A STOPPED CLOCK IS ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG.

Once upon a time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was, well, a publication written by atomic scientists.  They understood that in nuclear fission they had released great destructive power, as well as, if properly managed, an energy source of great potential.  To call attention to the consequences of misusing the destructive power, in 1947 their bulletin introduced the notorious Doomsday Clock.  "The scientists created the clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the Earth."  After the Soviet Union closed up shop, the people who set the clock turned it back to a quarter before midnight.  (And the self-styled progressives who always made "turning the clock back" into a pejorative wet themselves, but I digress.)  The problem, though, with setting the clock in such a way as to suggest the Threat Level is Way Down, is that people will go about their lives without being afraid, and that way lies organizational extinction.  Thus, in the same way that the Southern Poverty Law Center no longer has anything to do with Southern Poverty, and the March of Dimes shifted focus from a polio vaccine to prenatal health generally, the people who set the clock set their sights on new ways to frighten people and keep the fundraising going.

THE PATH TO MILWAUKEE GOES THROUGH SPARTANBURG.

The Republican presidential competition is down to two hopefuls, former president Donald Trump, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.  The next state primary will be in South Carolina, and voters are considering their options.

On paper, South Carolina offers the broad Republican coalition Haley has sought. It has a larger presidential primary electorate than other early nominating states; turnout was 740,000 in 2016 — almost 200,000 more than Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada combined. South Carolina has a large presence of every Republican faction: evangelicals and social conservatives; anti-tax Tea Party activists; national security hawks; business-minded traditionalists.

It's going to be a hard sell all the same.

“She has been the most articulate candidate in this campaign,” Ralph Carter, a Southern Baptist pastor in Greer, said before a rally outside Greenville.

Carter backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. He said he knew “both times” that Trump did not reflect his personal values, but Carter said he wanted a Republican administration. The Jan. 6 insurrection, he said, was a breaking point. Carter declined to speculate what he would do this November if Trump is nominated again; he said Haley offers Republicans the obvious solution to avoid that choice.

Mr Trump has a large, loyal base, many of whom support him because they perceive his legal troubles as more machinations by the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment to drive him out of national politics and deter anyone else with similar views from even trying.  That's not how to assemble a winning coalition.

SHOULDN'T FORECAST ERRORS BE POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE?

Extrapolation models built to push policies, whether with respect to climate or to contagion, are useless.  How much more evidence must John Hinderaker offer before advocates of extrapolation models shut up?

It should not need to be said that a model is not evidence of anything. A model is a hypothesis. Like any scientific hypothesis, it is confirmed or refuted by observation. A model that is refuted by observation is worthless. And yet, these models, which have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, are the basis for enormously destructive policies that have been adopted across much of the western world.

Someone pointed out with respect to these data–I would credit him, but I can’t now find the reference–that if it were simply a matter of mathematical errors or inconsistencies, one would expect some models to err on the “hot side” and others on the “cold side” of actual observations. But that isn’t the case: all of the models run hot. That suggest that global warming alarmism is a political, not a scientific, movement.

It is, because pushing frightening things, whether it's body odor, a lack of sex appeal, or The End of The World As We Know It, pays off, until it doesn't.  Perhaps after fifty to sixty years of this sort of doomsaying, while the Worst Case Scenarios of a quarter century ago have not transpired, enough of us have accumulated sufficient evidence to undermine the doomsayers with mockery.

THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION MIGHT OBJECT.

The Illinois State Police have a new suggestion for the Midwest's worst drivers.  “Road Rage. Don’t Engage.”

The ISP’s campaign will include educating the public on the signs of road rage and sharing tips on how to prevent a situation. Additionally, promotional materials will appear on billboards and radio ads and are encouraged to be posted on local departments’ social media.

One graphic from the promotional kit shows a handgun in a driver’s passenger seat with the caption, “Road rage is more dangerous than you think.”

The tagline appears tailor-made for those overhead message signs on the Interstates. Good thing, I suppose, that the Federal guidelines against witticisms on those signs is advisory only.

MERDE, DAS IST EIN HAUFEN MIST!

From the earliest days of Cold Spring Shops, we have called attention to the dubious political economy of farm subsidies.  "It is amusing to hear U.S. trade officials complaining about the dumping behavior of other countries whilst tolerating the export subsidies for grains, sugar, cotton, and tobacco (yes.) I am still waiting for the opportunity to buy a Lands' End button-down made in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq from cotton grown in one of those countries, but my government won't let me."  That post also called attention to the sponsored research hustle.  (There is a line, somewhere, between externally funded pure research and externally funded advocacy.)  Twenty years on and the follies are still with us.

Today, though, let us focus on the European farmers' protests, which have spread (literally, manure!) beyond Germany.

WHAT WAS I SAYING ABOUT THOSE OVERSIZED BUNDLES?

Joe "Sanity Clause" Klein (is he the Primary Colors guy of years ago?) notes,  "Trump exhilarates his Republican base. Biden exasperates his Democrats."  He doesn't even have to mention the open borders or the neglect of East Palestine or the casual insulting of voters.

REALITY IS SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE.

The Conservative Woman gives a guy, Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, a forum for "Sexual freedom and the collapse of civilisation" to cite nearly century-old research.

Step forward J D Unwin, an ethnologist and social anthropologist at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, who a century ago painstakingly studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilisations through 5,000 years of history. Unwin described his 600+ page book Sex and Culture as a ‘summary’ of his decades of research; a full disclosure would require seven volumes.

Although his study was published nearly 90 years ago, in 1934, it is still relevant. Robert P George of Princeton, one of conservative Christianity’s leading intellectuals, uses Unwin in his teaching and argues that no one since has matched him in the thoroughness of his study of civilisations. Unwin had no axe to grind; he was not a believer and his work reads like that of a scientific rationalist who has nothing positive to say about Christianity.

Unwin studied the art, literature, politics, science, architecture, engineering and other cultural activities as well as the social structures of the 86 societies. He was looking for the effect they had on the social energy, stability and cohesion of the group, as well as its ability to compete with and defend itself against rival civilisations. He concluded that there is a positive correlation between the level of cultural achievement and survivability of a society and the level of sexual restraint expected within that society.

When a society practised sexual restraint it flourished and all aspects of cultural life prospered. However, as societies develop and become prosperous they become increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result they lose cohesion, impetus and purpose. This accelerates social entropy and the reduction of its creative energy. Unwin concludes, ‘Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.’

Professor Unwin might have used "sexual restraint" as a proxy for "bourgeois norms" more generally, the phenomenon he focuses on is precisely what Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings warned of, and he compiled that research before contraceptive medicines emerged.

THE LAND BRIDGES GET MORE OF A WORKOUT.

