UNDOING THE CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION.

In the generational morphology hypothesis, complete resolution of social tensions among classes or generations is difficult, because each set of tensions involves a different cohort of young people seeking changes in the way the current cohort of middle-aged and older people do things.  So, too, appears to be the dynamics of Occupy Wall Street and its regional manifestations.

Lehigh political scientist Ted Morgan sees an echo of the Sixties (a counter - counter - counter - culture, if you will.)

What is perfectly clear here is that the institutions of the global economy, and the world they are producing, are catastrophically out of line with the needs, values, and aspirations of most of humanity, and the people are rising up to resist this world.  Occupy Wall Street is the latest manifestation of this uprising, in this case addressing the way that Wall Street and its minions have been manipulating and ignoring the needs and values of the American people for far too long.

Notwithstanding media hype about something they like to call “the Sixties,” there are two important connections between today’s protests and those of the 60s era.  One is simply that the forces being confronted by today’s protests are the same forces that sponsored a backlash against the uprisings of the 1960s.  Beginning in the 1970s, corporate and rightist interests combined to (erroneously) blame the 60s upheavals on the idea that government should be used to produce public goods and meet the needs of the people.  Meanwhile advertisers, television producers, film-makers, and commercial media used the same “Sixties” stereotypes –hippies, young rebels, militants— to divert public attention to the world of privatized leisure and consumption.  Together these forces turned politics over to capital and produced the world we live in.

The crisis of the institutions, in Professor Morgan's view, might have been suppressed under "morning in America" sloganeering and bought off with big-screen televisions and cheap fuel, but the contradictions never went away.

Chicago Boy Lexington Green went to a gathering of the Chicago occupiers, and saw over-indulged Baby Boomers of the 1960s continuing their over-indulged ways into the present.

I was surprised that it was not more Left boilerplate. It seems to reflect an accurate understanding of the seriousness of crony capitalism as the heart of the problem we face.

These conversations I found enjoyable, though I was as usual saddened by the combination of earnestness and ignorance of this rising generation.

My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has been shamefully dumbed down.

He discovers some of those baby boomers, still true to their Days of Rage fantasies.

My overall impression is of a large and incoherent community of people with no clear agenda, no actionable plan, but with a few particular and genuine grievances.

It appears to be composed of at least two major groups. There is an older group of experienced activists, who have experience at organizing and leading protests. These people are orthodox leftists. There is a certain hard quality to their eyes which you can see right away. These people are generally engaged in the same kind of protest they and their predecessors have been doing for 50 years. It is the same old thing and they could do it in their sleep.

The other group seems to be a large, young and energetic but poorly educated group of kids who have spent their lives on a path to “college” on borrowed money, then a “job.” Now they are facing the derailment of the entire vague program they have always lived by, and they know they owe a lot of money and don’t know what to do now or do next.

This group of kids seem to be educable, and to have some good instincts. But, they have for now fallen into malicious hands.

Both commenters suggest that an organizing theme is going to have to emerge in order for the occupations to have any permanent effect, and that there is sufficient discontent for the protests to go on for some time.

THE CASE FOR SOCIAL DISTANCE.

Some Milwaukee-area school districts have requested business casual for teachers (ties recommended but not required: ties are required of male teachers and students at at least one selective private school).  One commenter on the policy sees the value of social distance.

Teachers do and should occupy an arena of esteem and authority. This can be diminished if a teacher shows up in class wearing clothes so informal as to send a message to students that, hey, we're all buddies and I want to be your friend.

I don't care if they like me, I do care if they're willing to work with me rather than work on me.  Another commenter suggests the requirement is just more style over substance.

EVERYTHING I LIKE GOES AWAY.

"Pan Am" might be a disguised lament for the destroyed, best parts of the victorious United States.  But it could be suffering from bad scheduling.

After starting reasonably well, Pan Am ratings fell 16% in its second episode, and then fell 27% in its third episode and was ABC's second lowest rated scripted show last week (ahead of only Charlie's Angels). 

"Charlie's Angels" has already been cancelled.  (No loss, catering to feminist, thirteener, and millennial sensibilities destroys the eye candy.)  "Pan Am" is in the 10 pm (Eastern) Sunday time slot, opposite some pretty good Sunday night football matches, and the cliffhangers that the baseball playoffs have been.  And networks can't simply put a program into a holding pattern and bring it into households when there's less conflicting traffic.

THE RIVER LEVEL VIEW.

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article recommends the Chicago architecture boat tour.  Some guides even provide the explanation for Cub fans drinking Old Style.

In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago reversed the flow of the river using a series of canal locks, sending water (and sewage) south down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to the Des Plaines River and ultimately, St. Louis.

Residents of that city objected mightily, Bartholomew said, and got their revenge by using the river water to make beer and ship it back to Chicago.

Regional rivalries aside, the tour is highly recommended.

During the summer, it is possible to get a preview of some of the buildings as part of the trip.  Ride the Hiawatha to Union Station, go out the Adams Street food court exit, walk north along the west bank of the river to the shuttle boat dock at Madison Street, ride the shuttle boat to Navy Pier or to the dock opposite the Wrigley Building for the architecture tours.

A PASSENGER TRAIN SHOULD LOOK LIKE ONE.

General Motors's Electro-Motive Division built the locomotive that signified diesel passenger train.

Electro-Motive is under new management, but je me souviens.

The builder, now part of Caterpillar’s Progress Rail Services, says the design will boast “streamlined” styling, including a prominent, roof-level headlight for a “classic American” look. It will be capable of 125-mph operation. The company hasn’t made a final decision on a prime mover, but says it will come from Caterpillar’s designs. So don’t expect the 710 or 265H Electro-Motive designs in use on freight models.

EMD’s last passenger design was its F59PHI, a sleek 3,200-hp locomotive that serves on Amtrak corridor routes in the West, plus several commuter lines.

The Fifty-Nine is not bad looking, although it's too tall for a Talgo, Horizon, or Amfleet consist, and a little short for a Superliner or California Car rake.

Now look closely at that Burlington unit in the upper picture.  Those shadowlines on either side of the upper headlight are to suggest air intakes, and the black stripes the windows of a Zephyr power car.

