SOME THINGS TO GET STEAMED UP ABOUT.

Once Union Pacific restored Big Boy 4014 to steam, their smaller Challenger 3985, which had been the world's largest active steam locomotive, shown off inter alia on a stack train and rolling The Greatest Show on Earth, was put into honorable retirement.

That retirement is short-lived.  Sometimes there is mutual benefit in downsizing.

Union Pacific has agreed to donate more than a dozen pieces of historic railroad equipment — including one of the world’s largest steam locomotives to run in the preservation era and a rare 2-10-2 that hasn’t run in decades — to the non-profit Railroading Heritage of Midwest America.

Officials with Railroading Heritage of Midwest America, which also owns Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 261 and recently acquired the former Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad shop complex in Silvis, Ill., said it plans to restore both steam locomotives, 4-6-6-4 ‘Challenger’ 3985 and 2-10-2 5511, to operating condition. The Challenger will be restored first and 5511 will follow.

Other rolling stock has potential for excursions or for show.

Besides the steam locomotives, the equipment being donated to Railroading Heritage of Midwest America includes the last operational DDA40X “Centennial” 6936; an un-restored E9B; four coaches and a diner lounge from the 1950s; a baggage car; a caboose; and two historic business cars, “Selma,” which was previously Western Pacific’s “Feather River,” and “Stanford,” a former Southern Pacific car built in 1928. The group plans to repaint the business cars into their historic WP and SP liveries and offer them for charters on Amtrak and private trips. Most of the remaining cars will be repainted in Milwaukee Road colors, like the rest of its passenger fleet.

All of the equipment will be moved to the Silvis shops later this year. Railroading Heritage of Midwest America plans on turning that massive 400,000-square-foot building into the largest historic railroad equipment restoration facility in the country.

That mudsucker returning to operation is interesting. Union Pacific had 5511 on hand for years, but never ran her.  "With Iowa Interstate’s two Chinese-built QJ 2-10-2s now out of service, No. 5511 will be the only the only operating 2-10-2 in the United States when completed."  Did I mention that Iowa Interstate run right past that shop complex, Silvis being the major repair shop of the Rock Island Lines.  Their Chinese mudsuckers were withdrawn from operation when they came due for their elapsed time inspection.  Whether they will steam again under Iowa Interstate auspices, or perhaps move to the steam shop that is taking shape in Silvis is yet to be determined.  The Milwaukee Road's 261 will also be based in Silvis.

Railroading Heritage of Midwest America will make good use of any tax-deductible contributions you send them.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS A REGRESSIVE TRANSFER.

Populist politicians are catching on that a blanket forgiveness of student loans is a giveway to rich people.

[Florida governor Ron] DeSantis is right about how grotesque it is to make waiters and construction workers foot the bill for high-income professionals, who are going to make millions of dollars over the course of their lifetimes. Most student loan debt is graduate-level debt because that’s where colleges gouge people the most, fueled by a steady stream of easy money from the government over the last several decades. The industries with the greatest price increases over the last half-century are healthcare and education for a reason. The government always makes things worse.

What I really like about DeSantis’ reaction, though, is that he goes further than some other Republicans are willing to go, which has been a staple of his leadership. The right move here is not to tell those who fell prey to predatory student loans to pound sand. Yes, there’s ultimately a level of personal responsibility involved, but we can’t ignore the role the universities have played in this.

Those who benefited from these loans should have a part in footing the bill. That means universities that raked in gobs of cash to pay diversity officers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year should be holding the bag for those who can’t afford to pay their loans. The idea that we are going to make truck drivers pay the student loans of somebody with an MBA, while universities sit on hundreds of billions of dollars in tax-free endowments is insane. Any government program to relieve student debt should be completely dependent on taxing those endowments.

That’s where Republicans need to go when arguing against what the Democrats are doing. Counter their ridiculous vote-buying scheme by making changes to the student loan process, while also putting the universities on the hook for their predatory behavior. That will go much further than a temporary payoff that does nothing to solve the problem.

Stephen Moore dials the populism up.

Who would ever pay off a student loan ever again after this blanket forgiveness program?

Who would benefit? The most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances found that only 22% of families had student loan debt and that "student debt has consistently been disproportionately held by higher-income families." So this is a giveaway to the financially successful students and families paid for by middle-class workers, millions of whom didn’t go to elite universities in the first place.

Once student loans move to “free college” for everyone, university tuitions, which are already soaring at two to three times the inflation rate, would race further ahead of all other consumer prices. When I attended the University of Illinois in the early 1980s, the tuition was $1,000 a semester. Now, it’s closer to $12,000 a semester. Where’d all the money go?

The Biden administration has misdiagnosed the fundamental problem here. To wit: Colleges and universities have become fat, flabby, and inefficient money burners with no accountability. No oversight. No getting rid of bad teachers and professors. No looking under the hood to see where extraneous costs could be axed.

He also notes that those university endowments ought to serve as reserve margins for bad debts.  The first time all student loan debts get expunged, nobody, willing to pay back or not, will bother to repay.  If the big ticket universities are hedge funds with classrooms, well, recall that "hedge" is against downside risk, too.

LEARNING TO WIN.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, and it continues to go badly for the Russians.

Is a proxy war in progress?  Perhaps.

We’ve been training and arming the Ukrainians since at least 2008, apparently to great effect, and have continuously ramped up our direct support since the most recent invasion. Arming belligerents in a conflict is an act of war and Russia is certainly within its rights to treat it accordingly. We are, for all intent and purposes, conducting proxy war.

What's going to happen next?

WE WARNED THEM.

The title of a recent Kira Davis article, "The Left Has Created Their Own Misery," is a candidate for a Friday short take.  It's not a short take, though, to count the ways in which the self-styled progressives have failed.

It’s been a miserable year so far for progressives, and it doesn’t seem to be looking up.

Biden now has the honor of being the worst-polling President in history, and Kamala Harris – THE FIRST WOMAN OF COLOR™ Vice President – has managed to squander any semblance of good will related to her racial status by being generally terrible in every way imaginable. Inflation has deflated the Democrat base, America’s public school students are woefully behind in education statistics, and global politics have become the most unstable in years.

Everything is awful and it’s just getting worse. The progressive left created this misery for all of us, all by themselves.

Our Intellectual Betters were so keen on getting rid of Donald Trump that they concealed how far Joe Biden's brain had deteriorated. The coming crackup within the Democrat coalition between whoever is calling the shots in the administration and the members of the legislative branch has the potential to be epic.

They used a combination of the legal system, social media censorship and mainstream media bias (and maybe even more sinister means) to wrestle the 2020 election into submission. They gave us a President no one really wanted, one who wasn’t ready for “that 3a.m. call” and in fact was barely lucid most of his campaign. America did not want Joe Biden, and the chaos you’re seeing now is the manifestation of the collective consciousness of 325 million Americans who have the sinking feeling that something’s not right.

Progressives got cocky after January of 2020. They and their Democrat overlords genuinely believed that they could permanently squash all opposition and end the Republican Party and conservatives forever. It is an astounding ignorance, given that this country is and pretty much always has been split right down the middle politically speaking. Politics are cyclical, which has been a saving grace of American governance. We are currently looking at what happens when one side believes the cycle is over.

