Brown, Scott, Sununu and Inslee is that while they kept kids out of class and closed thousands of businesses, they did achieve low relative COVID-19 deaths and all-cause excess deaths. They likely would have anyway had they let kids get educated and let businesses function.

That's despite the state legislature and a divided state supreme court holding that emergency powers must be limited in scope and duration.

That report, though, took the view that there were degrees of failure, which makes sense, there are abject failures, listed above, and there are the truly spectacular failures.

Governors Andrew Cuomo (NY), Phil Murphy (NJ), Gavin Newsom (CA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Tom Wolf (PA). There’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.

There is still time, later this year, to turf the Michigan and Illinois governors out.  Whether the opposition parties will come up with credible replacements remains to be seen.

YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION.

Set the Wayback Machine to 2016, Sherman.  "How long, though, until sufficient voters recognize that they're being played for fools by the political class?"

Perhaps two years into fifteen days to slow the spread is long enough.

The embrace of the Canadian trucker protesters by the American right is a sign that the Tea Party spirit circa the early Obama years was never fully extinguished. Since then, everything has changed — most importantly, the rise of Donald Trump and his movement — and nothing has changed. It is freedom that remains the most natural and powerful Republican rallying cry.

That puts together two elements of the conservative coalition that faced down the Stalinists and the blame-America-first San Francisco Democrats.

Jeff MacNelly used to do the title cartoon that accompanied the Dave Barry "Year in Review" feature that is still a thing.  We were willing to be magnanimous to the useful idiots when the Berlin Wall came down, but there's no reason to be nice to the likes of Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau and Mark Zuckerberg, especially if they're covering for Red China.

The Canadian protest is a unifying moment for the American right. To simplify for the sake of clarity, the populists are drawn to the truckers as representatives of the working class, of a rejection of government by experts, and of a willingness to shock and defy the progressive governing class as embodied by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Limited-government conservatives, on the other hand, tend to sympathize with the opposition to the vaccine mandate on truckers as an irrational, completely unnecessary regulation and with the push to begin lifting Covid restrictions more broadly.

Both elements on the right have denounced Trudeau’s invoking of emergency powers. For the populists, the action is a dangerous sign of an impulse to smash anyone crossing elite opinion. For limited-government types, it’s a dangerous sign of a government that can too easily slip free of constitutional constraints.

The social conservatives, however, are not fully on board.

More to the point, [Republican candidates in opposition] don’t even have to do anything about gender ideology or the new wokeified race science of white women teenagers, about how being on time for things and taking pride in your work are vestiges of white supremacy or any of the other new bugbears. All they have to do is mumble along with vague slogans about how what the unspecified other side is doing is bad (and occasionally funny).

Social conservatives should be wary of carrying water for the GOP here. If the last administration showed us anything, it was that we should demand more from Republican presidents—especially those who find themselves with control of both houses of Congress and a de facto majority on the Supreme Court—than pointless uplift. Before, during, and after his presidency, Trump was admired less for anything he actually accomplished in office than for the amusing things he said about his opponents.

In a representative democracy, politicians are not elected to make us feel better about ourselves or to offer some kind of existential affirmation of our chosen way of life. Nor are they in office to attempt to define the nature and purpose of human existence or to debate first-order questions about natural law and morality. Instead they are supposed to apply their minds to an ever-expanding number of prudential questions: What should tax rates be? Should we build more bridges? How about the minimum wage?

Perhaps the proper answers to those final questions are "lower," "treat bridges like productive assets," and "it's effectively zero."  But Matthew Walther is kidding himself if he expects any respect from Democrats on matters of gender ideology or critical studies.  Those are experiments against reality that will fall of their own weight, and a freedom-weighted bundle of less corona tyranny, less taxation, less technocracy centralized in Washington, less, disrespect for law enforcement, and local control of the school boards is likely to get him more than continued governance by Democrats, no matter how bitter the fight between its communist and corporatist wings becomes.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Behold the incompetence of Our Progressive Betters.  Joe Biden is out of excuses.  Let us first count the ways.

The regular roundup of pithy references to Cold Spring Shops themes follows the enumerated list.

MAKE THE PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL CLASS MODEST AGAIN.

American Spectator contributor Auguste Meyrat does not write, "deny coherent beliefs, enjoy incoherence," and yet he notes precisely that.