Roof-level headlight, 125 mph operation, streamlining, is it too much to ask for a profile that matches the coaches that follow?  Everything old is new again ...

RUNNING TO WIN.

It's been a busy week, with the usual stresses that come with examinations.  Add to that a few days of good weather for getting the harvest in, and posting has been light.

For some reason, athletics departments and alumni relations officers like to schedule homecomings in the middle of all those distractions (despite the strongly held view of at least a few of the faculty that the sports and the social events are the distractions.)  Thus there were homecoming events of various kinds in Madison and in DeKalb.  Here, the post-game festivities include a concert with Kansas backing the NIU Philharmonic.

On the fields, the Badgers took care of business with Indiana.  A good team is one that makes adjustments at halftime with a 28-7 lead.  (Those seven points annoyed the defense particularly.)  That mismatch was assigned to the 11 am television slot.  Presumably ranked teams have to have television coverage, but if the outcome is unlikely to be for the squeamish, it can be televised while the hung-over and the Vegas punters haven't rolled out of the rack yet.

Then came Western Michigan at Northern Illinois.  Western have been successful at scoring points, and Northern's defense has been suspect, or gone missing.  No matter this day, as Northern's second half adjustments led to 38 unanswered points and a one-sided win.  There were sufficient rounds for the requisite howitzer salute after each touchdown.

TACKING ON.

Lots of opportunities to play outside during the second half of the summer, and then comes football, and some unexpected developments in the pennant races, and the Fifty Book Challenge gets crowded out.  In this shortish third quarter report, the links go to the review at the Challenge.  Some books are particularly good (+), others particularly bad (-).

19. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 10 July 2011 (+).
20. Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times, 16 July 2011.
21. The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, 24 July 2011 (-).
22. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, 25 July 2011 (-).
23. Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, 29 July 2011 (-).
24. Gettysburg, 30 July 2011 (+).
25. High and Mighty: SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, 5 August 2011.
26. We All Fall Down, 17 August 2011.
27. The Final Storm, 3 September 2011.
28. Reckles$ Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, 5 September 2011.
29. Winter of Frozen Dreams, 30 September 2011.

The second quarter report is available here, or at the Fifty Book Challenge, or on the European Tribune.

The first quarter report is available here, or at the Fifty Book Challenge, or on the European Tribune.

There are more books stacked for review, and the bookworm will grow some more segments by year's end.

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo


(Cross-posted to European Tribune and 50 Book Challenge.)

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

Trinity University's Michael Fischer wrings his hands about the difficulties involved in running a university like a Quaker Meeting.

At times, many of us in academe take pride in our commitment to consensus-based decision making, aligning it with such positive values as involving people in the decisions that affect them and favoring persuasion over coercion. At other times, however, even the most forceful advocates of consensus-based decision-making, among whom I count myself, get impatient. Our frustration leads to familiar complaints about herding cats, never getting another accomplished, and enduring interminable meetings that only complicate problems instead of resolving them.

That's always been the case: each of those New England town clusters (East Millpond, Millpond Centre, Millpond Hall, Millpond Heights) represents an irreconcilable breakdown of consensus among relatively like-minded people.  (I'm looking straight at you, administrative toadies on university committees.)

Our commitment to consensus waxes and wanes for many reasons but primarily because we are ambivalent about compromise. Compromise is almost always essential to achieving consensus in higher education. A proposed major change in a university – for example, a revision in the academic calendar or curriculum – typically attracts a core of supporters and an equally vocal group of naysayers. Between these extremes lies a not yet committed, more or less curious group, sometimes a majority of faculty members, who need to be brought along if the proposal is going to succeed. I say "succeed" rather than "pass" because without sufficient support, even a proposal approved by the majority can still be sabotaged or at least stalled. Tenured faculty opponents of the change can continue their dissent with impunity. Lukewarm faculty members can maintain their disengagement, refusing to staff key committees that may be necessary to implementing the change. Although unanimity is neither essential nor realistic, sufficient consensus, not just a majority vote, is crucial.

That's where an absence of viewpoint diversity comes in handy: it's easier to achieve consensus when the issue being contested is relatively minor (do we lower admission standards to a combined 850 or a combined 800 on the college boards?)  But everybody gets along to go along until the tension between consensus and, oh, producing meaningful intellectual development, becomes too much for compromise.

Measuring "sufficient consensus" is a judgment call administrative and faculty leaders must make before moving on. Familiar marketplace metaphors often guide our reasoning. The "buy-in" of the uncommitted results from "selling" them something. It can be something tangibly in their self-interest – e.g., the curricular change might lower teaching loads – but often in colleges and universities, carrots are as hard to come by as sticks, especially now, when budgetary pressures are increasing class size, freezing salaries, and whittling away travel support. Rewarding cooperation becomes as problematic as punishing intransigence. Buy-in accordingly comes from allowing the initially disaffected to leave their mark on the proposal that results: offering amendments, rewriting sections, raising objections to be dealt with later, all with the ultimate goal of achieving broad "ownership."

Precisely. As long as there's general agreement on what it is the administration is selling, the endless wordsmithing achieves nothing substantively different yet leaves everyone believing they've said their piece.

The problem Mr Fischer avoids mentioning is that there can be no compromise between faculty members who see greater access, or more accommodation, or more climbing walls, or a pursuit of athletic excellence and more commuter students, as desirable, and faculty members who see such things as distracting from, or destructive of, the higher earning.  The lion lies down with the lamb only in your prayers.

That makes his transition to a gripe about the absence of compromise in national politics silly.

At this level, suspicion of compromise has given way to hostility, with President Obama the target, contributing to the national legislative gridlock. It is striking how criticisms of Obama from the left and the right consistently disparage compromise. From the point of view of Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and other liberal columnists, Obama is a disappointing centrist who caves in too readily to his adversaries. From the point of view of Tea Party Republicans, however, he is a steamrolling socialist who must be resisted at every turn, not appeased in any way.