One of these days, people will recognize as somewhere between "wishful thinking" and "disinformation" any thought of a permanent presidential majority, let alone the kind of unified executive and legislature Franklin D. Roosevelt briefly enjoyed.  In 2020, the voters, taken together, voted to gridlock the government, but the nature of primary challenges in the states from which the Speaker and Majority Leader hailed, combined with presidential megalomania, to that cockiness.  We'll see how the votes turn out in November.  Ms Davis is of the view the self-styled progressives got too full of themselves.

The left’s misery is their own doing. We warned them that pushing opposing voices underground would only aggravate and motivate people. We warned them that their policies would create more harm, more chaos, more crime, and more expense. We warned them that the American people, regardless of the success of election shenanigans sometimes, will always have their say and their way. We warned them that parents could only be pushed so far away from their children before they would begin to fight back. We warned them they were creating a whole new class of political activists who wouldn’t be as kind or soft as the Tea Party activists turned out to be.

We warned them that if they insisted on playing Dr.Frankenstein with our economy, biology, and our social discourse, they would come to hate the monster they created.

All they had to do was not be crazy, and they couldn’t manage it. The ‘woke’ have awakened the sleepy electorate that would have been fine to maintain the status quo if only the left could have kept a lid on their insanity. Their ridiculous political litmus test that forces anyone not toeing the alt-left progressive line into the “right-wing nutjob” camp has done nothing but make conservatives out of perfectly fine liberals.

There are signs of an ongoing recognition of reality. We'll look at some of those in posts to come.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's time to stop taking their nonsense.  "Leftists are similar to the youngest sister of the family. Bratty, entitled, and seemingly un-punchable, they get away with nonsense that the rest of us wouldn’t consider doing in the first place."

The week's harvest of pithy summations of familiar Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

A POLICY ENTREPRENEUR.

The Independent Institute announce the passing of founder David J. Theroux.

David launched the Independent Institute, an academic non-profit, public policy, research and educational organization, as the first “garage” think tank, in 1986. Starting Independent in his Oakland, California basement, David subsequently established Independent’s offices in San Francisco until the Loma Prieta earthquake precipitated its relocation back across the bay in Oakland.

With the launch of Independent, David was able to realize his dream of an organization adhering to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry in pursuing the creation of transformational ideas addressing the most pressing social and economic challenges of the day. He was the consummate entrepreneur, constantly identifying and leading the pursuit of opportunities for advancing the principles and application of liberty for greatest impact in the public square.

There's a substantial overlap between Independent policy positions and libertarian political economy in the academy. Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok spent some time at Independent before returning to higher education at George Mason.  "Ultimately, of course, I returned to academia by moving to GMU but not before learning many valuable lessons from David and my years at the Independent Institute."

I first became aware of Independent in the early days of weblogs.  There might have been links from time to time to Independent essays, but from time to time I'd get an electronic mail (in those days, I had a public presence at a university) from Mr Theroux reading "Would you please post a notice of the following new article."  It was my practice then, as it is now, only to link to stuff that I had read, and unsolicited link requests are not something I look favorably upon.  (These days, not having an institutional affiliation with a linked electronic mail address is great for privacy.)  My response was generally something along the lines of "I will consider the content you recommend.  I would be more favorably disposed to your request if I saw a link to Cold Spring Shops on your publication's blogroll."

That never happened, but I have had a working relationship with Independent's stable of scholars, some of whom hold academic posts.  Their coverage of the corona tyranny has been spot on for two years.  In addition, despite my cheekiness, somebody at Independent Review had enough confidence in my ferroequinologist chops to review Amtrak critic Randal O'Toole's Romance of the Rails.

It may not have been given to Mr Theroux to finish the task, but libertarian leaning scholars at Independent or within higher education will not give it up.  R. I. P.

ROYAL PURPLE FOR A PLATINUM JUBILEE.

No, that's not some new Thomas and Friends character, the devious diesel lurking in the background notwithstanding.  Just in time for Queen Elizabeth's actual birthday, Taw Valley puts on formal dress.

Severn Valley Railway photograph retrieved from Railfan and Railroad.

Severn Valley Railway 4-6-2 34027, the “Taw Valley,” was recently painted purple and given the number 70 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.

There is a Princess Elizabeth on British metals.  Her owners are raising money for major repairs.

THE EMERGENCE OF COMPETING GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES?

From time to time, I've mulled over the emergence of governance structures.  "Plagues or conquest or perhaps the application of knowledge that served as a military force multiplier (phalanxes or firearms) combined to provide an opportunity for the family farm to emerge as a trade-tested betterment."

Now there's peer-reviewed research thinking systematically about just that.  "Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it."

I've been exposed to enough UCLA price theory to bridle at that "surplus" argument, preferring to see division of labor emerging organically.  Whether the forager hires the fighting skills of a bigger forager, or the bigger forager offers to do the fighting is immaterial, I bet those bands that rewarded the better fighters found an evolutionary advantage compared to bands less organized.  If you see my cynical view that the protection racket is the worst affront to the state monopoly on violence, you're right.  It's historical, you can't have both the duly constituted authority and a competing authority selling the protection.

Then things start to get interesting.

Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape.

That's probably why cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice – rather than taro, yams, or potatoes – are at the root of virtually all classical civilizations. If the land was capable of cultivating grains, evidence shows it was much more likely to host complex societal structures.

"The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites," the authors of the hypothesis write.

"Roots and tubers, in contrast, are typically perennial and do not have to be reaped in a particular period, but once harvested are rather perishable."

In parts of South America, for instance, perennial root crops like cassava can be harvested all year round. Unfortunately, however, cassava rots easily and is difficult to transport.

I should break down and buy a J-Stor subscription, at least for one year, to dig into that article.  The authors propose that the value of protecting durable nutritious foods made the taxation possible.

Farming was obviously a necessary step to improve food production, but researchers suspect only those crops that could be easily confiscated led to the rise of an elite class.

If a powerful echelon of society began collecting tax in the form of grain from farmers without extra food on their hands, then farming communities would not be able to support as large of a population. As a result, their numbers would likely shrink, thereby creating a surplus of food to bestow to more elite classes.

Might there have been competing elites?  The better fighters have a value to the foragers or to the cultivators alike.  People with pattern recognition skills have a value to the cultivators that they don't have to the foragers.  What are the roots of our intellectual orders?  Understanding the rhythms of the sun?  A Stonehenge is not parasitic on a pastoral society, it is a planting aid.  Seeing the patterns in nature?  The proper clues to a future rainstorm make your rain dances more effective.  Is it the physical talents the warrior has, or the intellectual talents the observer has, that demonstrate favor with the gods?

The warriors and the observers might both be competing to serve the cultivators.

If these farmers didn't protect the elite, the elite wouldn't protect their food stockpiles from bandits. Stealing grains is, after all, much more valuable than stealing perishable foods.

"Thus," the authors of the new hypothesis write, "we concur with conventional productivity theory that farmers in hierarchical societies produce surplus, but our contention is that rather than surplus generating the elite, the elite generate the food surplus on which it can flourish, once the opportunity to appropriate rises."

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to test whether the "opportunity to appropriate" occurred to cultivators negotiating with warriors and observers, or whether the observers and warriors made common cause to help themselves to some of the crop.  What do I keep posting about symbiotic rather than parasitic governance?

SEPARATING SCHOOL AND STATE?