It's not enough that Iranian proxies and African pirates are scaring shippers away from Suez, which makes for intermodal business on Eurasian railways.  Now, the rains aren't coming in Central America, and transloading in Panama has picked up.

In an advisory to its customers, shipping giant Maersk said it will use trains to avoid the drought-plagued Panama Canal for some of its container traffic.

The Canal Authority recently reduced the number and weight of vessels that can pass through the canal based on current and projected water levels in Gatun Lake, the rainfall-fed principal reservoir that floats ships through the canal’s lock system, Maersk said. That means some containers will be transported across the isthmus by the Panama Canal Railway.

The railroad has long had that capability, in order to cater to container ships too large to transit the canal.  The canal has since been widened, and although the new locks conserve water relative to the original, still operating locks, a transit still uses a lot of water.  David McCullough describes the water requirements for one transit of the original, some 52 million gallons of water, as "a day's water use for a major city."  All that fresh water goes to the oceans.

There were good reasons to build the canal in the form it took.  Because of differences in tides at sea level, and the presence of a backbone ridge defining a continental divide, a sea-level canal was impracticable, and as laid out, the canal replaced the Rio Grande from the Pacific Ocean at Panama City to the continental divide, with the Gaillard Cut at the ridge.  The builders dammed the Chagres River to create Gatun Lake, and even that proved inadequate to store water, with an additional reservoir, Madden Lake, completed in 1935.  As the main channel transits Gatun Lake, there are two challenges to canal operation: maintaining that pressure head for the locks, and keeping the channel deep enough for those larger ships.

Look for container traffic diversion to the other land bridges, including the North American railroads serving Mexico, the States, and Canada.

THE POLITICAL BUNDLES ARE TOO DARNED BIG.

What better way to demonstrate that than to bundle two political books from authors with differing perspectives as Book Reviews N^o. 2 and N^o. 3?

There are plenty of books who have argued that one of the major parties is in the position of developing a lasting presidential, and perhaps governing, majority.  There was Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority, years ago, and he, after events overtook his analysis, filled the bookstores with volumes explaining why the correlation of forces was not favorable.  Never mind, as late as 2004, there were Republican court intellectuals suggesting that a coalition of compassionate conservatives and security moms could coalesce as a majority.  Oops.

Democratic strategists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira offered a nod to Mr Phillips with their The Emerging Democratic Majority, only when that failed to materialize they had the opportunity to wrote Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes), and that pretty well suggests where their argument will go.  Patrick Ruffini, who argues with but mostly votes for Republicans covered similar ground in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  (Right now, dear reader, Amazon is offering a bundle including these two books, and the authors have filed mutually complimentary reviews!)

The fault lines within the major parties have been visible for a long time, perhaps beginning when the industrialized countries devastated after the War started to recover, while the United States looked strong enough to do anything (Interstate highways!  Voyage to the Moon!  Win in Vietnam!  Abolish poverty!), and it was bye, bye, Ms American Pie, and she took the Victory Dividend with her.

Welcome to the reality check.  "I'm a big fan of separation of powers, in part because I'm not persuaded elections, no matter what rules determine the winners, are useful for revelation of preferences, particularly among large policy bundles being voted on by large electorates."

EMBRACING EXCELLENCE.

Milwaukee sports pundit Brandon Sneide hails the development of a winning culture in Green Bay.

A season, that left many filled with joy, excitement, and surprise, ended in such an abrupt way, that many fans, me included, felt sad, angry, and disappointed.

There’s no doubt, that 2023 was an odd year – many ups, downs, twists, and turns.

Expectations were set low, and, let’s be honest, until Thanksgiving, this team looked dead in the water, until they clearly began to swim again.

Fast forward to this week, and the now sad, angry, and disappointment is met with higher expectations, and on Wednesday, head coach Matt Lafleur made sure to make a statement.

Goodbye, defensive coordinator Joe Barry.

Goodbye strength and conditioning coach, Chris Gizzi, and hello kicking competition already with the signing of a new kicker less than a week after rookie Anders Carlson missed a key try in the team’s three-point defeat.

Many have said LaFleur has always been unable to make the big decisions, that he’s been unable to make bold moves after letdown after letdown, but these are issues that have plagued his teams, and instead of preaching for “continuity,” instead of standing pat, he decided to do something about it and put his foot down to let his young team he means business going forward.

It may seem like an easy choice, but Barry was still under contract with the organization. Players seemed to want to play for “JB”, but LaFleur saw the outcome on the field, he knew it was under-performing, and he decided to make a move knowing this team could be something special in the years to come.

The message is simple – You don’t perform, you don’t belong here. It’s a strong message to the league’s youngest team.

Yes, and it's familiar.  Here is Vince Lombardi, during training camp in July of 1967, as chronicled by guard Jerry Kramer in Instant Replay. "Take an education, but don't dwell on it.  Don't let it affect your play.  You will drop passes.  You will make mistakes.  But not very many if you want to play for the Green Bay Packers."

THE OPERATION TITLE IS INAUSPICIOUS.

Illinois National Guard troops are being called up to ship out to the Middle East in the wake of that drone attack on a base in Jordan that killed three of their comrades from Georgia.

In a press release Monday, the Defense Department said Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Georgia; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Georgia and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Georgia, died Jan. 28, 2024, in Jordan. The attack occurred when "a one-way unmanned aerial system (OWUAS) impacted their container housing units," the Pentagon said.

The operation is SPARTAN SHIELD.  Spartan mothers supposedly advised their sons, "Come back with your shield or on it."  With the current crew advising National Command Authority, there are likely to be more of our neighbors coming back on their shields.  "Biden weighs high-stakes response to Iran after US troops killed in Jordan."

“We do not seek another war. We do not seek to escalate. But we will absolutely do what is required to protect ourselves … and to respond appropriately to these attacks,” national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Monday.

Biden has pledged to respond to the latest attacks in a “time and manner of our choosing.”

The president met Monday with members of his national security team, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who returned to the Pentagon for the first time since undergoing surgery for prostate cancer.

Kirby emphasized that the U.S. is not looking for a war with Iran, but when asked if Biden is considering a strike inside the country, he would not say whether it was on the table.

“This attack over the weekend was escalatory, make no mistake about it. And it requires a response, make no mistake about that,” he said. “I will not get ahead of the president’s decisionmaking.”

American troops have come under fire from Iranian-backed groups more than 160 times since late October.

The White House has in recent weeks launched precision strikes targeting Iranian-backed militia targets and struck back against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen after the rebel group targeted commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

But the death of U.S. troops will increase the stakes for Biden, particularly among Republican defense hawks in Congress who are already calling for retaliation, including inside Iran.

Dither, dither, dither.  "Time and manner of our choosing" is classic saber-rattling.  Who was it said "rattling a saber makes noise, drawing it doesn't have to."