As much as the Left’s anti-intellectualism (what else can one call it?) hurts conservatives, however, it hurts the Left even more. Because they define intelligence and argue about it so superficially, they end up with embarrassingly ignorant and incompetent leadership. They elect leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both of whom struggle mightily with articulating a single clear thought. They appoint justices like Sonya Sotomayor, who fails to understand the basic facts about a virus that has deeply impacted the country for over two years. They continue to worship experts like perpetually wrong Anthony [der Giftzwerg -- Ed.] Fauci.

Contrary to [Atlantic contributor David] Graham’s claims, it seems that leftists are the one struggling with dumb leaders — except their leaders don’t seem to be pretending. Even if mocking conservatives makes him feel better about this sad truth, he and the rest of writers at the Atlantic would do better to take a step back, consider their arguments, and offer constructive solutions.

In other words, they can use their brains and be “smart” for once.

Apparently, they haven't been mugged by reality enough. As long as they can get away with their heretical incantations, they might keep on keeping on.

In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.

No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words, even though they’re pretty much always bogus.)

Yes, that's the kind of rhetoric you might expect from a Pajamas Media type. The heresy isn't coming from Knoxville alone, though.  "I see a replication of an odious and all too familiar culture war dynamic pitting finger-wagging urban liberals against an ever-radicalizing right wing that pretends to stand up to elites and speak up for workers."It's Jacobin, so you can expect the category errors. But credit even leftists for noting the failure of the professional-managerial classes and their incantations.

Far-right politics do not exist in a vacuum or arrive suddenly like a random weather event. They flourish in conditions of economic hardship and social alienation and are often aggravated by the cynical behavior of traditional political elites eager to distract from their own failures.

The current moment in Canada is no exception. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the country remains in a quasi–state of emergency, but the language of togetherness and social solidarity of its early months are long gone — along with many of the benefit programs that supported people throughout the initial lockdowns. Even as the highly infectious Omicron variant has rampaged across the country, elected leaders (including Trudeau himself) have continued to place blame for the pandemic squarely on the unvaccinated. Though it’s since been abandoned, the premier of Quebec even floated the idea of a punitive new health tax on anyone who refuses a jab.

Why nobody has bothered to note that people who refuse the corona shot are doing so at their own risk, which would be a valid observation if the corona shots worked, the same way public health practitioners and primary care physicians do with the annual flu shots, for which receiving the injection is voluntary, and nobody is panicking, continues to escape advocates of the continuing tyranny.

THE FALSE GOD OF WOKENESS.

Reason's Nick Gillespie chats with John McWhorter.  "McWhorter argues that today's anti-racist crusaders evince a quasi-religious fanaticism that ends up hurting, not helping, the plights of black Americans."  They engage in autos-da-fe, but their motivation is not saving souls, which was the reason behind immolating heretics back in the day.

There is a group of people who are committed to what they call social justice, certain enough of their moral purity that they are willing to hurt other people if they don't agree with their principles. Their notion is that they are saving people who are living under the power of white hegemony. Not only are these people mean and unpleasant to deal with, but in the name of social justice for black people, they often either don't care about black people for real, or they're hurting black people. I wrote Woke Racism not as some boring statement from the right wing about family values and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This is a book saying there are black people who need help. The people who are calling themselves black people's saviors don't understand this. What they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help.

That argument generalizes to other dimensions of the so-called progressives' wildest dreams, but regular readers already knew that.  Let's focus on the empirically empty stances of the social justice warriors, which might better be understood as a faith tradition, if without any pretense of divine influence.

I call it a religion partly because of formal similarities between it and especially devout Christianity, starting with white privilege as original sin. Not only are those parallels important, but I have a heuristic reason for it. Some people were expecting Woke Racism to be an examination of the nature of religion and wokeness and what the parallels are. Nobody would have read that book. They shouldn't have; it's not that important.

I consider it useful to think of this as a religion so that people can understand that we can't have productive exchanges with the particular kind of person I'm writing about. Many people think, "Well, if we could only get them to understand that we need a plurality of ideas." Or people ask me, "How can I get that kind of person to not call me a racist?" You can't. That's what they do.

You're unlikely to try to convince somebody that Jesus does not love them; you're unlikely to try to talk someone out of their religious faith. Framing it as a religion gets across that idea better than just calling it an ideology.

It's useful for public intellectuals not of the traditionalist right to call attention to the ways the so-called Great Society and Woodstock Nation went wrong.