The rationale for prohibiting the establishment of a state church is one of freedom of conscience.  And yet, the rationale for public provision of schooling includes safeguarding Puritan America from subversive papist notions.  These days, the school board election has become contested turf in part because those publicly provided schools come off as more about the subversion of the dominant paradigm than about fundamental intellectual skills.  That's not a problem only for conservatives, although as the legislatures use the schools as vehicles for preaching their particular gospels, it's causing the publishers heartburn.

To develop, print and bind even a few copies of a K-12 textbook series requires an army of staff and suppliers and is an investment of a few million dollars, easily. I read in an article from 2004 that producing a K-8 reading program can cost as much as $60 million. If there’s a significant chance the books will be declared unsalable by a handful of political appointees on a textbook adoption committee, would you risk it? Especially since the books have “Florida” all over them and couldn’t be used in other states?

That's long been a challenge to publishers. More usually it's a "Texas" version as opposed to a "California" version and school districts in other states choose from one of those two bundles.  At least school districts have more choice than motorists, as it's California's standards that configure cars and personal trucks, nationwide.  I wonder whether more local control of curriculum mightn't make some of that problem go away, or at least get some publishers or book sellers taking a hard look at the price tag of program development.  Sixty million bucks?  Seriously?  Why not dust off McGuffey or Story Hour Readings or otherwise improvise?

The post offers mathematical levity, perhaps there is a separating hyperplane between school and state.

At a time when Floridians by law “don’t say gay,” much less “trans,” this banned book brazenly teaches about the “Transitive Property of Equality.” Not only are impressionable minds taught about the “transformation of functions,” but also they are even indoctrinated in “describing transformations” and — appallingly — “sketching transformations.”

At a time when DeSantis is trying to restore the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, “Precalculus With Limits” has endless references to “sin” and “polynomials” — even “multiplying polynomials.” On Page 318, for example, it tells children to believe that “sin x takes on its full range of values.” Valuing sin! On Page 734, incredibly, it orders children to “sketch the graph of the degenerate conic.” Disgusting.

At a time when Florida is banning the acknowledgment of gender fluidity or any identity outside male and female, this subversive textbook unabashedly tells suggestible children that such things exist as “reciprocal identities,” “cofunction identities,” “additive identity property” and even “multiplicative identity property.”

Right now, all Floridians should be fighting the radical socialists, but “Precalculus With Limits” is inviting children to find the “simplest form of a radical equation,” or even to take a perfectly normal equation and “rewrite with a radical.” Which radical? Saul Alinsky?

Heaven forfend somebody bring up irrational and imaginary numbers!

I wonder, though, how many journalists can describe a degenerate hyperbola.

LEARN HOW TO SAY NO.

There are limits to "if you want something done, ask a busy person" and this anonymous academician just discovered them.

I have been a highly productive scholar and committed campus citizen for nine years. I have poured myself into my university’s mission—into teaching, engagement, service and scholarship. I have told friends and family I have the best job in the world. I have worked to embody an ethos of care and inclusivity in hopes of building a thriving and just academe. My university and professional society have rewarded and recognized me.

But in the past three months, I have found myself questioning if I can continue being a tenured professor or whether the best thing to do is just resign. Like so many of my colleagues, I don’t want to give up what was a joyful profession and hate even more to abandon it, but something has to change.

The woke word salad suggests to me it was a proliferation of faddish administrative burdens rather than an in-box full of requests to review manuscripts or grant proposals that have overwhelmed the writer.

When my child was diagnosed with a severe illness in December 2021, I was already languishing in a simmering stew of burnout and discouragement. Since then, the subsequent experience of attempting to balance their [c.q.] care needs with my job has ignited a full-blown professional crisis.

It was weirdly fortunate that we discovered our child’s illness at the beginning of winter break. In the early weeks of staying with them 24-7 to ensure their safety, I was already off from work and things were quiet, with most people out of the office. When it was clear our child would need continuing and dedicated parental care as the start of the term neared, a campus policy allowed me to modify my duties temporarily to fit my family-care needs. I gratefully stayed home and stumbled along, trying to manage the nonteaching part of my job remotely. But my child got sicker. Eventually I had to take two full weeks off to give them my undivided attention.

Those two full weeks were without meetings, email correspondence, writing or reading (although a few tasks sneaked in here and there). Two full weeks doesn’t sound like so much—many people take two-week vacations, or so I hear. But when I attempted to return to work after my child’s care regime changed, it became clear that two weeks might as well have been an entire semester. Although I was away from work with my supervisor’s blessing, the work did not go away. It just piled up. And it piled up on top of a system already teetering on the brink of collapse.

Each day back at work, my depression and anxiety have worsened as the deadlines, student requests and reminders fly at and by me like road signs on a high-speed interstate trip. As I began to struggle with even basic tasks like getting out of bed in the morning, I came to see that the only way for me to survive in this job is to ask the unthinkable: to declare academic Chapter 11. I must go to my colleagues and ask for a release from overdue tasks, to find another reviewer, to find another person to judge the poster session, to do that planned manuscript without me or not at all. Even more unthinkable: I must return grant money, because the planned work just can’t be done.

A sick child or some other unanticipated crisis is not fun to deal with. It sounds, though, like this academician was already well into the introspection of "is that all there is?" perhaps overwhelmed by the ease that others can schedule meetings in an environment of "excellence without money."  Downsizing is a false economy, isn't it?

While this workload debt crisis is partly explained by personal choices and the extreme circumstance of my child’s illness, it has other causes, too, causes that are systemic to academe and public institutions like mine. I want to share my perspective on these other causes for my own catharsis and also in the hope of helping others by being open about where they are as we begin to see the end of COVID.

The damage our public health officials have done in their monomaniacal focus on suppressing the Wuhan coronavirus are going to be the stuff of a lot of doctoral dissertations, if there are people available to supervise them.

Beyond my own frustrations at feeling I was doing many things ineffectively, I watched the devastating impact of COVID on colleagues and their families and communities—and I was deeply troubled by their pain and suffering. This was after years of witnessing colleagues succumb to mental and physical health issues from overwork. I tried at every turn to raise concerns about faculty morale and, more specifically, to propose interventions to ensure COVID didn’t exacerbate inequality among faculty.

Unfortunately, my efforts to advocate for the vulnerable among my colleagues went pretty much nowhere at my institution. They encountered not so much callous disinterest, but more a kind of shut down born out of terror and panic. We were told not to make a fuss—to please just pivot, learn to do new things and carry on—and under no circumstances to do anything to upset tuition-paying parents or the state Legislature. We were all in this together.

As we carried on, we shouldered an endlessly burgeoning—and burdensome—workload. Our campus workforce was progressively depleted thanks to the combined effects of a hiring moratorium, compounded by attrition and a housing-affordability crisis. The gaps to fill, the leaks in the dike of having a functional campus, just got bigger and bigger, the workload heavier and heavier and heavier. The authentic thank-yous became few and far between. The opportunities to say “uncle,” to say, “I’m grieving what I’ve lost,” to say, “I don’t know if I can go on,” were nonexistent.

Perhaps the parents and the legislators would be more sympathetic if the institutions of higher education had not gleefully and repeatedly broken the social contract under which the students actually received an education.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IS CULTURAL ENRICHMENT.

New Shot in the Dark contributor Jeff Kouba reflects on the Texican style of polka.