YOU'LL GET BETTER ROADS WHEN YOU GET BETTER DRIVERS.

The relatively new mayor of Milwaukee seeks citizen participation to reduce the pedestrian carnage.  "Milwaukee wants you to help create a plan to eliminate traffic deaths."  I'm being snarky because the call for participation starts in the wrong place.

Jessica Wineberg was hired to lead that effort in the summer of 2023. Her first task is developing a Vision Zero Action Plan. Wineberg says perhaps the highest hurdle will be changing behaviors.

"Hopefully we can have some sort of cultural change where following the speed limit and yielding to pedestrians becomes the norm again," she said, reflecting on the task ahead. "And to do that we'll have to make a lot of policy changes and put a lot of time and effort in. But I just hope everyone knows — by you, yourself driving the speed limit and not being distracted and yielding to pedestrians — you are part of changing what's normal and what's acceptable."

It's true that there's carnage like a Waukesha Christmas parade massacre every summer weekend in town.  And look who turns up in that post, and what she says.

Note, above, that quick release of bad drivers doesn't strike the locals as a blow for social justice.  Dive deeper into those statistics, dear reader, and you might find senior citizen pedestrians, or moms crossing the street with their kids on a walk light, or prime-age adults who happened to be in the wrong place when a speeding motorist disregarded the signals.  "Jessica Wineberg, who is Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed and founder of MilWALKee Walks, says one of the biggest issues is getting drivers to yield to pedestrians. 'Often, pedestrians are hit in crosswalks following traffic lights,' said Wineberg. 'It’s very rare the pedestrian made the critical error.'" That is, there might be more at work than the wrong visual cues the stroad design gives drivers.  Although the Urban Milwaukee post makes all the proper nods to limited-access highway design in thickly settled areas, some of the crash investigations in Milwaukee suggest there are reckless drivers even where the visual cues are missing.

That's right, I called attention to the stroad environment in the neighborhoods where the carnage continues.  Search that report in vain for any evidence that the visual cues matter.

"We do know overall that crashes in the city, especially those with deadly or serious outcomes, really impact certain neighborhoods the most," said Wineberg. "So we are focusing our outreach efforts in those neighborhoods. That's part of why our meetings are where they are because those are communities that really feel the burden of this issue and we want to hear their voices."

I'm hoping the residents will have some say in how the traffic is tamed.  I also hope someone will bring up the importance of traffic taming measures, which might have more success in changing behavior than efforts to change the culture.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

That's sports.  "Putting yourself in position only counts for so much."  What is the sour mood of Bear fans, Aaron?  "Do you know what’s not quite as upbeat and peppy as a camera shot of Taylor Swift dancing and singing in a suite during a playoff game?"  A “rebuilding” year turned into a postseason run.  This team is built to last.  This still seems like the beginning of something significant.

Then there's the Jarrett regency.  "Mayorkas’ superpower is the sin of omission. In this he is rather like an Ottoman eunuch hatched by Barack Obama."  Buckle in.  "The haughtiness of Washington grandees is just like that of the French nobles before the Revolution.  I hope Americans can see this, can’t they?"

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

PREACH PEACE IN YOUR OWN CONGREGATION FIRST?

Common Dreams contributor Afsheen Shamsi asks, "What Will It Take To Stop Hatred Towards Muslims?"  She continues, "Muslims are loving, peaceful people. Our holy book, the Quran, explicitly states that taking a life is the same as killing all of humanity, and saving a life is the same as saving all of humanity."

MEDIOCRITY IS A CHOICE.

Northern Star sports editor Lucas Didier wants more from the Lady Huskies.  "NIU women’s basketball has become the face of mediocrity."  There's not a lot else going on right in Northern Illinois intercollegiate athletics these days, and the sometimes promising basketballers ... aren't.  "The Huskies have capitalized on the cushy games in their schedule, going 8-2 against teams with losing records, but they are now 1-7 against teams who are currently .500 or better, with their win over Detroit Mercy standing alone in the category."

AVOIDING GOOD HOPE AND THE ROARING FORTIES.

The Suez Canal provided a water alternative to the very challenging Europe to India or China course envisioned in that title.  There are rail options now, in some instances paralleling the old Silk Road.

AN INADVERTENT CASE FOR LIMITING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT?

Northern Star columnist Kahlil Kambui, in "America needs a multi-party system," sees the flaw in voting, but probably not the implications.

America’s two-party system is flawed and needs to change. The current system offers mediocre candidates who don’t represent America. A multi-party system is the necessary fix for underrepresentation and polarization.

In the U.S., the two-party system is becoming less popular as Americans grow tired of it. In fact, in 2023, 37% of Americans wished there was a multi-party system, according to the Pew Research Center.

The U.S. deserves a selection of leaders that represent their ideals instead of having to choose between two candidates who don’t properly represent them. A multi-party system could help all Americans feel represented in every aspect of government from Congress to local office, bringing the political diversity and representation we need.

That's a student columnist in a student newspaper, and let us encourage him to discover the political aggregation problem inherent in any election.  Whether it's the dog-catcher, the school superintendent, a selectman, delegate to the legislature, governor, or president, we're limited to people running on a manifesto that bundles a whole bunch of stuff, and if we want some border enforcement to go with our abortions, or some passenger trains to go with our tax cuts, we're in trouble.

FIRE YOUR GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES.

George Mason economist Veronique de Rugy reminds readers that spending your way to prosperity is a fool's errand.

In a thrilling address at the World Economic Forum, Javier Milei, President of Argentina, presented a robust defense of capitalism and a critical examination of all forms of collectivism. His speech, rich in historical context and economic analysis, offers some vital lessons that are particularly relevant for today's globalized economy. Sadly, these lessons have long been ignored by American politicians on the right and left, whether in Washington or on the campaign trail.

Milei began with a stark warning about the dangers of collectivist policies based on Argentina's own, sometimes sad, history. Once a beacon of prosperity under a capitalist framework, Argentina's shift toward collectivism over the past century caused its prosperity to plummet from a leading global position to a much lower rank. Its story illustrates how losing sight of free-market principles can result in economic stagnation or even absolute poverty.

This point is crucial. Milei reminds us that no matter how noble the intentions are behind collectivist policies, whether it's fighting climate change, obtaining justice for all, or enhancing national security -- and whether they are pushed, as Milei says, by "communist fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists" -- attempting to solve problems in this way harms the very people who are meant to be helped.

Things that sound good in theory don't necessarily stand up in theory, and practice does not make perfect.

NO DEFENSE, NO CHAMPIONSHIPS.