Either way, compromise gets stigmatized: as something the president engages in too readily or as a trap his right-wing adversaries must avoid. The only resolution of their differences that these ideological opponents can imagine is somehow tilting the balance of power in their favor: a game-changing election that will finally allow their side to get something definitive done. The game being changed or ended is the process of debate and negotiation across differences, which few are confident will lead to a better outcome than their own initial position. We are left with paralysis, short-term fixes, posturing for one’s allies, and endless searches for opportunities to weaken the other party.

No. We have two major parties beholden to electoral bases with very different interests.  That reality is itself a result of a compromise (Republican support for the so-called voting rights act enabled state legislatures to craft majority-minority districts safe for Democrats in such a way as to create other districts safe for Republicans).  That makes splitting the difference in a conference committee more difficult.

Whether we're looking at national affairs, or at academic politics, the absence of a consensus supportable by relatively small compromises follows directly.

HOW TO SPEAK CURMUDGEON.

Apple products.

Technology.

Playlist.

Apologies to Fosters Beer.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING.

Historiann recommends a Gary Gerstle review, in Dissent, of Railroaded (reviewed here).

This review of Railroaded is a model of how to write a review for an audience of intelligent general interest readers.  Gerstle tells readers of Dissentwhy they should read this book in the first paragraph, and then Gerstle explains White and his career as a historian before giving an able overview of the book and an explanation for its importance.  Nicely done.

That's the teachable moment. The details of the review are instructive.  A too-cozy relationship between business and government looks very similar to public-choice libertarians and dissenters somewhere on the left.

That these corporations repeatedly secured government assistance only deepens White’s anger. The bailouts, White alleges, succeeded principally in allowing the CEOs of these railroad corporations to become fabulously wealthy, to set up universities (Stanford) and humanities centers (the Huntington Library) to cleanse their family names, and to escape the economic penalty and social censure that should have come their way. The transcontinental railroads were not, in the final analysis, a mechanism for economic growth and transformation; rather they were merely “corporate containers for financial manipulation and corporate networking.” America would have been better off, White argues, had these railroads not been built when they were and with the financial chicanery and corruption that their establishment and sustenance required. 

And thus does the Occupy Wall Street coalition (something whose non-appearance puzzled Professor Gerstle during the summer) have more than a few things in common with the Tea Party coalition.  The mind is tempted to substitute "McMansion" for "railroad" in the preceding passage and see if it generalizes to either movement.

When the first trains began to run, settlement, commerce, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing in the trans-Mississippi West had not developed to the point at which they could support one transcontinental line, let alone the six that were being built. The hope was that these roads would rapidly stimulate the economic activity that had been missing, and thus bring the railroads, within five to ten years of existence, the volume of traffic necessary for them regularly to turn a profit. But men of money knew that this scenario was utopian, which is why none of them attempted to build one of these railroads out of their own reserves or with funds raised exclusively through financial markets. The government, for whom building a continent-spanning railroad had become an imperative, decided that its only recourse was to lavish extravagant incentives and subsidies on the Central Pacific Associates and their ilk.

White is brilliant in documenting and reconstructing the precise ways in which the Associates and others feasted on the opening the government gave them. He demonstrates how small groups of private moneymen got access to the government, formed alliances with “friends” in Congress, and conspired in the notorious Willard Hotel in Washington and elsewhere to gain favors, buy votes, and steer legislative debates to desired outcomes. White’s portrait of an American government overwhelmed by corruption is breathtaking to behold and devastating to ponder. It alone is reason to read this book.

That first paragraph is economic historian Art Woolf's argument, also.  And it's interesting how the Willard Hotel morphs from the place where Julia Ward Howe composed "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois" humbled the desk clerk to a place where favors are traded.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether limiting the powers of government (including the power to award corporate welfare) or expanding the powers of government (including the power to revoke corporate charters or seize corporate property in the public interest) will work better at uprooting the thickets of corruption.

A FISKING.

In the run-up to the topplings of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the line-by-line refutation, or perhaps negation of an article in the online press or a rival weblog, earned the title of a Fisking, after a particularly silly column an eponymous reporter wrote from the Stans, expressing his understanding of the motives of the locals who beat him up.  Vodkapundit might have earned his spot in the Pajamas Media lineup through his mastery of the form (or his willingness to post comments on various Events of National Import while keeping the glass full), and he's still at it, here turning E.J. Dionne inside out.

At University Diaries, the Scathing Online Schoolmarm series sometimes turns into a fisking, although that form is more about ways in which a writer makes a weak argument even weaker.

But today's smackdown of Washington Post groupie Sally Jenkins takes the form of a full-on Fisking.

If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. [Americans are fully-proud of college sports, and they assign them stupendous value. What is Jenkins talking about?] The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors [Way strange simile, though it fits, I guess, with her use of the word "cure" in the preceding sentence. But does she really think the NCAA, of all places, considers college sports a cancer? For the NCAA, college sports is precisely a cure - a cure for poverty.] and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art. [A college education, after all, is a four-year opportunity for students to pursue their real interests, be these dribbling balls, building meth labs, playing video games, or whatever. When it comes to constructing a curriculum, colleges should inquire of students what they would like to do. Then they should build buildings and hire people to help them to do those things.]

Ouch. The commenters get in on the act, with one suggesting a Department of Athletic Studies.

That, and the Brewer win, warrant another cold one.

PUNISHED FOR BEING RESPONSIBLE.

The Atlantic's David Indiviglio suggests that college financial aid policies might contribute to the low national savings rate.

Parents putting money away for their children's education is hard enough without being penalized for their responsible behavior. 

(Via Newmark's Door.)

ANTICIPATING THE NEW HIGH.

Walter Russell Mead sees, amid the ashes of the Postwar Consensus, the road to the sunny uplands.

Capitalism marginalizes those who do not understand the world and how it is changing, and gives opportunities to those who do. No one knows what our economy will look like in twenty years time, but those who can think about the world intelligently now, recognize new opportunities, and seize the initiative, can grow into global leaders down the road, fundamentally changing our politics, businesses, and way of life.

And on a more practical note, they will invent the jobs of the future and build the careers of the future.