You go to 1970 and there's this whole new mood—the black power mood. The new idea is, "We can't do our best because you won't let us. And therefore you have to accept that we won't do our best, and that sometimes we'll do our worst." Gradually the notion settles in that doing your worst or not doing your best is almost what black authenticity is, because you stand as a totemic demonstration of white racism. 1960s racism is about segregation. By 1970, it's standard in certain circles that racism is still present and indestructable because it's structural.

Because of the welfare revolution in 1966, it starts to become regular for people to just stay on welfare, with no one concerned about whether they get job training. The knocking on the door dwindles in the early '70s, and it becomes this multigenerational program. It's not anybody's fault. Black America turned upside down between '60 and '70.

I think that civil rights up to about 1966 and [black activist] Stokely Carmichael and people yelling "black power" and not knowing what it meant—that's where it went wrong. And we're still stuck talking about these things the way those people did.

And, ultimately, the continued appeal to the forms and rubrics of the late 1960s doesn't speak to contemporary young people.

Some people hearing me say that are thinking I mean that I don't like blackness or that I'm ambivalent about it. But I just think that the category is beginning to not make sense. That includes my daughters. I don't know if they, when they're 40, are going to identify as black women, as opposed to just mutt women growing up in an upper-middle-class world, where everybody has a different flavor. What they're basically becoming is modestly affluent American urban kids.

I worry these days that when people say blackness, what they mean is, roughly, not being buttoned up like Episcopalian whites. I worry that blackness is thought of as, roughly, jamming. I mean this as more than just dancing, but that there's something that black people are in touch with in terms of rhythm. That blackness is not being too exact—we're seeing that in so many educational materials. It runs throughout the culture that to be black is to not be precise, is to not be responsible for getting the exact answer. You have a rhythm; you jam. You don't sit in one place; it's about the beat. And I worry that [this sense of] blackness is primitive, you know?

That way lies a self-destructive notion of authenticity, whose persistence keeps worshippers of that false god poor and alienated, whilst giving intellectual ammunition to people who might not wish Americans of African extraction well.

MORE FROM BILL MAHER.

It's amusing watching the Pajamas Media types respond to Bill Maher simply being ... Bill Maher.  "A dedicated lifelong liberal, Maher has been on quite a roll throughout the Biden administration, earning what many of us would have thought was impossible, over the years: newfound respect from the right." That part of the right got on Mr Maher for his objection to people calling the September 11 pilots "cowardly," noting it took some sort of guts to steal a plane with the intent to use it as a kamikaze weapon, and more recently for expressing some doubts about one Donald Trump (who has been many things, but not a conventional conservative, and not a libertarian.)  We have longer memories at Cold Spring Shops.

Let's conclude today's posts with more wit and wisdom from the onetime host of "Politically Incorrect."

.@billmaher points out the terrible comments Trudeau has made on unvaccinated Canadians pic.twitter.com/l2BQzLlwGp

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 12, 2022

The list Red State's Mike Miller offers of Mr Maher breaking with the woketards of the ficus's so-called presidency would not surprise anyone who watched "Politically Incorrect" back in the day.

PUBLIC RADIO FINALLY CATCHES ON.

Poverty, Dropouts, Pregnancy, Suicide: What The Numbers Say About Fatherless Kids. Not much good, but I suppose finally acknowledging in 2017 what some of us understood in 1980 or 1992 or so is better than continuing to deny reality.

HOW LARGE IS HIGHER EDUCATION'S SUB-PRIME SECTOR?

This large.  "New data from Georgetown show that nearly a third of colleges and universities leave most students worse off 10 years after enrolling than their peers with only a high school diploma." As the newsreader might say, those are the headlines, here are the details.

Most students who attend college earn more 10 years down the road than those who don’t. But at roughly one-third of institutions, a majority of students end up earning less than those with a high school diploma, according to a new analysis from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

The analysis examines new data from College Scorecard and looks at net economic gains for college students 10 years and 40 years after they enroll. The data includes all students, including those who did not graduate.

“College typically pays off, but the return on investment varies by credential, program of study, and institution,” Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center for Education and the Workforce, said in a press release.

Sometimes you have to start with the obvious, and then disaggregate.

Low earnings are often linked to low graduation rates at a given institution, said Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy at the center. At many institutions, the share of students who earn a degree is 50 percent or less.