There's accountability in Wisconsin.  Last summer, the Milwaukee Bucks replaced head coach Mike Budenholzer, who got his team to a championship for the first time in fifty years, with Toronto assistant Adrian Griffin.  "The Bucks, however, are in a different place than the Packers when it comes to underachieving in the playoffs.  There is still a lot of second-guessing about whether that team wasted a quarter century of quarterback talent with two Super Bowl wins in three appearances, and we'll see whether a coaching change at the Bucks produces another title or two, or provokes a different sort of second-guessing."

THE INTERSECTIONAL CATECHISM.

I don't have a lot of respect for what passes for diversity training these days.

No, those bureaucracies have to justify their existence, and their catechism, excuse me, their priors like those of the Holy Inquisition, insure that there will always be demons to exorcise.  "Catholic university teaches 'transphobia' and 'fatphobia' are products of racism perpetuated through religion."  Am I supposed to be grateful that "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" is not a constraint on the curriculum, or troubled that the priors structuring the workshop are tighter than stretch pants on Hillary Clinton's tush?

I titled that post "Make-Work for Failed Scholars."  There's nothing in Jonathan Turley's recent take-down of Diversity Catechism at Wisconsin Law to make me change my mind.

This training is part of the ABA Standard 303’s requirement for all law schools and was presented by consultant Debra Leigh, Vice President for Cultural fluency, equity, & inclusion at St. Cloud Technical & Community College.

The controversy was featured on a couple of conservative sites such as College Fix  after law students complained about the first-year law student training. Leigh has long been controversial for her views, including that those who claim to be “colorblind” are racist.

The required reading list for student “Re-Orientation” includes instruction on indications of “white guilt, denial or defensiveness.” It then explains how “People of color, as a social group, do not have the societal, institutional power to oppress white people as a group. An individual person of color abusing a white person – while clearly wrong, (no person should be insulted, hurt, etc.) is acting out a personal racial prejudice, not racism.”

Thus, people who have accused figures like Leigh of being racist in her own writings are categorically wrong and racist themselves. No matter what Leigh says about white people, she cannot be racist.

The explanation in the material is self-serving and shallow.  The idea that racism is premised on the ability to yield power is not accepted by many, if not most, citizens. Racism is a matter of prejudice, not power. It is racism whether it is in a country, state, or city dominated politically by whites or racial minorities. It is an expression of ignorance and hate that uses the racial identity of others as the basis for claiming inferior or dangerous qualities.

The site also identified other controversial claims, including how seeking to learn about racism can be racist. Leigh explains that “I want to stop acting like a racist, so please tell me when I do something you think is racist,” is a “common racist [attitude]” or behavior.

She is quoted as adding “While it is vitally important for white anti-racists to work with other white people, this detour again results in white people controlling the direction and focus of anti-racist work.”

The controversy could not come at a worse time for the university, which recently agreed (after considerable debate and pushback) to cut down on its diversity-related materials in exchange for $800 million in funding from the state.

I suspect that Wisconsin Law are not engaging in subtle trolling here, demonstrating the folly of a rule by complying with it, although bringing in a deanlet from St. Cloud Tech to work from such "self-serving and shallow material" sure looks like keeping failed scholars in work, doesn't it?  And yes, the facilitator is working from priors that are as tight as Hillary's stretch pants.

HOW THE NINERS ACCUMULATED THE SMALL ADVANTAGES.

Packer pundit Zach Kruse counts fifteen ways.

The Green Bay Packers had the rusty and — on this night — mostly unremarkable San Francisco 49ers on the ropes in Saturday’s NFC Divisional Round, but another deluge of missed opportunities and blown chances, from the team’s opening drive to the last, opened the door for a heartbreaking defeat — and the top-seeded 49ers gleefully took up the Packers’ on their offer, escaping what could have been a historic win for Matt LaFleur’s team.

The taste of defeat was a familiar one. This recipe for a devastating playoff loss was one that the Packers — under three different quarterbacks over three decades — have cooked up on multiple occasions. On Saturday, the Packers let a chance to go to the NFC Championship Game melt away on a rainy Santa Clara evening, the bedrock of victory eroded slowly but steadily with the falling force of every missed opportunity.

“We fully believed and fully expected to win this game,” LaFleur said. “We had plenty of opportunities to put the game out of reach and unfortunately just didn’t do enough. It’s never just one play.”

A loss like Saturday’s in Santa Clara never comes down to just one play. But when one team — especially a team pegged as a 10-point underdog on the road — blows so many repeated chances to win a football game, each individual missed opportunity becomes magnified in significance.

“There was a lot of plays out there if one play goes different, we probably have a different result right now,” LaFleur said.

As a chess author years ago asked, "How often does the inexperienced player establish a strong position against a Grandmaster, and how often does the Grandmaster go on to win?" In chess, yes, it's possible for the Grandmaster to sucker the inexperienced player into overextending himself, and then comes the end game. For the Packers, though, the Niners didn't sucker them into the red zone three times in the first half, with a total of six points to show for it.

That article notes a number of defensive breakdowns as well.  As the season began, we noted, "The onus might be on the defensive coordinator this season."  Packer Nation had been carping about the team's defense all season (thus my "much maligned" when the prospect of playing an eighteenth game first arose) and today the Packers fired defensive coordinator Joe Barry.  The conversation about how to put together and coach a defensive platoon comprising lots of high draft choices promises to be more edifying than the ongoing presidential election.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

Your tax dollars at work.  "Feds are banning humorous electronic messages on highways."  Predictably, it takes an army of bureaucrats to get the process right.

The Federal Highway Administration recently released an updated 1,100-page manual that spells out how signs and other traffic control devices are regulated. In it, the agency strongly recommends against overhead electronic signs with obscure meanings, references to pop culture or those intended to be funny.

Rather, signs should be “simple, direct, brief, legible and clear,” when relaying important information like warning drivers of crashes overhead, adverse weather conditions and traffic delays, the agency said. Seatbelt reminders and warnings about the dangers of speeding or driving impaired are allowed.

Never mind that amusing signs might have an effect on reducing road rage.

SLOW DOWN, PA!
SAKES ALIVE
MA MISSED SIGNS
FOUR
AND FIVE!

No, they've got to be boring.  "Just days before Christmas, Grundy County, which is southwest of Chicago, put up two digital signs along Interstate 55 to deter buses from stopping in the fairly rural area."  As if those warnings, whether amusingly worded (and Illinois have some creatives creating the copy) or not won't raise the blood pressure of Normals.

AMERICANS DESERVE SO MUCH BETTER.

Spiked contributor Sean Collins weighs in on that Biden v. Trump rematch, and he's not pleased.  "As the first few days of 2024 have already shown, a Biden-vs-Trump rematch will be unedifying and uninspiring. It won’t be ‘democracy’ on the ballot, as Biden claims; it will just be two well-past-their-prime incompetents shouting about events from three years ago."

There might be some purchase to what the Jarrett regency is doing.