Interaction among people across borders is part of the human condition. Languages typically influence each other across borders, but cultures also intermingle and music is a part of that. The polka music the Germans planted in Texas eventually made its way south across the border to northern Mexico, and from that Mexico’s Norteño music developed. This regional music retains the influence of the accordion and the polka beat.

There are instructive music videos at the link.

Enjoy.  For that matter, Prosit!

BETTER NOT START A FAMILY.

That's the somewhere-between-realistic-and-cynical advice people hiring out at the BNSF Railway sometimes hear.  When the house organ for rail management pays attention, there might be something to it. ‘At What Point is This Not Worth It?’  The Surface Transportation Board has asked for public comment on working life on the rails.

As the spouse of an engineer, I would like to specifically speak to issues of recruiting and retaining employees.

My husband was hired 10 years ago. At that time and up until Feb. 1, 2022, he was afforded five (5) weekdays and two (2) weekend days [off] per month. He did not have scheduled days off or a schedule to know when he was going to go to work. While this arrangement is unconventional for most, we were able to live a life where my husband could be an active participant. We would plan ahead for birthdays, parent/teacher conferences, appointments, or a mid-week outing with our children. When BNSF came out with the “High Impact Day” policy, we shifted our planning and hoped that maybe he would hit RISA, an allocation for a vacation or PL (Personal Leave) day may be available, and he avoided taking off most days identified as “High Impact.” Again, this isn’t conventional, but when my husband was hired, we knew that he would miss some events, and we created our own traditions.

Between the corona shutdowns, the so-called right-sizing of the railroads (something that's thirty plus years in the making) and the conversion of railroads into scheduled conveyor belts, something has to give.

For decades, Class I railroads have cut their labor force in an effort to increase profits for shareholders. With the strain of a global pandemic, a more restrictive attendance policy was implemented. Since then, approximately 1,000 TY&E employees have resigned. Class I railroads have created this labor shortage themselves, which negatively impacts the supply chain. This is not a new issue; this is the direct result of years of implementing PSR and trying to cut every bit of fat from their companies, and now they are cutting the muscle. Now, Class I railroads wonder why current employees, who had every intention of staying for 30 years, are leaving, and there aren’t people lining up to take their place. There is not a shortage of people willing to work; there is a shortage of people willing to work for companies that do not care for and about their employees. Mental health matters, fatigue and rest matter, customer service matters, the safety of crews and communities matter.

In the words of Railway Age editor William C. Vantuono, there's something happening here. "The increasing number of comments being filed with the STB by rail employees suggests some coordination or urging by the BLET and SMART-TD, [two labor organizations -- Ed.] but they are not form letters and read like individualized assessments, making them more grassroots than Astroturf."

Sooner or later, the Smart People in Headquarters downsize a little too far.

SHORT-HAUL AIR CARRIAGE NEVER PAID ITS WAY, ANYWAY.

I have to wonder how much of the current commercial pilot shortage is self-inflicted on the part of the airlines.

“The pilot shortage for the industry is real and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” Scott Kirby, chief executive officer of United Airlines Holdings Inc. said earlier this week on a conference call. That will likely force United to keep 150 regional planes parked despite increased domestic travel demand, he said.

Some of the troubles are collateral damage from the corona shutdowns.

A quick aside: I used to close the survey of political economy class with a caution along the lines of "we don't know what sorts of things our descendants will point to and wonder how the heck that happened.  I have two candidates for that list now, the corona hysteria, and the intrusion of queer theory in kindergarten.

But this was supposed to be about the regional airlines.

The issue isn’t new -- airlines already faced difficulty finding and retaining pilots before the pandemic -- but a purging of employees at the start of the downturn in 2020 has left the industry ill-prepared for a rebound. Thousands of pilots accepted buyouts or retired early when federal aid to avoid furloughs failed to cover all the airlines’ labor costs, especially for veteran pilots earning six-figure salaries.

It's gotten to the point that your regional flight might be ... a bus ride.

Regional airlines play a critical role in ferrying passengers from smaller markets to hub airports where they board flights operated by larger partners. These work horses of the industry have capacity purchase agreements binding them to one or more primary airlines such as American or Delta, which control scheduling, pricing and ticketing.

“This is the pivotal point,” Faye Malarkey Black, chief executive of the Regional Airline Association, said in an interview. “We have not seen this level of service loss since right after 9-11, when that crisis changed the fly-drive equation. I expect this bad situation to get worse before it gets better, no matter what we do.”

In lieu of puddle-jumper flights, some airlines are linking up with charter bus services. United and American have contracted with Landline Co., a Fort Collins, Colorado-based startup, to ferry passengers and their bags by motorcoach on some shorter routes, allowing them to sell destinations where they don’t fly.

I can't wait for some spoiled Important Types getting upset when their connecting flight to Vail or Aspen never leaves the ground.

There's got to be a research project for somebody on the economics of a relatively short regional flight with no more than a bus load of passengers on board.  A lot of those regional carriers depend on the so-called essential air service subsidy to cover what the code-sharing partner carrier doesn't.  There aren't many amenities on those regional planes in any event.

Meanwhile, the people inside and outside government are too wedded either to high-end bullet trains or local rapid transit to consider supplementing the regional air carriers with regional passenger trains.

PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND OTHER BOURGEOIS IMPEDIMENTA.

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth ask New Republic readers, "Should academic freedom really protect those who make false and morally repellent claims? It’s time for a rethink."  Their essay is going to get into difficult terrain, as what they characterize as "false and morally repellent" might still be contested questions.  That's a familiar place for Cold Spring Shops readers.

Academic freedom does not mean academic license. Rather, it means academicians enjoy a great deal of latitude to investigate questions that interest them, subject to the constraints of the discourse practice in their discipline. At the risk of oversimplifying to finish this post in finite time, scholarly inquiry involves variations on the theme "Proposition P is valid under conditions C."

The problem Professors Bérubé and Ruth focus on is precisely the quest for the P and the C, although the line of inquiry bothers them. "Does academic freedom protect professors espousing white supremacist ideas?"  They understand an ancient American Association of University Professors statement as saying as much.

The American concept of academic freedom is distinctive insofar as it covers not only research and teaching but also “extramural utterances”—statements beyond research and teaching, including Twitter and podcasts. The idea is that no professor gives up their First Amendment rights as a citizen when they take an academic position.

That's true, although the spirit of the doctrine is protecting the right to investigate, and follow the evidence no matter where it leads. You don't use your status as a scholar in one field to claim authority in some other field, or to make unscientific claims.

AAUP has consistently held that faculty should not be fired for extramural speech unless that speech calls into question a professor’s fitness to serve. Ordinarily, that speech has to bear directly on the faculty member’s field of study. The idea is that a historian who is a Holocaust denier is obviously unfit, whereas an electrical engineer who is a Holocaust denier is just a crank. This position makes perfect sense, though few people realize that it entails the unsettling corollary that professors enjoy greater protection for extramural speech when they have no idea what they’re talking about than for speech within the areas of their research and teaching.

That's only a problem if the people who are spouting off about their ideological hobbyhorses are calling attention to their academic credentials as they do so.  That's academic malpractice, and it might be bad manners.

One might use the term "freedom of speech" loosely as in the liberty to pop off about anything, any time, anywhere. That's not the same thing as the liberty to address a governing body in order to influence a particular policy.