The fundamental fact about the emerging new economic order is that it is going to be a much richer world than the old blue social model could ever offer.  The vastly enhanced efficiency of manufacturing, energy use and organization that the information revolution brings with it means that human beings will spend much less energy and time on fulfilling their basic biological needs, and much more time exploring and fulfilling more complex and personal goals.  As a species, we will spend less time in the coal mines and more time in the theater, less time chopping cotton and more time writing novels.

Reshaping our social institutions and our mental habits to capitalize on the vast and unprecedented opportunities of the information revolution is going to take a lot of time, energy and creativity.  The pain and drama of the shift will absorb our political system — and painful as it will be in the US, it is likely to be still more disruptive and difficult elsewhere.

But unless we get it profoundly wrong, these are birth pangs, not death agonies.  The millennial generation will build a new world, and it will be an extraordinary place.

That is, if we aren't all frazzled by the demands of the information economy that we be on all the time.

But as I read that passage, it twigged a memory about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and posting after the Brewers win.

Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

That's Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," in 1845.  The information economy Professor Mead envisions is one in which, on the one hand, the variety of means of livelihood might become more diverse, and more individuated, but on the other hand might preclude any individual from becoming accomplished in more than one endeavour.

PASSENGERS WILL PLEASE REFRAIN.

Europe might offer some of the fastest passenger trains on rails, but a lot of passenger miles get racked up on austere puddle-jumpers.

The Dutch national railway has an unusual solution for passengers who need the bathroom on a train line designed without them: plastic bags.

The rail operator underlined that the bags, introduced Friday, are for use in emergencies only, when a train has stopped and passengers can't be evacuated. The idea has been met with incredulity by politicians and the general public already unhappy with the short-haul "Sprinter" trains' bathroomless design.

(Via Drudge.)

BEST QUIP OF THE SEASON.

A Rick Reilly column about the baseball playoffs characterizes the New York Yankees as a hedge fund.  Chortle.  The gods of baseball must be sardonic, as Dubya's old team is the only divisional winner that got it done in fewer than five games.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING.

Apple is to Steve Jobs approximately as the Great Northern Railway is to James J. Hill.  Vermont Tiger's Art Woolf explains why the Great Northern might have been the more challenging project.

James Hill, the owner of the Great Northern, built the transcontinental line slowly by only building lines where he could make a profit.  He slowly expanded westward by building feeder lines from areas that were settled or had profitable opportunities for his railway and connecting them to his main line.  The other transcontinental railroads built ahead of demand and went bankrupt because even with their federal subsidies they could not earn a profit due to the lack of revenue opportunities between the eastern and western terminuses of the  railroads.

There's more on foolishly building railroads ahead of demand here.  (And there might be resentful fiftysomethings in Silicon Valley grumbling tonight that they had been working on similar things in their garage before Jobs and Wozniak first burned their fingers on a soldering iron, or perhaps cursing themselves for pursuing government grants for defense projects rather than working on consumer goods.)

Hill's Great Northern was the only transcontinental that was built without major subsidies and that did not go bankrupt.  It was profitable because it relied on building its own market by incrementally building westward and building feeder lines that could transport agricultural products, minerals, and other goods and people and could connect to the main line.

It did not prosper because it absorbed the existing infrastructure of the bankrupt rail lines.  Those lines were worthless to Mr. Hill.

The Great Northern, however, was of great value to those other lines, which is why the 1904 Northern Securities ruling simply postponed, until 1970, the combination known at the time as Burlington Northern (now the northern tier lines of BNSF Railway).

ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

Joel Mathis on Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs was capitalism at its best. Let's not make him the champion of capitalism at its worst. Instructive.

WORK IS WHAT WE DO BETWEEN MEETINGS.

That's Professor Munger's First Law of Time Allocation, and long-time readers will remember that its consequences include higher education being crowded out by activities either peripherally related to or in opposition to higher education.

The crowding out also fits into Roxie's World's Excellence Without Money movement.

Image courtesy Roxie's World.

Crowding out can sometimes happen by administrative ukase.  Tenured Radical, now operating at The Chronicle of Higher Education, doesn't usually give job advice, but an inquiry by a professor at a university has keypunched all of the faculty schedules into a database called Meeting Maker, and unnamed REMFs have gotten into the habit of assuming that any time not specifically blocked off for classes is time available for meetings, and then peremptorily calling meetings on short notice.

THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.

The Postwar Consensus, or The Vital Progressive Center, or perhaps Habit Persistence, is breaking down, and the advocates for, or perhaps long-time beneficiaries of, that mode of thinking, are panicked.

Reason's Shikha Dalmia sees plenty of blame to share around, to national-greatness conservatives and great-society technocrats alike.

[E]very time really smart people run the country, things go spectacularly wrong.

The team of the “best and brightest” that Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy embroiled America in an ignominy like Vietnam—not to mention Medicare, a fiscal quagmire that, unlike Vietnam, the country can neither exit nor fix without courting bankruptcy or seriously screwing over millions of seniors.

Moreover, George W. Bush’s failures resulted not from his alleged stupidity, as his most vitriolic critics believe, but the brainiacs in his Cabinet. Bush himself might have reveled in his Forest Grump [c.q.] image. But he assembled a team of intellectual stars including Dick Cheney, who was so smart that Beltway Republicans and Democrats wished that he had run for president; Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies; Condi Rice, provost of Stanford University; and Donald Rumsfeld, who made his mark in academia, politics, and military service. But this Mensa-worthy team, backed by Ivy League neocon intellectuals, left a legacy of Afghanistan, Iraq, and deficits as far as the eye can see.

The prize for discrediting intelligence, however, goes to President Obama. Unlike Bush, he wore his intellect on his sleeve, raising hopes that he could fix the country with sheer brainpower. But he has presided over a deterioration on every front: Deficits are worse, unemployment is higher, a double dip is imminent, and we have added another foreign misadventure.

So why do intelligent people consistently make such a hash of things? Because they are smart enough to talk themselves into anything. Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense. But intellectuals are particularly prone to this. Hence Bush’s brilliant foreign policy team used the apparatus of the state to search for evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attackers, which its superior ratiocination told them had to exist.