It’s desperate stuff from Biden’s team. The attempt to present Biden as the great defender of democracy might be a little more convincing if his Justice Department wasn’t trying to put Trump, his likely presidential opponent, in jail. And while Biden might claim that Trump has been trying to ‘deny your right to vote’, his fellow Democrats in other US states have been trying to remove Trump from the ballot. Jailing your opponent and removing him from ballots sounds awfully autocratic to me, but what do I know.

It’s remarkable that the ‘Trump is Hitler’ strategy is the best that Biden’s team can come up with. Here we are, three years into his presidency, and his re-election message is all about events that happened before he entered the White House. Biden’s campaign team has clearly decided that his supposed achievements – such as Bidenomics and green investments – will have little purchase with voters.

This is weak, negative campaigning. And yet there is method to Biden’s apparent madness. Demonising Trump and his supporters, as Biden did in a manic speech delivered against a blood-red backdrop in Philadelphia in 2022, was a big factor (along with the abortion issue) in rallying Democrat support and winning over independents in that year’s Midterms. Biden’s campaign team clearly hopes that a repeat of this approach will bear fruit again.

They're still running on abortion, but with the geographic sorting that has been going on, stories of a few distressed women living in states with strict abortion restrictions might have less purchase, particularly if the distressed women are able to go to the less restrictive states.

Beyond that, the administration's messaging is incoherent.  One day, Trump is a fascist who will be more effective than Hitler's government ever was (yes, including waging the war and conducting the Final Solution.)  The next day, he's an incompetent who talked a lot about infrastructure and spent no money, and voters are asked to note the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, a porkulus that isn't even keeping up with the deterioration of the existing roads and bridges.

We have much to look forward to.

COSMOLOGY, WITHOUT CELESTIAL MECHANICS.

American Thinker contributor Andrea Widburg offers "More evidence of the historical truth behind Biblical narratives."  Read on, though, and discover that a historical record is not evidence of Divine Intervention.

I just stumbled across a new entrant into the truth behind the Bible stories. This time, archeology shows that, at the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, there really was fire raining down from the skies.

Genesis 19:24-25 describes the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah when the people, rather than welcoming strangers (who happened to be angels in disguise), instead tried to subject them to homosexual gang rape. “Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”

Current estimates are that those two cities, assuming they existed, were destroyed between 2100 and 1900 B.C., during the Bronze Age. One of the theories is that an earthquake occurred but, Wikipedia explains, there’s no contemporary evidence from other cultures that there was such a major earthquake at the time. Of course, the timeline could be wrong, so that may explain the absence of an earthquake.

However, maybe the destruction happened a few hundred years later and wasn’t an earthquake at all. Maybe it really was fire and brimstone raining down from the heavens. That’s because we now know that, roughly 3,600 years ago (around 1600 B.C.), a giant space rock traveling at about 38,000 MPH exploded above a site now called Tall el-Hamman, which was once a city in the ancient Middle East, near the Dead Sea.

Close encounters with asteroids might be simpler explanations for other ancient events, including all of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision.  The shockwave might also have been documented as the heavens giving that mighty shout, and Jericho's walls come tumblin' down.

She continues,

I highly recommend a video called Patterns of Evidence: Exodus. In it, Timothy Mahoney suggests that the reason (usually leftist) archeologists insist that the whole Exodus story is fictional is because they’ve misdated it. If you shift the narrative by 400 years, there’s a great deal of corroborative evidence for the Exodus story.

Corroborative evidence of cosmological phenomena, perhaps.  So too might it have been with Cyrenius and the Bethlehem Star.  But I have a family tradition of asking too many questions about religious doctrine, and there might be a simpler explanation for the corroborative evidence than Divine Intervention.

THOSE DEANLETS HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR EXISTENCE.

John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane writes finis to his coverage of Harvard's latest administrative failure.  "I offer a few small comments on the Claudine Gay affair, and try to say a few things that haven’t been said many times before."  If you're at all familiar with Benjamin Ginsberg's Fall of the Faculty, what comes next will come as no surprise.

The source of higher education's troubles with administrators might be in the absence of intellectual foundations for a coherent defense of what higher education ought to be doing. When any social arrangement is a construction, it can be deconstructed, and the sub-plot that ought to make readers angriest is the one in which serial administrators serially bring in their own retinues of assistant-tos, facilitators, and consultants to replace the strategic plans and mission statements of the previous administrators, after much work by the previous assistant-tos, facilitators, and consultants that distracted the faculty from doing what faculty ought be doing, namely having original thoughts and challenging students and each other with those thoughts. (But, Professor Ginsberg argues, there are ample opportunities for administrators to play on faculty sympathies with underdogs by framing some of the usurpations as in the service of diversity or equity or inclusion or access. Why more observers haven't caught on that academic prestige rests in part on bad writing not getting published, or bad dissertations not being defended, or weak students not graduating, or -- keeping March Madness in mind -- bad teams getting a play-in game at best escapes me.)

That was twelve years ago. Here's how things roll at the Ivies and their peer institutions.

Faced with an existential challenge, a fork in the road between science and meritocracy vs. politics and activism, faced with plummeting support and public trust, the board and president think the way to “turn things around” is for the president “and her staff,” presumably abundant, to create a detailed “spring reset” plan, including “appear all over campus, hold office hours” and above all to “express her empathy,” and of course to appoint “task forces” to address “phobias.”

I quote twice just so you’ll stop and notice. It’s entirely focused inward. It’s marketing, spin, HR, with no fundamental institutional change.

Stanford has lots of these sort of events, “task forces” that sit around and gab and write memos, “community building” events. It also apparently has a lot of people with time on their hands to go to them. Noticeably absent: research-active faculty, assistant professors who want tenure, and grad students who want jobs.

It might have come to this, as I have complained repeatedly, because as long as the diversity deanlets and sociable schmoozers took stances that aligned with the belief systems of the professors, the professors were willing to abdicate their stewardship under the illusion that they were delegating work to functionaries, the better to be able to concentrate on that scholarship, until they found out that Student Affairs had captured the curriculum and usurped faculty governance itself.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO HART'S LOCATION?

Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960 opens with the midnight votes from Hart's Location (five expected for Kennedy, five expected for Nixon, two voters playing coy with the campaign staffs).  Yes, that was a long time ago in The America that Worked^(TM), and the book should still be required reading for contemporary politics junkies as it lays out the way the shift change affects the returns the decision desks see, and recalls a time when the losing side would accept the results "and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes."  Mr White passed before the routine questioning of presidential elections became just another way America stopped working.

BOURGEOIS NORMS FORESTALL PUNISHMENT CYCLES.