We have good manners to serve as a constraint on free speech in the first sense, or perhaps enlightened self-restraint. It's probably not smart to go into a Harley bar and pour beer over the riders and say good things about rice-burners. We have rules of order to serve as a constraint on free speech in the second sense. No matter how good it might feel to yell "Believe all victims" when the legislature is debating tax policy or the siting of an airport, that really isn't convincing anyone not already convinced, or is it germane to the question before the house.

It's precisely the use of expertise in a field that bothers the writers.

When [Portland State's Bruce] Gilley compares BLM “criminals” to the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his First Amendment rights protect him. But that’s not the same thing as saying that his claims have the protection of academic freedom. He is not, after all, platforming as an ordinary citizen; he’s doing it, as he says in a tweet on June 16, 2020, “based on my knowledge of Mao’s politics.” This is critical. For here he is saying that his extramural commentary is manifestly an extension of what he considers his area of expertise—the history and politics of various regimes. He’s not staking his rights to this speech on the First Amendment, but on his claim to expertise as a scholar of political science.

Perhaps so, but that only strikes me as a big deal if Professor Gilley had gone on Tucker Carlson's show or the like, and even then, other comparative politics scholars could offer a compare-and-contrast on whether the summer of looted cities was the kind of revolutionary violence a Barrington Moore might seek to understand, and how that differs from state-sponsored public demonstrations a Communist dictator might organize.  The authors come close to that position.

But some ideas don’t deserve a hearing, and one of the primary roles of the university is to distinguish between those that do—and should continue to be explored and built upon—and those that should not be seriously entertained by any legitimate institution of higher education. Conflating free speech with academic freedom obscures this basic truth.

I suspect that the social causes of urban unrest fall into the universe of topics that "should continue to be explored," and that comparing and contrasting state-sanctioned unrest with emergent, if politically grounded unrest ought not be beyond serious entertainment.

On one side of the campus culture wars, we have people arguing from extremely tight priors and ruling some conditions C as out of bounds, perhaps with the best of intentions, but none-the-less, violating the rules of construction.  It does no more good to blame all sorts of ills on some -ism or -phobia than it did to lay them off on Original Sin.  Teach the controversies and consider other sets of C.

On the other side, we have people bringing in provocateurs simply to set the True Believers off.  That might demonstrate how tight the True Believers' priors are; it doesn't do much to open students' minds to the possibility that there are other C leading to the validity of P.

The authors' priors might be too tight to permit them to grant that possibility.  Their argument rests strongly on a premise of enduring, institutional white supremacy in the country and in the academy.  That's unfortunate, as the standard practices of scholarly inquiry are excellent tools at winkling those priors out.  Or perhaps we're seeing the consequences of high intellectual denials of coherent beliefs.

Universities are thus critical institutions in democratic countries because the work they perform—discriminating between opinion or propaganda on the one hand and reasoned argument on the other—inhibits the development of alternate realities rooted in power and special interests. Why, then, has it been so easy and tempting for everyone to treat academic freedom as a synonym for free speech? For two reasons, we suspect. One, “expertise,” some conception of which is integral to academic freedom, is in bad odor these days, for some good and some bad reasons. Two, the idea of “competence” pales next to the triumphant rhetoric of free speech—the idea that everyone has a right to speak their mind. According to [Yale Law's Robert] Post, while “it is not intelligible to believe that all ideas are equal,” Americans gravitate to free speech over the cognitive ideal embedded in academic freedom because “Americans are committed to the equality of persons,” and “the deep egalitarian dimension of the First Amendment resonates far more with this ethical value than with any cognitive ideal.”

Yes, if your experts suck, they ought be figures of fun.  And when competence is another social construction, and the intellectual stars have had sixty years or so to contend that constructions are arbitrary, does it come as any surprise that competence gets deconstructed?  "In practice, though, scholarly inquiry builds on previous inquiry, and there is at any time a box to be respected rather than mindlessly thought outside of.  Implicitly, there ought be limitations on what an academician is as a public intellectual."  That is, academic freedom comes with obligations.

STOP DESTROYING YOUR DISCIPLINE.

We noted the suicidal tendencies of the National Council of Teachers of English a week ago.  "Whether it's incoherent jargon or question-begging or potted political economy is left for the reader as an exercise. I wonder if your typical English teacher can even compare and contrast the vanguardist from the evolutionary perspective on what structures a better world."

Let's pass the baton to Mark Bauerlein, who knows a thing or two about teaching English, and has his own take on the word salad of that position paper.  "You got all that? It’s quite a mouthful, imparted with all the confidence of experts who know the ways of the world and do not fear breaking old habits and keeping up-to-date. Other points in the statement reiterate the world-is-changing motif. In the 21st century, communication is ever more oral and pictorial, the authors say. Kids, especially, express themselves in non-print ways."  There's material for a Friday short take there.  I recommend people read and understand the essay in full.  Professor Bauerlein suggests the word salad is being made with life-expired ingredients.

The assumption about skills needed in college and professional spaces doesn’t hold up, but NCTE holds it too tightly and pleasingly for evidence to shake it loose, no matter how solid that evidence is. NCTE people utter this claim as if it were a nugget of the discipline’s wisdom, and also proof of the utterer’s membership in the ranks. Such revolutionary talk comes up all the time in education circles, in fact, and has for at least two decades, since the Web 2.0 phase of the internet began.

Indeed, if you’ve heard these claims of “new literacies” a few times, you start thinking less about the import of them and more about the language in which they are expressed. After a while, you start to see an irony open up, a gap between the content of the words and the words themselves. We have a radical meaning clothed in banal terms, epochal dimensions offered in clichéd, conventional, pseudo-radical diction. In spite of the declamatory tone and avant-garde ethos, the words are altogether familiar. We’ve heard them many times before. There’s nothing new about them.

Yes, and perhaps it is the kind of familiarity that should breed disrespect, if not the sounding of the Viking horn and the end to the woke business as usual in education.  Let the disrespect begin by the calling of b.s.

Two words, however, stand out as unusual: “decenter” and “valorize.” They have a lot of responsibility in that paragraph, but laymen can’t quite apprehend them. Such words don’t come up in ordinary conversation, not even in professional domains. They have the aura of complexity, adding intellectual cachet to the recommendation and making the shift away from print seem sophisticated and disciplinary. That’s the point. “Decentering” and “valorization” sound like acts of expertise. Only a trained person knows how to carry them out adroitly. The terms suggest that only the virtuosi at NCTE know what must be done, and only they are astute enough to do it.

But anyone with long experience in literary theory knows otherwise. The unfortunate truth about this particular locution, which is supposed to denote our proper advance into the 21st century, is that it rests on holdovers from more than 50 years ago.

It takes a special ability to obfuscate effectively, and the people at that national council lack it.

The phony sophistication undermines the credibility of NCTE more soundly than does a debate over the status of print in a digital era. The style undoes NCTE more than the content (as does the mixed metaphor in the first sentence of the passage, “decenter . . . pinnacles,” along with the treatment of “media” in the last sentence as singular.) The real question is how these middling talents and pompous declaimers ever attained positions of authority within the field. What kind of decadence afflicts us when the pedagogues of print are the vandals of print instruction? How did the guardianship of books become the duty of people who aren’t terribly bookish?