Unfortunately, a Consensus, by definition, requires some combination of the silencing of serious objections, or the reluctance of serious objectors to wage the kind of lonely battle against go-along-to-get-along, until the shortcomings of the Consensus become clear.  Thus the resolution, or the quest for a new Consensus, is likely to be messy.

The great political divide right now is not between eggheads and blockheads, as Maureen Dowd puts it, or intellectualism and stupidity, as other self-serving liberal pundits sneer. It is between two types of activism: an irresponsible, pseudo-intellectual one and a retrograde, folksy one. This divide will disappear when some genuinely smart and wise leader earnestly addresses the nation’s problems, instead of pushing his or her loopy program.

We might be able to look forward to that when the well-scrubbed Morale Conditioners who attach themselves to the various loopsters to go on the Sunday shows or the evening opinion programs to reassure us, "At the end of the day, everything will be fine provided we get what we want."

But the current Establishment is unlikely to cheerfully surrender its power.  George Will suggests that the will to power is simply our Political Masters looking out for the rest of us.

Corporations can nullify consumer sovereignty and vitiate the law of supply and demand. [John Kenneth] Galbraith asserted this while Ford’s marketers were failing to create a demand for Edsels.

Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness” is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by people drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.

Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,” because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state.

And, Betsy Newmark fears, a comment by the governor of North Carolina might reveal the inner fears of the Governing Class.

I don't think she really was serious about postponing elections. But there does seem to be somewhat of a trend for Democrats to decry vicious partisanship when it means that they're not getting their way. James Taranto has a nice roundup of liberals yearning for a little less democracy. He has quotes form Peter Orszag talking about how we need to hand over more decisions to unelected panels such as the Independent Payment Advisory Board to decide how to alter Medicare payments. And, of course, there is always Thomas Friedman who periodically expresses his wish that we could be, well, more like the Chinese.

She continues, "It's only when they aren't getting what they want that they suddenly discover that they aren't fully on board with democracy."  It has always been the case that what you want is In the Public Interest and what They want is Partisanship.  It is also encouraging that during the Southern Rebellion, elections continued as scheduled in the states not in rebellion.  But the end of a social order that has outlived its usefulness can be messy enough as to involve rebellion, or the suspension of civil liberties.

THAT INTELLECTUAL FLACCIDITY.

The College Republicans at Berkeley hold an affirmative action bake sale, and the Diversity Boondoggle holds its nose and attempts to distinguish political speech from Campus Conformity.

Last week an incident occurred that was contrary to the Principles of Community we espouse as a campus. The Berkeley College Republicans (an ASUC sponsored organization) publicized an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” that prices baked goods according to a person’s ethnicity, race, or gender. This event has moved the campus community into dialogue, because it was hurtful or offensive to many of its members.

Illustrating the breadth of the offense taken, last night the ASUC Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the methodology used by BCR and urging respectful conduct by all student organizations. The administration firmly endorses those sentiments. It is our sincere hope that the strong reactions generated by the proposed bake sale provide a vivid lesson that issues of race, ethnicity, and gender are far from resolved, and very much a part of lived experience here and now.

The Principles of Community are not about political positions. They require a consciousness of the potential effect of words or deeds on others: a positive intent not to hurt, offend, or denigrate others while expressing a reasoned position. Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions. The issue is not whether one thinks an action is satirical or inoffensive, the issue is whether community members will be intentionally – or unintentionally – hurt or demeaned by that action. The same applies to the way we interact with each other, whether academically, professionally, or socially.

If we, as a community, do not live with these expectations, then our Principles of Community (which the community authored) are just words on a page. The administration can urge, but not mandate, a person to behave with civility. We can express our disappointment or condemnation when respectfulness is abused. It is the community who must hold each other accountable for behaviors that do not reflect our communal values.

Forbearance and consciousness of how one’s actions may affect others should always be a strong consideration. We celebrate the exchange of ideas through the freedoms we share as a nation, but intelligent debate is based on mutual respect. Freedom of speech is not properly exercised without taking responsibility for its impact. Taking that responsibility does not negate the freedom, it brings an enhanced humanity to it.

Welcome to the Quaker Meeting. Dialogue. Hurtful. Offensive. Issues.  Celebrate.  Demean.

And get that "intelligent debate is based on mutual respect."  It's not quite Shut Up and Go Away, but it's language George Orwell might have fun mocking.

The statement, however, might not be for the edification of the students, or the chastisement of transgressive conservatives bent on subverting the dominant paradigm.  It's a recitation of the Creed.

Let me suggest that the true purpose of the outrage is not to stamp out opposition to racial preferences. Rather, the overreaction is best understood as a reaffirmation of a faith that is slowly (but inevitably) going wobbly. And, I suspect, this includes most Berkeley students. If beliefs about the value of legally imposed racial preferences were rock solid, the over-the-top indignation would be unnecessary.

Begin by recognizing that nearly all Berkeley students were born in the late 1980s or early 90s, and grew up in a world profoundly different from us senior citizens who can actually recall when the playing field was really tilted against women, blacks, and other minorities. In fact, even people in their 60s’ and 70s’ today probably had little direct experience with earlier discriminatory policies. Yes, as a 10-year old (I was born in 1941) living in New York City I heard about “colored only” drinking fountains but this knowledge only came from schoolbook pictures and what my liberal parents told me. Still, convincing my generation (and even baby boomers) that affirmative action was necessary to rectify past injustices was an easy sell, since inequality was indisputable and no serious effort had been made to reverse it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Great Society, compensatory measures and all the rest made perfect sense.

Compare that era to what today’s Berkeley students see with their own eyes—blacks and Hispanics (and to a far lesser extent, women) enjoying immense privilege. More than a few, I suspect, had teachers who clearly owed their jobs to affirmative action versus the old adage about a black having to be twice as good as a white to get the job. And they certainly had textbooks that went out their way to celebrate black history, the contributions of women and minorities while apologizing for past white racial discrimination.

The Pettis Bridge. The New Deal. The Bloody Shirt.