“At many of those colleges—where students start and never finished—the [return on investment] probably doesn’t offer any more than that a high school diploma would, because if you go to college and you don’t finish, you don’t have a credential that is worth any more than a high school diploma in the marketplace,” Van Der Werf said.

It's probably unprincipled to suggest that maybe there are institutions of higher learning that are signing up a lot of Distressed Material that matriculates but never graduates.  And in some cases, the return on human capital comes in relatively late in one's career.

Two-year institutions offered the best net economic gains after 10 years, in part because students who graduate in two years compared with four spend more time in the workforce and incur less debt, Van Der Werf said. About 15 or 20 years postenrollment, that begins to change.

“Over time, the returns on a four-year degree are quite a bit higher than on a two-year degree,” Van Der Werf said. “Of course, that depends on what the [two-year] degree is. If it’s in a technical topic—like computer science—you can compete with a four-year degree. But a two-year degree in general studies or something like that has some capture in the labor force in the early years after you earn it, but it begins to fade over time.”

That comparison, however, is incomplete: what's the marginal benefit of a baccalaureate in general studies compared with the associate degree?

HAS HE EVER BEEN TO WISCONSIN?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille attempts a comparison that doesn't quite work.

Canada appears to be governed as you would expect of Wisconsin if California's snotty political class were exiled to Madison. This puts generally nice, compliant people under the rule of an especially self-regarding and contemptuous gang. But some Canadians have been driven to revolt against that ruling class's pandemic policies in the form of the trucker-led Freedom Convoy. So powerful are the shock waves of this unprecedented uprising that they crossed the border and flipped the positions Americans of the left and right take on the legitimacy of political protest and suppression of the same. More importantly, the movement cautions the political class everywhere against pushing people too far.

I submit that current Wisconsin governor Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D-Public Instruction) is at least as snotty and incompetent as any of the leading Californians.  There's more legislative oversight, though, which led relatively quickly to an easing of the corona tyranny in Wisconsin.  And the pencil neck at least had the good sense not to antagonize the Packer fans or lumberacks too much.  Where did Canada's prime minister mess up?  I mean, those "nice, compliant people" watch nationally televised fist-fighting on ice on Saturday nights.  Why should a continent be governed by an island, whether it is with the sensibilities of Manhattan or of Montreal?  Maybe they could take an education from their neighbors who wrote the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment into their governing documents.

The more protest-prone United States likely avoided this scenario by not just decentralizing but often ignoring rulemaking. The split may best be captured by the media's constant contrast between locked-down New York and wide-open Florida. Even in restrictive states, many local officials refused to enforce curfews, mask orders, and business closures. Within or in defiance of the law, local policies in-line with local sentiment mean fewer pissed-off people. If the U.S. had widely imposed national mandates, politicians in Washington, D.C., would probably now be wishing the pushback had stopped at traffic jams and honking.

There is that subset of the political class who would like to smear some large segment of the electorate as "insurrectionist," but that's not going to go anywhere.  But that subset of the political class overlaps, substantially, with the corona tyrants, and their future doesn't look so bright right now.

"Two years after the world first heard about covid-19, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a huge extension of state power over people's lives and the erosion of individual freedoms," the Democracy Index 2021 observes about conditions around the world. That loss of liberty inspired waves of popular but disconnected protests in country after country among people seeking the return of liberal norms and respect for their personal choices. Now, improbably, those protests may be coming together under a maple leaf and a #HonkHonk hashtag.

None too soon, either, but it's on voters to recognize that corona tyrants pivoting, relatively recently, toward freedom, ought be replaced wherever possible with office seekers who were dubious in the spring of 2020.

THE FOOD DESERT THAT ACCOMPANIES J. B. PRITZKER'S TAXATION AND CORONA TYRANNY.

I could recommend this Northern Star column as an illustration of Clueless Collegian Privilege.

DeKalb needs more diverse food options.

Lincoln Highway is lined with restaurants and fast food joints. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Culver’s can still be tempting and The Junction is a DeKalb favorite when it comes to comfort food, but it’s not satisfying or particularly exciting.

As a hungry college student, I want more options. I don’t always want to eat unhealthy fast food or quick-to-make comfort foods.

To be fair, DeKalb does have some options: in just the five miles surrounding NIU’s campus, there is a multitude of Chinese takeout places and different Mexican restaurants. Downtown DeKalb also offers a Thai restaurant, which is a personal favorite of mine.

What’s missing is variety.