Our humanistic institutions are in the hands of people whose humanitas is feeble. They’re proud of that fact, though. They believe it’s warranted by social conditions, and they’re ready to pass along their ineptitude to the pupils they’re paid to edify.

Defund them, turf them out, undermine them with mockery.

THE WASHINGTON POST CONFIRMS MY SUSPICIONS.

Trains in Belarus were bogged down the way Norfolk Southern often is in Indiana, and some of that might have been unofficial job actions by railway workers and hackers.  "I keep hearing of free agents hacking into Soviet era dispatching systems."  Liz Sly confirms.  "A clandestine network of railway workers, hackers and dissident security forces wreaked havoc on supply lines."

What's surprising is there's apparently no notion in Russia of dispatcher and train order operation.

The attacks were simple but effective, targeting the signal control cabinets essential to the functioning of the railways, members of the activist network said. For days on end, the movement of trains was paralyzed, forcing the Russians to attempt to resupply their troops by road and contributing to the snarl-up that stalled the infamous 40-mile military convoy north of Kyiv.

How much of the chaos can be attributed to the sabotage and how much to poor logistical planning by the Russians is hard to tell, especially as there is no independent media reporting from Belarus, said Emily Ferris, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. But without automated signaling, trains were forced to slow to a crawl and the number of them traveling on the tracks at any one time would have been severely restricted, she said.

“Given the Russian reliance on trains, I’m sure it contributed to some of the problems they had in the north. It would have slowed down their ability to move,” she said. “They couldn’t push further into Ukrainian territory and snarled their supply lines because they had to rely on trucks.”

Some of that reporting is fog of war. Presumably the Russian trains were not running on Ukrainian metals, and the military, pushing overland, would have to use tire and tread vehicles to push toward Kiew.  All the same, a dispatcher worth his borscht would have a plan based on talking trains past signals and fleeting the train movements, say, ten loaded trains to the southwest, then ten empties toward Mother Russia.

What might be more salient, however, is that pan-Russianism might be yet another hallucination with little validity outside Moscow.

Three main groups have been involved, representing railway workers, security force defectors and cyber specialists, said Lt. Col Alexander Azarov, a former security official living in Warsaw who heads the security force group called Bypol.

Railway employees sympathetic to the partisans have leaked details of Russian movements and the locations of key railway infrastructure to a group called the Community of Railway Workers, which shares them on Telegram channels. Supporters on the ground link up to carry out the attacks, but there is no formal chain of command, Azarov said.

“Our movement is not centralized,” he said. “It’s not like there’s a leader of the resistance. It’s horizontal, with dozens of groups working on the ground.”

Emergence, forsooth.  It's not play, though, sabotage during times of war can mean severe consequences.

EVENTUALLY THEY'LL MISS THE SENIOR NONCOMS?

I've been beating that drum for years.  "[T]he presence of a senior professor in an introductory course sends the right signal: the basics are too important to leave to novices. (Visualize a boot camp without lifer sergeants as drill instructors.)"  It's possible I suggested the same idea using different terminology before then, but the message is simple.  Beginning students deserve an encounter with a senior professor, someone who is properly a steward of the curriculum.

From time to time, Inside (the woke part of) Higher Ed picks up the message. "Marc Stein argues declines in tenure density constitute the greatest threat U.S. higher education has ever faced."  Professor Stein, an historian at San Francisco State, has to sound all the woke notes in his column.   The concept of "tenure density" has long been a thing.  One reason tenure at the highly regarded (or highly self-regarding) departments all of a sudden became harder to get, years ago,  is that many of the academy's stars were well connected to the various granting agencies and foundations, which meant a lot of the department's payroll was on outside money, and assistant deans that calculated the "tenure density" of the departments often found themselves in a position where only a genuinely high achieving scholar with lots of external funding could gain tenure.  A grant once in a while, or evidence of having sought funding, didn't cut it.

YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington sees a deeper challenge to life in Chicago than the continued suckitude of the Bears or the oh-so-fast disappearance of that home court advantage for the Bulls.  "Chicago cannot thrive without a safe and attractive public transportation system for all. Our economic, cultural and social survival depends on getting us where we need to be."  Although she has the means to get places without relying on the L, or the busses, that, like bananas, come in bunches, she yields nothing to your typical Central Electric Railfans' Association member in her devotion to the Transit Authority.

Now, my beloved CTA is in trouble. I watched in frustration as the COVID-19 pandemic plunged my CTA into an existential crisis. This indispensable public service suffered a steep decline in ridership as it lost the patronage of the work-from-homers and others who feared catching a bug along with a ride.

They abandoned the system to homeless and mentally ill people seeking shelter, bad-news hustlers and worst of all — the criminals committing a horrifying array of shootings, robberies and beatings.

Violent crime on CTA trains is up 17% so far this year, compared to the same period in 2021, according to Chicago Police Department data analyzed by ABC-7 Chicago.

I have other transit options, but other Chicagoans, especially low-income and working-class residents, do not. As the pandemic taught us, many of them are the “essential workers” who keep the city going. They should never ride in fear.

Read the column, dear reader, and search in vain for any assignment of responsibility.

Was it the corona pandemic, or the panicked overreaction of Illinois officials, that kept people from riding transit?

Was it the people who attempted to keep the trains rolling who "abandoned the system?"  Or was it some misguided ethnic solidarity that installed soft-on-crime Kim Foxx as county prosecutor?  How much responsibility does whatever coalition of "low-income and working-class residents" with lakefront liberals decided that having Lori Lightfoot and all the boxes checked was more important than, oh, competently governing the city?  It was, after all, the transit-dependent people who suffered most from the breakdown of civil authority going on two summers ago.

Does Ms Washington acknowledge any of that?  No.

Experts warn the pandemic could put urban transit systems into a “death spiral” sparked by declining ridership that triggers budget deficits, then leads to service cuts and fare hikes, which could trigger more drops in ridership.

Chicago cannot thrive without a safe and attractive public transportation system for all. Our economic, cultural and social survival depends on getting us where we need to be.

It wasn't the pandemic. The decline of Illinois has been going on for a long time.  There's no necessary dynamic that cities have to be crime-ridden pestholes.  That outcome is deliberate. Ms Washington and the rest of the editorial panel at the Sun-Times predictably carry water for the Combine and the Democrats.

They endorsed it.  They voted for it.  They continue to vote for it.  Let them marinate in it.

I'M IN A STROPPY MOOD.

Not, yet, this stroppy.

Regular people: Go woke, Go Broke

DeSantis and Florida Republicans: Go woke... **blows viking battle horn** and we shall burn your entire village to the ground and sing a song of victory so that any potential enemies in our future shall learn from your folly.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 22, 2022

I'm sure there will be more fireworks this week.

WE KNEW WE HAD BECOME A CREW.

It's a tale often told, beginning with a Cessna pilot verifying his ground speed, and aviator one-upsmanship continues faster and higher.

I was not aware, until recently, that the tale has become a sketch.

That is all.

WHY NOT SET UP A TRANSPORTATION TAX CREDIT?

My first encounter with a negative income tax was Wisconsin's homestead tax credit, in which a renter or a homeowner alike would pay less in state income taxes in some proportion of the property tax he paid.  In some circumstances, the homestead tax credit could exceed the income tax due, and the taxpayer would get a check from the state.  There is such a property tax credit in Illinois, which cannot exceed the amount of tax due.