Critically, at least for some—maybe most—Berkeley students, this correction of past injustice enterprise may have gone too far. For them “racial injustice” may mean knowing high school classmates with perfect SAT’s turned down by UCLA so as to help an Hispanic kid with slightly above average SAT’s but who spent a year organizing a boycott of Korean-run grocery stores to achieve social justice. In fact, defenders of affirmative action relentless point out that blacks and Hispanics cannot compete unless given a leg up on the white and Asian competition, and this leg up is plainly visible.

This politically inconvenient reality understood, it is no wonder that those still defending compensatory measures must take every opportunity to reaffirm the faith, trot out the historic tales of crushing injustice and punish heretics who question the racial orthodoxy. The parallel is the faith restoring commemorations of past oppression often ritually recounted in religious observances, for example, the Jewish Passover.

Indeed.

ADJUSTMENT COSTS.

An aluminum bat is not necessarily an improvement on a wooden bat, and laptop computers and printers are not necessarily better than paper and pencil.  A Kansas State graduate assistant counts the ways.

In the old days, a professor would hand you a syllabus printed on a piece of paper on the first day of class. A syllabus is a contract between the professor and the student. The syllabus outlines class expectations, regulations, required texts and supplies, contact information for the professor and due dates for tests and assignments.

You knew what to expect from the class and the professor from the beginning. You planned your time and resources for the semester.

It was laid out before you, like the Ten Commandments from God to Moses. And, much like the Commandments, it took an act of God to change the syllabus.

She's describing a course outline, but I digress.

WHEN A CARTEL IS DEREGULATED.

A Jon Hilkevitch column gets behind the mystique that was Pan Am.

Pan Am, for many years the most glamorous way to fly, folded in 1991. The airline's demise accelerated the slide toward the less satisfactory air travel we have today, said [Purdue aviation technology professor Brent] Bowen, who co-authors an annual report on the quality of the flying experience.

"Only since deregulation (of the airline industry in 1978) have we seen a heavy decline in services to go from luxury to bargain-basement travel," Bowen said. "The new show 'Pan Am' is re-reminding the public that we traded in free martinis, white linen, leg room and tea service for $7 beer, $5 nuts and $30 checked bags."

Much of the airline industry's woes stem from cut-throat competition that isn't good for the business or its customers, Bowen said.

"The basic problem of the airline industry today is that it's willing to fly people for less than it costs to operate the system," he said. "The pricing structure is not generally sustainable. That is why the airline industry is hemorrhaging cash year after year. If you cannot make a reasonable profit, you cannot deliver a quality service."

In general, economists classify the deregulation of airlines as a net gain in economic welfare, annoying changes of planes at hub airports (which makes possible faster service to most communities, because puddle-jumper flights in which a big jet would call at Madison and Waterloo and Lincoln and Denver gave way to smaller turbo-prop hops from any of Madison or Waterloo or Lincoln to a hub at Chicago or St. Louis or the Cities) notwithstanding.  There is some research suggesting that the characterization of airline markets as contestable, because an airplane is nothing more than capital with wings, was optimistic, and the major carriers were able to fortify themselves at the hub airports.

But perhaps government provision of the airports brings other complications to that analysis.

What many observers of "Pan Am" may not know, because it's ancient history, is that the makeup-and-weight checks of the cabin attendants, heck, their designer tunics, were competition in service, the only competitive option available to a firm in a price-fixing cartel, and that the size of the martini might have been a topic for discussion at the meeting of the International Air Transport Association.  I do know that the contents of a sandwich to be served in coach class became an issue, because the Earl of Sandwich's ploughman compares poorly to a Danish smorgasbord.  And Pan Am was complicit in defining the sandwich down.

WURSTMACHER ÜBER ALLES IN DER WELT.

It's not enough for Johnsonville Sausage to be provisioner to Wisconsin sports fans.

The company's sausages were the No. 1 retail brand, based on scanner data from supermarkets and other stores.

So the privately held Sheboygan Falls company set its sites on a new goal: to be the best company in the world that just happens to make sausage.

The metrics for the new goal might be a little fuzzier, but Johnsonville members - that's the name the company uses for its employees - are ready for the challenge, said Kevin Ladwig, a vice president.

Started in a family-run butcher shop in 1945 in a small town of the same name, Johnsonville now has 1,400 employees and more than $700 million of annual sales.

I remember family purchases of bratwursts from that shop, in a two-tavern, one church hamlet where the county highway bridged the Sheboygan River, and from the grocery store in Plymouth, one of the few retail outlets for the sausage.  But there are long-time residents of Sheboygan County who will say other local sausage makers have the better bratwursts.

GIANTS OF OUR TIME.

Steven P. Jobs.

Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr.

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

The world we live in is different because each of them was in it.

CHINA'S TOFU TRAINS.

The Chinese government is suspending construction on eighty percent of its ongoing high-speed passenger rail projects.

The crash in Wenzhou wasn’t the first sign of safety issues with China’s high-speed rail network, but it was the first accident that was severe enough to get the attention of the government, which is now reassessing the safety of the entire network. Chinese banks have been instructed not to lend money for new railway construction.

I read somewhere that there wasn't enough railroad grade concrete and reinforcing bar to provide safe rights-of-way for the planned passenger lines.  Perhaps that constraint matters.

Or perhaps somebody has figured out that the internal rate of return on a Chinese answer to the Powder River Line is greater.

THE PERPETUALLY EARNEST CANNOT STAND TO BE MOCKED.

The administration at Stout State, whose reaction to a professor's door posting earned from Joanne Jacobs the characterization of "idiocy boggles the mind," has backed down.

At least 1,000 people wrote [Stout State chancellor Charles] Sorensen in defense of First Amendment rights at Stout, and dozens of articles about the case appeared in the national media. Today, [Adam] Baldwin (co-star of Firefly) wrote about Stout's apparent double standard in censorship. Baldwin noted that earlier this year, Stout apparently had no problem with "Kill the Bill" posters based on the film Kill Bill, which depicted Uma Thurman with a sword and advocated against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget bill.

Finally, in a letter to all faculty, staff, and students today, the three senior administrators announced that Stout had reversed its decision, is developing a new protocol for handling such cases, and "will schedule workshops and/or forums during this academic year on First Amendment rights and responsibilities in higher education."