Helen Pluckrose, who, with James Lindsay, wrote Cynical Theories, which I recommend reading and might offer my review this year, recently wrote a takedown of the so-called critical theories that makes precisely the argument the post title offers.

When humans become too deeply invested in fighting for their “side” of the culture wars, they invariably cease to prioritise what is true and what is ethical. Their determination is to win at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage to liberal norms, the fabric of civil society, or innocent bystanders. The result is that there are no winners. One side might well emerge victorious for a time, but the manner in which this pernicious game is played has troubling implications. Every time one side goes too far, tribal pride and the blinding need to “win” prevents them from course-correcting. This leads to backlashes from the opposing side, which then engender counter-backlashes and so on, in a negative feedback death spiral. The primary casualties are usually not the culture warriors themselves but the “civilians” on whose behalf these wars have purportedly been waged in the first place, whether or not they themselves subscribe to any of the ideologies ascribed to them. The latest group to be caught in the crossfire is the LGBT community.

I fear very much that we are living through the beginnings of a pendulum swing on LGBT rights as the socially conservative “anti-woke” make significant headway in their reactive overcompensation to the bumbling missteps and extreme identitarianism of Critical Social Justice (CSJ, colloquially referred to as “wokeness”). Liberal critics of “wokeness” have been warning of this for many years, and with the dip in support for sexual freedom, the emboldened right-wing war on Pride, and the rise of “groomer” discourse, the backlash appears to have begun. Our best chance to break this cycle, and recapture some semblance of equilibrium, entails dialling down the intensity of identity politics.

The essence of identity politics, as practised by a particular element of the left, includes activists determining which views are to be regarded as authentic for each identity category.

The critical theories are devoid of testable implications, authenticity is a snare and a delusion, and what she calls "backlashes" are simply attempts to restore a state of good repair.  That "negative feedback death spiral" to which she refers is simply the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome.  Let all of that be: let us concentrate on her understanding of how the discourse practices of the critical theories lead to a breakdown of civilized discourse.

I fear that we are seeing a rise of people feeling perfectly justified in openly indulging in misogyny, racism, homophobia, biphobia, and hostility to trans people for simply existing. This, I believe, has come about as a form of reciprocation because the norms that made the open expression of prejudice against these groups so socially unacceptable have now broken down. Of course, some of the people giving voice to these abhorrent views have always done so and now feel able to let them out. But many, I fear, are developing these attitudes as a form of revenge in response to the authoritarian overreaches of left-wing culture warriors regarding so-called anti-racism, the alleged toxicity of masculinity, hostility toward free expression, and radical trans activism.

Indeed.  "If Someone With Authority denigrates a class of people, how will those people respond?"  The last thing a small class of people claiming Protected Status should do is give a large class of people the intellectual ammunition to simultaneously claim that status and to be belligerent.  And yet, that is what critical theories accomplish.

The rise of a reactive form of white identity politics has been even more evident and alarming. Right-wing racism is nothing new, of course, from segregationism to the opponents of civil rights, to anti-immigrant sentiments. But the surge in left-wing identity politics that often paints white people as oppressors has inflamed many on the right to lean into their own identitarianism. As I wrote previously, this dynamic has given white racists a sense of grievance and victimhood that they can use as justification for their bigotry. The identitarian left has endorsed negative racist generalisations against majority groups while insisting that minority groups cannot, by definition, ever be racist. By undermining the universal cultural taboo against evaluating people’s moral and social worth by their race, they have thrown open the gates. We have seen a proliferation of social media users fixated on disparaging black people in the name of “anti-wokeness,” posting fight videos, out-of-context photos, and misrepresented clips designed to gin up fear, anger, or racial resentment. An account called “End Wokeness” assumed a medical conference of black doctors to have achieved their positions through diversity quotas.

Once the punishment cycles start, though, everybody suffers.

The distinction between ideas and people has been blurred by both the identitarian woke and the identitarian anti-woke. It may well have been the “woke” who pushed the pendulum toward a form of divisive and illiberal identity politics. Nevertheless, because human rights depend upon the universalist principles that Critical Social Justice has abandoned, those most likely to be crushed as the pendulum ball gets shoved back are racial minorities and LGBT people, regardless of their own political views. This pendulum is not an ideology-seeking missile that takes aim at bad ideas, but a very blunt instrument that aims itself at identity-based tribes.

The wins, such as they have been, for the assorted affinity movements, have come under the rubric of Enlightenment standards of debate and discourse. Throw those out, and you don't get to that Bright Future any faster.

The advances made in women’s, racial, and LGBT rights have been largely achieved by liberalism, which rejected identity politics and called upon our shared humanity and ability to understand and empathise with each other despite our differences. This called upon our best impulses of compassion, fairness, and empathy and expanded that circle of empathy outwards. With a liberal individualist and universalist approach that treats people as individuals and advocates non-zero-sum outcomes that are mutually beneficial, there was far less push and pull on the pendulum, and its relative restfulness allowed for a period of rapid social progress.

Things began to change in the early 2010s as Critical Social Justice rose to prominence, first in elite universities, and then outward into wider society as graduates joined the labour force. The CSJ approach of boxing people into distinct identity camps — each with their own circumscribed levels of “privilege” and authority to speak on various subjects — and pitting them against each other called upon the worst of our tribal natures, undid decades of progress, and set it swinging wildly again. Finding a way to still the pendulum again won’t be easy, but any durable effort must be built on a foundation of open dialogue, mutual cooperation, and a desire to find common ground and compromise.

Fail to still that pendulum, enjoy the war of all against all.

WHERE IS THAT COURAGEOUS REPUBLICAN VOICE?

The regime media are calling attention to a campaign opportunity.  "Venezuelan immigrants boost right-wing candidates across the Americas, U.S."  Nikki Haley, are you paying attention?  Donald Trump, will you stop and think?  There are still huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, and they've been hard done by in communist regimes.

When far-right economist Javier Milei was inaugurated as Argentina’s new president last month, his supporters thronged the streets of the capital, Buenos Aires, bearing the national flag and donning Messi soccer jerseys.

Scattered among the sea of light blue and white were a handful of Venezuelan flags — a recurring sight in Milei campaign gatherings.

Holding one of them was Laura Ruiz. When Milei emerged from the presidential palace to give a speech, Ruiz waved her flag with gusto. Her hope, she said, was for Milei to see the flag — and to know that Venezuelans like her support him.

The 36-year-old immigrant couldn’t register to vote yet in the October election, but she says she became “indirectly” involved in the political process, advocating for Milei and against the left within her circle.

It’s an increasingly common story in Argentina and throughout the Americas. Scarred by economic collapse, widespread corruption and a crackdown on civil liberties associated with socialist leadership back home, many of the millions of recently relocated Venezuelans have lent their support to right-wing movements across the continent. The diaspora’s activism has taken place against a backdrop of warnings from right-wing forces that Venezuela-style socialism risks spreading.