Yes, Lincoln Highway is lined with restaurants, but options are still fairly limited when it comes to ordering. Chicken nuggets, burgers or pizza top the menu in most restaurants close to campus, with the exception of only a few.

Might it be that the places that are still in business had offerings that catered to people other than collegians. Between several years of declining enrollments, and two years of remote college, the correlation of forces has not favored eateries.

Many of the Chinese restaurants in DeKalb and Sycamore are typical takeout places — you won’t find anywhere that offers a more varied menu, like Chinese hotpot or dim sum.

The Mexican restaurants in DeKalb have the same pitfalls. Many of them offer similar dishes, and while they’re delicious, they don’t exactly offer anything special.

Obviously, there has to be a viable market for new restaurants. If there’s not, they won’t make money.

But what’s a more viable market than a university campus? College students are perpetually hungry and usually open to trying new things, especially when it comes to food.

That last sentence steps on the narrative of cash-poor collegians who ought have their student loans forgiven, doesn't it?  But the kind of places that might have offered variety are gone: the pho restaurant by the grocery store, the Panda, Wing Stop, and a local pizza delivery service in a complex that only hosts a Starbucks, and some of the more conventional hot dog and Italian beef outlets have given up.

But even before the current governor started issuing ukases and killing seniors, his tax and corruption agenda was driving productive people out.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 19,533.

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.  I am pleased to report that the indoor mask mandate for eateries and the like will be expiring in two weeks, on 28 February, although children of all ages will still be subject to the Biden muzzles.

The continued corona tyranny is not working for the so-called progressives any more.

To the extent that disruptions are caused by sickness, we would expect to see more disruptions in conservative parts of the country with low vaccination rates. Instead, we see equal if not greater disruptions in liberal parts of the country, even though the higher vaccination rate reduces the burden of disease. That’s because those jurisdictions are implementing Covid-19 mitigation measures with costs that exceed their benefits. And by making high-vaccination places relatively dysfunctional, these mitigations are sending a negative (and inaccurate) signal about the power of vaccination to let people live their lives with confidence.

Tellingly, it’s not just that more liberal jurisdictions have these measures. The rules are specifically strictest in areas of life where left-wing people have the most political clout — universities and public schools — rather than in places with the highest objective level of vulnerability (nursing homes).

Elsewhere, Sweden's corona mitigations are done; they are going away in Germany, and the remaining ukases in Iowa will be going away tomorrow.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

The latest report from Sweden counts 2,397,330 infections, up by 836,967 from last month, and 16,465 deaths, a change of 995 from that report.  The logic in Sweden is that the spike of the latest variant is over.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,001,771 infections, an increase of 412,131 over last month, and 35,998 deaths, adding 3,466 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.

As of this afternoon, the state counts nearly 21 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they've updated their talley to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations.  The state no longer counts the scary variants.  The current mix of infections is low on Delta, and hight on Xi Omicron.

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

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 17,062.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by  less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect.  Now we're adding over a thousand in a month.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.  Tell me again how all this micromanagement is for our benefit?

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE COMES FOR YOUR CONVOY.

Let's begin by noting that British North America was the refuge for people who for one reason or another had doubts about the notion that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness were rights inherent to all people, that governments existed to Secure those Rights, and that governments required the Consent of the Governed.  Thus Canadian pundits might not see people calling attention to governments abusing their powers the same way as their Stateside neighbors do.

Freedom, of course, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes. It’s been a rallying cry behind great triumphs such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement. But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.

More recently, political leaders, and others, with an unprecedented megaphone in the form of the internet and social media, have used the call for “freedom” to promote bigoted, racist and anti-democratic ideas.

That's a bundle of non-sequiturs, and it strikes me as less than germane to the circumstances that provoked the convoys.  I'm not sure how Canadian emergency powers work, or whether a prime minister can issue ukases and get away with them as long as there's no vote of no confidence in their parliament.  I do know that state governors in the United States have abused their emergency powers, and residents of several states have called attention, or sometimes had the emergency decrees lifted.  And yes, they get slimed by that Critique of Pure Tolerance-adjacent argument to the effect that freedom in the service of Bad Ideas is somehow anti-democratic.  The columnist ought to rethink that.  As should the coot, who again stammered out his silly idea that people were misusing their freedom by not getting vaccinated or by going out in public with a cold.  (It came to this when the Smart People deconstructed bourgeois conventions, but that's too subtle an argument for an addled ficus, let alone Canadian pundits.)