As [FIRE vice president Adam Kissel] stated in today's press release, "It takes humility to recognize one's mistakes, and UW-Stout's senior administration now deserves praise for making the right call." Nonetheless, Stout could have acknowledged its errors more directly. FIRE will continue to monitor the state of free speech at Stout, and we hope this controversy has become a learning experience for the administration.

The Foundation. In the early days of the Culture Wars,  David Horowitz's organization won a legal victory against suppression of political speech contrary to the Received Ethos, and as part of the remedy, university administrators were required to take First Amendment sensitivity training.

There is another tack available to administrators, unfortunately, which is to go into imitate-business mode, and, as a matter of university policy, prohibit any faculty member from posting anything on an office door.  That appears to be the practice in the College of Business, perhaps out of respect for the spiffiness of the new building, perhaps because in a corporation, a policy against unauthorized displays of individuality is defensible.

THE VALUE OF BEER, AND CIRCUSES.

The Badgers.  The Brewers.  The Packers.  What a weekend.

When we fill the grandstands, we're not so much liberals or conservatives or tea partyers. We're Brewers fans and Packer Nation and learning how to Bucky. There's plenty of time to go back at each other's throats after the final gun or last out.

Well, some of us have known how to Bucky (by the bright shining light of the moon) for a long time.  But postings will be somewhat light (as they generally are during exam season anyway) for as long as the fun goes on.

INTELLECTUALLY FLACCID.

A theater professor at Wisconsin-Stout posted some provocative material on his door, and the university police chief perceived a threat to good order.

On September 12, 2011, Professor [James] Miller posted on his office door an image of Nathan Fillion in Firefly and a line from an episode: "You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me. And you'll be armed." On September 16, UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter emailed Miller, notifying him that she had removed the poster and that "it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing."

Amazed that UWS could be so shockingly heavy-handed, Miller replied by email, "Respect liberty and respect my first amendment rights." Walter responded that "the poster can be interpreted as a threat by others and/or could cause those that view it to believe that you are willing/able to carry out actions similar to what is listed." Walter also threatened Miller with criminal charges: "If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct."

Later on September 16, Miller placed a new poster on his office door in response to Walter's censorship. The poster read "Warning: Fascism" and included a cartoon image of a silhouetted police officer striking a civilian. The poster mocked, "Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets."

Astoundingly, Walter escalated the absurdity. On September 20, Walter emailed Miller again, stating that her office had removed the poster because it "depicts violence and mentions violence and death." She added that UWS's "threat assessment team," in consultation with the university general counsel's office, had decided to have the poster removed, and that this poster was reasonably expected to "cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat." College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Interim Dean Raymond Hayes has scheduled a meeting with Miller about "the concerns raised by the campus threat assessment team" for this Friday.

I can't make these things up.  The threat assessment has become Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Case 874, and Stout State might now be the biggest Wisconsin college story not involving a football team.

A flack for the Sensitivity Weenies at Stout, Doug Mell, gave the administration's side of the story to the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram.  That just gave FIRE's Peter Bonilla opportunity to point out how the academic ethos, excessively conformed to, leads to intellectual flaccidity.

In the Leader-Telegram, Mell explains that "[o]ur action has to be viewed in the context of post-Virginia Tech and post-Northern Illinois." The sheer offensiveness of this statement, in the context of such clearly non-violent (indeed, anti-violent) expression by Professor Miller, can hardly be overstated.

The disgrace at UWS is only the latest example of this "magic words" theory, wherein a university seems to think all it needs to do to justify a blatant violation of a student or faculty member's rights is to invoke the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University and the rest of us will casually shrug it off and credit it as a somehow legitimate response, as if the First Amendment contains an exception for post-tragedy sensitivities.

Why shouldn't Mr Mell simply mouth cliches?  For years, academicians have used "New Deal" or "Jim Crow" as rhetorical trumps, hoping to stifle any serious discussion about the shortcomings of technocratic public policy by suggesting that any opposition means some Reduction in the Human Condition, rather than bone up on the possible failures of technocratic public policies (hint: if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?)  Here, the lack of intellectual diversity precludes any systematic deconstruction of those pat positions.  Muscles can become flaccid, why not minds?  Accordingly, why not simply invoke Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois and preserve the impression of comity?  It's so much easier to speak of "accommodating" crazy people rather than to strike a balance between quirkiness and disruptiveness, or to view "insurgent sociologist" as a mode of thinking, rather than an idea with consequences outside the common room.

Joanne Jacobs gets the last word, and the deep word. "The university administration’s idiocy boggles the mind."

ET VITAM VENTURI SAECULI, AMEN.

Victor Hanson understands the dynamic of a fourth turning, yet sees a hopeful resolution.  Life sucks:

Stagnant GDP, 9.1 unemployment, another $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion annual deficits, and sky-high fuel and food prices have combined to crush any notion of upward mobility. (If in 2004 5.7% unemployment was supposed to mark a “jobless recovery,” what exactly is 9.1% called? If Bush’s average $500 billion deficits over eight years were abhorrent, what must we say of Obama’s average $1.6 trillion over three? Really bad?)

In response, the Obama administration — let me be candid here — seems clueless, overpopulated as it is by policy nerds, academic overachievers, and tenured functionaries (cf. Larry Summers’ “there is no adult in charge”). They tend to flash Ivy League certificates, but otherwise have little record of achievement in the private sector. Officials seem to think that long ago test scores, a now Neolithic nod from an Ivy League professor, or a past prize translates into knowing what makes America run in places like Idaho and southern Michigan.

And yet, in the hubris of those Great Experts, the Great Repudiation.

The American Constitution remains singular and ensures a stable form of government of the sort absent in a Russia, China, the Islamic world, and even (or especially) the EU. Yes, I know Obama has mused that democracy is suddenly “messy” and he lamented to the La Razistas that he couldn’t quite enact legislation by fiat. And, yes, the governor of North Carolina, in revolutionary fashion, just wondered why we could not suspend congressional elections for a bit, while former budget director Peter Orszag (did he not get his trillions in “stimulus” from a Democratic Congress before he fled to Citicorp?) now dreams of a way of running around democratic “gridlock.” But for all that sudden liberal lamentation that the noble ends cannot be achieved by any means necessary, our system of government remains. And it will ensure us a stability abjectly absent elsewhere in the world.