Mr Milei is most emphatically not a "far-right economist." His possible future voters in Argentina understand that he has the success sequence to see off both Bolivarian socialism and the Professional Managerial Classes overreach.  If you want to ensure that the United States will not become a socialist country, it might be wise to ... get refugees from socialist countries participating in the economy and filing their applications for citizenship pronto.

The two other right-wing figures Milei is often compared to — Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — have tried mobilizing voters with similar rhetoric.

Experts say that there’s been a receptive audience for that kind of discourse among growing Venezuelan diasporas across the region. In recent years, over 7.5 million people have left Venezuela, setting off the most severe migration crisis in modern Latin American history.

Bolsonaro is not Milei is not Trump, but I digress. Perhaps the only thing worse than people fleeing into your country is people fleeing from your country.  I think Ron DeSantis, who recently suspended his presidential campaign, grasped this.

Many are starting new lives with a stark opposition to left-wing movements or candidates, which they associate with the dysfunction they had to leave behind.

In the U.S., that dynamic has helped bolster Latino support for Republicans in Florida, contributing to a right-wing shift in recent elections in the longtime swing state. Similar shifts could be in the works in places continent-wide that have a high concentration of recent Venezuelan migrants.

Weeks before Milei won in Argentina, the regional right clinched another victory with Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. He was also buoyed by the Venezuelan diaspora’s support.

“The conditions that forced you to leave Venezuela make you see everything in black and white,” said Eugenio Martínez, a Florida-based Venezuelan political analyst. “But the politics of receiving countries aren’t black and white.”

No kidding.  "We're still higgling over the same things, and I can't help but think that neither major party is getting the policy mix right. It does little good to treat the people who milk the cows and pack the cheese as criminals, nor does it do much good to treat those people only as future taxpayers."  That NBC report recognizes an opportunity for advocates of free minds and free markets, should they take it.  "As relative newcomers to the countries they’ve settled in, most Venezuelan migrants are unlikely to have become naturalized citizens, meaning they can’t yet vote. But many have found powerful platforms on social media to share their views."

ACCUMULATE THOSE SMALL ADVANTAGES.

I forget where I read it, was it a game theory book or a strategy book?  A sportswriter asks a pitcher, "What would you throw to Ted Williams on a 1-2 count?"  Yes, I'm Ted Williams old.  The lesson is still the same.  The pitcher responds, "How did I get the two strikes and a ball?"

REDISCOVER THOSE ARTICLE II LIMITATIONS.

Even before a single vote was cast, Our Progressive Betters had to offer advice.  Francis "L 'Ombre de L'Olivier" Turner noticed that the Davoisie were worried.  "Elections : Dangerous for 'our' democracy."  He continues, "I’ve spotted a number of recent articles where the 'right sort' of people are very very concerned that the 'wrong sort of person' i.e. orange might be re-elected president of the US."  The Davoisie reference is to the same sort of fretting arising over British voters, French voters, German voters, or Taiwanese voters.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Buckle in, if the first few installations of this series set a trend, it's going to be a rough year.  Solar Panels in Gaza Can’t Withstand Bombs.  "The question of Palestine undoubtedly encompasses racial, economic, health, gender, queer, and carceral dimensions. At the nexus of these intersectional issues is the environmental concern. In Gaza, limited access to food, land, water, and electricity are not just infrastructure problems, they are pressing environmental concerns that intersect with larger social justice issues."  Read that and weep, that's the quality of analysis that got Rozina Kanchwala a Fulbright.

Fortunately, more people are discovering the affirmative action asterisk.  "We will also begin devoting special attention to minority employees of limited qualifications to make them genuinely productive in the shortest possible time. Hopefully we can maintain standards of performance throughout."  Translated:  "[Diversity hiring] demands that less qualified minorities be hired instead of more qualified white and Asian men and, often, women. That is the whole point. DEI doesn’t 'tackle' discrimination, it viciously implements discrimination."  The scam isn't working any more.  "Claudine Gay is simply the latest beneficiary of a leftwing intellectual privilege that not only excuses away research misconduct—it also attempts to shift the blame onto the parties who made the discovery, no matter the validity of the evidence."

The adults are up for re-election.  "In real life, Biden went on to oversee crisis after crisis—record-high inflation, record-high illegal immigration, a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan—even as he stone-walled the press, dodged accountability, and tamped down on online criticism. Nevertheless, sympathetic news outlets have continued to defer to Biden and his technocrats."  Like the Bears, they still suck.  "Amazingly, the same team that brought us the border, inflation, and the Afghanistan disaster is still on the playing field. And it keeps racking up the L’s."

Mine is not a sympathetic news outlet.  Turf them out.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

JOHN GALT ADDRESSES THE DAVOISIE IN SPANISH.

Yes, there's a touch of the circus impresario in me.  It's not John Galt, it's Argentina's new president Javier Milei, who might be constrained by divided government to issuing libertarian executive orders and shutting down those parts of the administrative state that he can.  As a high government official, he is able to attend and address the World Economic Forum, and boy howdy did he.

Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.

We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.

Thirty five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.

But before having the discussion, it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it's the only morally desirable system to achieve this.

If we look at the history of economic progress, we can see how between the year zero and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period.

There is an echo of the opening paragraphs of John Galt's speech in the opening lines, and this alumnus of the Badger Herald of the early 1970s (before it became just another campus newspaper) approves of the recognition of the way free minds and free markets made "rich as an Argentine" a statement of envy.  An editorial from February 1970 notes, "The capitalist-socialist conflict is one which we could argue here, and has been dealt with time and time again.  Suffice it to say that we need a bit better socialist example somewhere before the United States departs from the capitalist course which has made even its poorest richer than the average citizen of any socialist/communist state on our dear little planet."  That statement is still true, but we still have people who will grouse and propose to throw it all over because the least-well-off aren't becoming better off fast enough.  That's a rant for another day.

AMTRAK, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

We opened the year with news that the latest infrastructure porkulus included all sorts of money for assorted rent-seekers to wet their beaks studying expansions of the Amtrak network.  I'm sure they're meeting and retreating and strategizing and engaging in wishful thinking.

WE STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

In a post from September 2022, I invoked Byron York, who did.  "Everyone is talking about how to accommodate illegal border crossers once they are in the country and not about how to prevent people from crossing illegally into the U.S."  At the time, we could see what was going to happen, before it blew up in the face of Illinois politicians.

"In other words, the Biden administration may not want migrants showing up in Martha's Vineyard, but there will be plenty of newcomers settling all over the United States, in a never-ending flow."