The concept might have some value as a way of preserving the resource allocation properties of a congestion toll on the roads while making the toll less burdensome on people who make less money.

A new report by UCLA transportation experts outlines ways that California could implement congestion pricing while minimizing the financial burden on those residents.

The study suggests that if congesting pricing were enacted in California’s six largest urban areas, about 13% of households in those areas might be unduly burdened because of the combination of their travel habits and low incomes. But while tolls could create an equity problem, the report suggests that the revenue generated by tolls could ultimately solve that problem.

The idea is a lot like the property tax credit, if the taxpayer can verify both income and tolls paid. "The most promising solution, they write, would be to provide direct cash assistance to low-income residents from revenue collected by the tolls."

To the extent that highway authorities collect tolls using transponders mounted on cars, there are methods for the taxpayers to claim and the state revenue auditors to verify the credit that is due.

THE LOWERING OF HIGHER EDUCATION CONTINUES.

At the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, that's not how they spin it.  "A new tool kit that launches today aims to help college instructors revise their syllabi to include more supportive language and resources, in an effort to put students at ease and create a more welcoming learning environment."  The usual jargon with the usual obfuscations, of course.  There's no reason to think of first-generation students or returning adults or all the rest of the "nontraditional" rubric as somehow less well-prepared.  Unless, of course, you're slinging the woke buzzwords at Inside Higher Ed.  "The instructors were shown research from the past decade showing that establishing supportive learning environments is particularly important for structurally disadvantaged students, including Black, Latinx, first-generation and transfer students, as well as Pell Grant recipients. With that research in mind, the instructors were invited to revise their syllabi and come back in a week to share them."  It gets more cloying from there.

Whether adding even more verbiage helping students navigate the therapeutic bureaucracy to what once was a course outline will do any good remains to be seen.

YOU THOUGHT DRUG-SNIFFING DOGS WERE ANNOYING.

Once upon a time, there were coffee-sniffing Prussians.

Prussia had too many out of work soldiers. Frederick II hired 400 of them, and gave them the job of Kaffeeriecher or Kaffeeschnüffler (Coffee Sniffers). Their job ... to wander the streets of Berlin "sniffing' for the smell of roasting coffee! The soldiers wore special uniforms (I'm imagining golden coffee beans on the epaulettes!) and could go into any home where they suspected coffee roasting. The fines for roasting your own beans was stiff, and the sniffers were paid a quarter of the fines, so they were rather enthusiastic about their jobs ... and hated by the general population.

The particular political economy of German taxation had something to do with creating those special tax collectors.  Does it really require a Ph.D. in economics to grasp that steep tariffs on imported coffee and prohibitions on home-roasting will have unintended consequences.  Additionally, you know full well that having the tax collectors working on a percentage is, like the asset forfeitures that accompany those drug busts, not a good idea.

The story ends with cooler heads prevailing, and did you know there is a real Melitta behind those coffee filters?  Ja, sicher, a Melitta Bentz aus Dresden.

BUSINESS BEFORE PLEASURE.

Union Pacific postpones Big Boy tour to Northwest.

The trip to the Pacific Northwest via Northern California had been scheduled to begin June 26. The railroad said it would announce updated plans once service performance levels return to normal.

“We know many rail enthusiasts make travel plans and communities prepare to act as host, which is why we made this decision now,” Scott Moore, senior vice president-corporate relations, and chief administrative officer, said in an email to members of Union Pacific’s Steam Club. “We have a duty to continue our efforts to reduce supply chain congestion and provide customers the service they deserve; given the impact of a steam tour on our operations that focus must be our priority.”

During a quarterly earnings call with investors and analysts on Thursday, Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz said improving service “has our full and undivided attention” after a quarter that saw trip plan compliance for intermodal and carload traffic fall by 6%, while car velocity fell 5% [see “Union Pacific earnings improve despite congestion …,” Trains News Wire, April 21, 2022]. The railroad has also announced a move to decrease the number of privately owned cars operating on its system in an effort to address congestion [see “Union Pacific to begin metering traffic …,” News Wire, April 12, 2022].

Morale among transportation workers, whether on the rails, the roads, in the air, or at sea, is pretty low right now, and it wouldn't do for a planned or impromptu job action to manifest itself with a postponed or annulled steam trip.  In addition, that lineside business waiting for a delivery might not be full of enthusiastic spectators for a promotional trip, no matter how spectacular the head end is.

Union Pacific's statement.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Do you miss eating disorders yet? "When I was a teenager, the cool kids smoked cigarettes. Today they cut off their weiners [c.q.]."

Let us count the ways Militant Normals are calling attention to the mental disorders of progressivism.   Sane people weren’t buying it.  Life’s a bitch. Learn to live with risk.  Think for yourself.  "Government authority is undermined when people don’t trust the government."

We've been warning you.  "[T]he Gods of the Copybook Headings laughed bitterly and said: 'well, it’s time to go play again.'" The era of wishful thinking is over.  Reality comes.  "[I]n ideological totalitarianism, fallibility is not an option."  People are noticing the incompetence.  There can be no future with such people in charge.  The rot starts at the top.  "Biden knows that he inherited a stable, prosperous America and has nearly ruined it. "

The usual collection of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THE RAIN BARREL IS FULL AGAIN.

Just in time for Earth Day, there's deluge, blizzard, and bluster.

Valid 00Z Sat Apr 23 2022 - 00Z Mon Apr 25 2022

...Significant winter storm to impact portions of the Rockies and Northern Plains into Sunday...

...Severe thunderstorms expected over the Great Plains tonight and from the Upper Midwest to the Southern Plains on Saturday...

...Scattered instances of flash flooding across portions of the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley through Sunday...

...Damaging wind gusts and very dangerous fire-weather conditions are forecast throughout the Central/Southern High Plains and Southern Rockies this weekend...

I think we call this "spring."  The way the weather bureau configures these reports, the link will likely take you to different content later in the weekend.

It's just the usual story in Illinois.  There's been a drought since sometime last summer.  That might be ending with all the rain that's just fallen, although the timing is less than desirable for getting the spring plowing and planting in.

WE'RE STILL HERE.

That was my message in last year's Earth Day post, which concluded, "Charles Krauthammer might have been on to something, years ago, suggesting that contemporary environmentalists and primitive sun-worshippers might have had much in common in seeing bad weather or volcanic eruptions as evidence that humans had displeased the gods."

FAST FREIGHT, SIXTY YEARS AGO.

Union Pacific called attention to the performance of contemporary freight diesel locomotives with a visual.

Once upon a time, 4,410 cylinder horsepower looked like this moving freight at those speeds.

Philip R. Hastings, "All the implications of the Book of Revelations," Shelby, Ohio.

In the mid-1950s Trains editor David P. Morgan and photographer Philip R. Hastings documented the end of steam on the trunk line railroads in a series, "Steam in Indian Summer."  In many cases a transitory increase in traffic had the railroads dusting off or delaying the retirement of their steam locomotives rather than wait for the delivery of diesels, let alone issuing rush purchases for diesels whose permanent employ could not be assured once the surge passed.

Here, a New York Central L2 is making that 70 mph with dead freight behind.  The title of that month's article was "The Mohawk That Refused to Abdicate" on the basis of the illustrated performance, and a subsequent anthology of the "Indian Summer" stories sold under that title.  There's still at least one Mohawk in preservation, albeit not the star of the Shelby story.