Indeed there has been a flow.  Calling attention, politely, to what is going on, didn't work, and when Donald Trump rang the warning bell in declaring for the presidency, Our Intellectual Betters threw every relevant -ism and -phobia at him, and attempted to guilt-trip anybody who agreed with him in a similar way.  Does it come as a surprise that people, pushed too far, will push back?

That post also noted,

Sounds nice in theory. Practice is another matter.  Mr Barkan correctly noted that New York mayor Eric Adams "offered a muddled response" (there not being enough Other People's Money, even if the creatives in Central Park West pay even more in taxes); and we saw Chicago's mayor have a temper tantrum when the first busloads from Texas showed up.  (Does that mean none of the Jarrett regency's secret flights went to Chicago?)

Ah, yes, those secret flights.  In Newsweek, Charles Lipson savors the schadenfreude.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott's buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

These shrill noises are the sound of progressive politicians being squeezed. They proclaim their cities are "sanctuaries" but—surprise, surprise—they don't actually want more illegal immigrants. Not that they can voice that reservation, of course, given their activist political base. Neither can they support serious efforts to manage the underlying problem by closing the border, or even trying to. Doing so would mean a humiliating return to Donald Trump's tough policies: building the wall, requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico as their applications are processed, and encouraging Mexico's armed forces to deploy along the border to prevent illegal crossings. Biden overturned all those policies, to cheers from his party's left-wing base. That was when they thought it would be costless.

Now the costs are mounting, and so are the consequences for progressive politicians. The pushback is coming, not from their base but from disillusioned centrists and independents. Those voters are groaning under the costs associated with this rising tide of illegal immigrants, including welfare benefits, social services, schooling for more children, emergency room visits for uninsured patients, and a need for additional police without sufficient additional tax revenues to pay for all of them. Drug-smuggling cartels now find it much easier to cross the border, so these cities also have to cope with more heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl on the streets, more hospitalizations, and more deaths from overdoses. It's an ugly picture.

That column concludes,

How will we know whether Abbott has opened progressives' eyes to the problem? We won't, until progressive mayors and governors start openly demanding the Biden administration staunch the flow, not at urban bus terminals but at the southern border. So far, they haven't done that. They complain about Governor Abbott, not about President Biden, and are beginning to snipe at Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Vice President Kamala Harris, the "border czar" who denies the crown.

Those two diversity hires are still in office.  And Illinois is still, officially, "the most welcoming state in the Nation."

Governor JB Pritzker today signed HB 121, SB 667, SB 1596 and SB 2665 into law, legislation expanding protections for immigrant and refugee communities and further establishing Illinois as the most welcoming state in the nation. The new laws strengthen the TRUST Act and make Illinois the second state in the nation to require local officials to end partnerships with ICE, address hate crimes against immigrant communities, expand workplace protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and create the Illinois Immigration Impact Task Force to ensure state programs and policies best serve immigrant residents.

Governor Pritzker also signed an executive order creating the Welcoming Illinois Office, to report to the Office of the Governor and the Secretary of the Department of Human Services while being housed and supported by the Department of Human Services. The Office will work to coordinate, develop and implement policies and practices to make Illinois a more welcoming and equitable state for immigrants and refugees. The Office will be led by the Senior Immigration Fellow.

"Throughout my governorship I've directed my administration to adopt policies that make Illinois a welcoming state for immigrants, and I'm proud to sign these accountability measures into law to advance our cause."

Noble though those sentiments are, the Schreechenrauf that joined the Festive Season playlist has been epic.

LET THE RECKONING CONTINUE.

At the time Claudine Gay ascended to the presidency at Harvard, I documented the doubts people who pay closer attention to such things than I have raised.  That post concluded,

Political reliability matters more than those tiresome academic credentials. Mr Randall concludes, "Claudine Gay exemplifies the unquestioned and unquestionable double standards and mediocrity that affirmative action inflicts on American higher education—and, indeed, on the republic as a whole." At the moment, the higher education establishment is likely hailing the newest Defender of the Faith, but the irascible contrarians are noticing.

The irascible contrarians took the poseur down.  Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner draws a sobering lesson.

Gay’s ouster will not turn the tide on the illiberal rot that permeates our universities. Gay is a symptom, not the disease. The Gay affair was significant, however, because it brought a deeper problem into stark relief. Faculty—who are supposedly the academy’s raison d’etre—have become utterly irrelevant. Even worse, there is no credible way that faculty can pull the academy out of its malaise.

Oh, there is, but the faculty have to reclaim their relevance by reclaiming their proper role as stewards of the curriculum.

THE CURTAIN FALLS ON THE STONED GUEST.

Word reaches Cold Spring Shops of the death of Peter Schickele.  So often it is, dear reader, that what you aspire to and what you become known for are wildly different.

Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele, who said his health had declined after a series of infections last fall.

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera and other notable ensembles, as well as by the folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.

But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.

For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.

No, that is not bad company to keep, although it might be up to a future successor to discover the Jagermeister quartet in one of those taverns.  What he did discover was pretty cool, and read the obituary, dear reader, to learn more about the instrumentation.

Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”

With these and myriad other works, Mr. Schickele, who billed himself as P.D.Q.’s “discoverer,” gleefully punctured the reverent pomposity that can attend classical-music culture.

It was P.D.Q., after all, whose work won four Grammy Awards to Mr. Schickele’s one. It was P.D.Q. who packed some of New York’s foremost concert halls for decades of annual Christmastime concerts. And it was P.D.Q. who, unbidden, could rear his head insidiously at performances of Mr. Schickele’s serious music, with audience members who had come expecting belly laughs sometimes walking out in bewilderment.

It's fitting, as well, that someone who grew up near Zap would pass near Woodstock, and write for protest singers.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

After earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Swarthmore College in 1957, Mr. Schickele received a master’s from the Juilliard School in 1960. Over the years, he studied with the composers Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti.

The campus cut-up, though, was always in him.

Needing to flesh out the program of a student concert, Mr. Schickele recalled a work that he, his brother and a friend had written as teenagers in the early 1950s: “The Sanka Cantata,” a parody of Bach père’s “Coffee Cantata,” which they ascribed to a Bach black sheep they called P.D.Q. (in common parlance, short for pretty damn quick).

Although the Vatican sought to excommunicate P. D. Q. for his Missa Hilarious, the Musical Community never excommunicated Professor Schickele.  In the manner of popularizers everywhere, he might have brought in listeners who, after the joke, stuck around for the stuff that inspired it.

But by the mid-1960s, Mr. Schickele, as resolute a populist as ever in his own compositions, had begun to bridle at the entrenched musical snobberies that he felt defined Juilliard in those years. Perhaps P.D.Q., he thought, could commute his sentence.

It's still football season, and maybe there will be time to put his play-by-play of Heilige Dankgesang taking on the orchestra in Beethoven's Fifth on the Victrola.  R. I. P.