HITCH UP THE HORSES LIKE IT'S 1825.

Food and beverage producers forced to curtail production due to delayed rail shipments.

The Sweetener Users Association, which wrote to the Surface Transportation Board on Wednesday, is the latest trade group to complain about poor rail service as the Class I systems face a shortage of crews and locomotives.

“Issues with switching have forced companies to reduce production in key product lines and shut down manufacturing facilities,” Richard Pasco, president of the Sweetener Users Association, wrote in his letter to the board.

Shippers and the nation’s largest food and beverage producers rely on railroads for bulk movements of sugar.

“Intermittent switches at the plants are not only causing it to take twice as long to get the bulk rail cars, but even when companies get them, they are not consistently switching them into the manufacturing plants,” Pasco wrote. “For example, a manufacturer may have 50 rail cars of sugar close to their facilities and still run out because the railroad is not switching them into the plants due to a lack of labor.”

The group also told the board its members are experiencing delayed shipments, increased dwell times, and bunched deliveries of carloads.

“Actual and threatened embargoes at customer destinations routinely hinder shipping cars,” Pasco wrote.

It's not just your sugary drinks, either. "In the past few weeks the STB also has received complaints from shippers of ethanol and grain and feed." Perhaps Nancy Bilyeau, Juliet Schor, and Matt Yglesias see in these supply challenges an opportunity to fast and do penance like those medieval peasants did.  I see no evidence they're making horses available to help get the commodities to the factories.

LET'S ALL EAT LIKE IT'S 1222.

It seems like no matter how many times I note the blessings of liberty, summarized, for instance, as "Yes, we are all underemployed compared to our ancestors, and people put a lot of money into steam traction engines for the sociability of it, not because they are the most effective way to help God give us our daily bread," there's always somebody who gets nostalgic for the thirteenth century.

Incredible as it may sound, the average modern American puts in longer hours at his or her work than the average medieval peasant.

While many people feel pressure to work long hours, even the hardest-hit victims of the “gigs economy” might assume that at least they don’t work as hard as a medieval peasant.

But that assumption would be wrong.

Juliet Schor, a Professor of Sociology at Boston College, explained in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, that the average American in 1987 was working about 1,949 hours annually, while an adult male peasant in 13th-century England racked up approximately 1,620 hours yearly.

If you're going to measure inputs, maybe you ought also look at outputs, and your tenure-tracker, or partner-tracker, or startup enthusiasts sees a lot more by way of secular reward than that thirteenth century serf did.  There are lots of ways the contemporary labor supply curve might bend backwards, and the way information technologies blur the boundaries between work and leisure (on the one hand, keeping current with the late night electronic mail, on the other hand, checking the brackets during what is notionally the work day) it's likely still true that we're underemployed compared with our distant ancestors.  Even if there was ample time, once the harvest was in, and winter came, to devote to devotions and to fasting.  "Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, no doubt, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off."  Yes, and pray the rats didn't get to the last of the root crops in the cellar before the new planting season.

I'll let Twitchy's Sam Janney bring the high heat.

If Leftists think Medieval peasants had it better way back then, by all means, they should start living that way.

They can give up their phones, any sort of conditioned air, heat, doctors, electricity, modern-day food, clean water, etc. and live their lives just like Medieval peasants did. Hey, if capitalism is such a horrible thing then they really should stop benefitting from it.

There’s a reason ‘old age’ for a Medieval peasant was around 30.

But hey, stupid narratives are the in thing on Twitter.

That post has a few illustrations, which reinforce one of my favorites.

IT'S NOT JUST PEOPLE SEEKING SEX IN BARS.

Killing barroom social networks kills innovation.  Those blue-collar aristocrats in Milwaukee probably talked a lot of shop over those schnapps.  Prohibition did its damage, as, more recently, the corona tyranny did.

Saloons were where the ideas that would define America were first hashed out, presumably via the kind of rowdy, unstructured conversation that tends to happen in bars. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that America was imagined, organized, and eventually built over booze consumed in saloons. Without saloons, America—or at least America as we know it—might not exist.

In the century and a half after the founding, saloons continued to be a key social institution, places of business, leisure, and community for many men—until Prohibition wiped them out, destroying in one fell stroke the cultural and economic infrastructure they had long provided.

The article continues,

The cost to innovation was just one of many associated with Prohibition, and it took nearly a century, and some unusually clever data gathering, to pin it down. That in turn provides a strong hint that the costs and consequences of the current pandemic are broader and deeper than we can currently measure or see. They may well take years to fully discover. To begin to understand them, we first have to understand America's long love affair with saloons.

In the tavern, the ideas also have sex.

The central idea of the saloon was that it was a productive social space—a hangout and a refuge, but also, in the days before Prohibition, a bank and a place to make deals, find work, and organize political campaigns. Yes, there were table games and drinks, but there were also informal or semiformal social functions: Saloonkeepers cashed checks and made loans, and many saloons catered to particular occupations.

No, seriously.

There was no such thing as Twitter or talk radio or Wikipedia. College education was a luxury for a tiny fraction of the population. Saloons were where ordinary men went to encounter and engage with ideas.

With prohibition, those third places, and the idea sharing that came with them, went away.

In the paper "Bar Talk: Informal Social Interactions, Alcohol Prohibition, and Invention," University of Maryland economist Michael Andrews looks at data about propensity to restrict alcohol around the time of Prohibition, comparing counties that expressed a clear desire to stay wet with counties that had shown a predisposition to go dry. He finds that "the imposition of Prohibition caused patenting to drop by 8–18% in counties that wanted to stay wet relative to consistently dry counties in the same state."

Andrews rules out most plausible alternative explanations for the drop in innovation, using statistical analysis to demonstrate that the drop in new patents can't be explained by, say, the era's general economic downturn or changing patterns in migration. He also finds that the decline wasn't a result of decreased alcohol consumption. Drinking may or may not aid in creativity—the research on that is mixed—but it was something else that dampened innovation during Prohibition.

Repeat inventors in counties affected by Prohibition, Andrews finds, collaborated less often with the people they had collaborated with prior to Prohibition. Even small changes in collaboration can have significant effects: Andrews points to a modern study that found researchers who lose a star collaborator to an unexpected death reduce their output by about 8 percent. And Prohibition disrupted collaborations all across the country.

Andrews attributes most of the drop in patent applications to the loss of "informal interactions"—the sort of unplanned, unstructured conversations that often happen at bars over drinks. He notes that at the time, America's patent applications "tended to come not from an aristocratic elite, but from skilled workers and craftsmen, the same types of individuals likely to meet in their local saloon."

The same sort of people who saw only the good in closing the bars are still around, seeing only the good in preventing human interaction, all in the name of public health.

How many times did we hear that staying home for a brief time was a small price to pay for saving some number of lives, that school closures represented no threat to student psyches or learning progress, that masks were an easy, low-cost measure, really just a form of basic politeness?

These responses were predicated on the notion that informal social interactions have little or no value, and thus that disrupting them has minimal costs. That wasn't true of the connections that happened in saloons before Prohibition, and it's not true now. Two years into the pandemic, it's already clear that the costs of COVID-era disruptions have been considerable. And as with Prohibition, we may not know the true toll for many years to come.

Indeed not. The research opportunities are there, for those who would pursue them.