Gridlock: this time the opposition means it. And in meaning it, the opposition is smoking out the hidden dreams of the well-intentioned.  Or perhaps not so well-intentioned, who seem bent on imposing massive adjustment costs on U.S. commuters and U.S. industry.

We are poised for an oil boom not seen since the age of Texas and Oklahoma wildcatting. With a friendly new administration and more exploration out West, offshore, in the Gulf and in Alaska to augment the Dakotas oil renaissance, we will soon save hundreds of billions of dollars in imported fuel costs, stop subsidizing our enemies, perhaps help to lower energy prices worldwide, create “millions of new jobs,” and give a larger window of opportunity for solar, batteries, and alternative energies to become more efficient and cost competitive in the free market.

Mr Hanson might better stick to the classics: lower worldwide energy prices mean on the one hand that the Saudis will have to tighten their robes, but on the other hand that the incentives to improve on solar, wind, and other energy sources are attenuated.  Note, however, that extracting oil from under the Dakotas makes more sense than attempting to grow additional corn in the Dakotas for the purpose of brewing ethanol.

He might be on to something, however, in recognizing that resources are scarce, and privation can imply demands present, but not acted upon.

[P]rivate enterprise is hoarding cash, uncertain over the costs of ObamaCare, in fear of more regulations and higher taxes, stung by “at some point you’ve made enough money” harassing bluster, and still convinced that equally cautious consumers are simply not buying. Yet, the country is still growing, still needs new homes, more food, and more energy. There are few strikes. Americans remain more self-reliant than our competitors. We are not a shrinking nation with the demographic crises of a Europe or Russia. Soon the mounting pressure will be released by a new change in government and we will see a recovery that should have occurred more than two years ago when the recession officially “ended” in June 2009 — only all the more enhanced due to its delay.

Perhaps instead of the forced savings of War Bonds, seventy years ago, we have forced savings thanks to regime uncertainty. On the other hand, financial resets involve a different sort of readjustment than an ordinary inventory-driven recession, and the recovery might be slow, no matter who occupies the White House.

But perhaps, this time, the technocrats will have a record of failure to defend.

The next time Keynesians lecture us on more borrowing or greater spending (fill in the blanks), Americans will perhaps ask, “So we need to borrow at least $5 trillion within three years? Keep interest rates at near zero? Vastly inflate the money supply? Extend unemployment insurance to over 100 weeks? Exceed 50 million on food stamps?”

With an inept Carter, the left’s lament was “weak messenger.” With the triangulating Clinton, it was “weak message.” With Obama, despite the recent defections and liberal angst, there were both the messianic messenger and the true-blue message. What’s left? The American people turned on both in less than two years. That change of mood will lead the way to necessary reform in a way a less harmful McCain administration could not have achieved: greater revenue from tax simplification, tax reduction, and greater tax compliance, less regulations, entitlement reform, and budgetary discipline. Obama is doing to liberal politics what no right-wing activist could dream up.

The self-styled progressives might view the preceding as post hoc nec ergo propter hoc on a grand scale,  but then, they've been riding that pony since about 1945.

AT SCHOOL CROSSINGS, TAKE IT SLOW.

Let the little shavers grow.  (Burma Shave).

For 18 years, Jim Fischer has commanded this spot in front of Manitoba School, shepherding kids twice daily across four lanes of Forest Home traffic. At an age that many people never live to see or need serious assistance to manage, Fischer is aiming for another perfect-attendance record on the job this year.

Good for him. When I attended Manitoba, there was a city crossing guard on duty at 43rd Street, mostly to enforce the crosswalk at the traffic lights there. Mr Fischer protects the 41st Street crossing, at the school's front door.

"Sometimes, I have to be very careful," Fischer says. "You should see how fast these cars go - 50 or 60 miles an hour through here. Even though I put that (stop sign) right down in their face, these cars will not stop. I have to push them back."

Wisconsin drivers, becoming more like Illinois drivers? I used to get off the morning pull-in bus that turned back at 74th and Oklahoma at 8.32 to return to the Kinnickinnic Station, set me down at 41st and Forest Home at about 8.45.  No crossing guard in those days, and I don't recall any A. J. Foyt wannabees practicing on Forest Home.

ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES.

In Centralia, Washington, transportation planners understand the case for not quite so high speed rail.

In the Northwest, passenger rail has purposely taken some of the speed out of high speed. Instead, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) measures its rail initiatives based on a three-part definition of convenience: reducing total trip time while boosting system efficiency and average speed. Scott Witt, director of WSDOT’s State Rail and Marine Office, says a number of studies all indicate that sticking with faster (rather than fastest) rail would allow the region to realize 90 percent of the ridership and revenue targets at 50 percent of the cost of true high-speed rail, which can peak at 150 mph on Amtrak’s Acela service in the Northeast.

The lion’s share of the $781 million in federal passenger rail funding awarded to Washington is dedicated to raising the average speed by eliminating slow parts of the corridor with new bypasses and other upgrades.

At a top speed of 110, station-to-station running times are only a few minutes longer than they would be with an acceleration to 150.  And strategically placed additional trackage permits more effective mingling of passenger trains with the freight trains.  In the Pacific Northwest, riders see the value of the intermediate stops, something that Centralia business interests see as a marketing plus.

Back in the Hub City, Flossie Heymann, who owns and runs Heymann Whinery with her husband, notes that visitors who come by car may stumble upon Centralia’s downtown after shopping at the area outlets, but tourists who come by train arrive on purpose. “They come as couples or in small groups. They know we’re here and come for a day trip of antiquing and exploring our historic downtown.”

For Heymann and other local businesses, trains are an integral part of the downtown, bringing in city people from Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, as well as those who don’t have cars. As she pours some wine for the next tasting at her shop across the street from the station, Heymann coyly adds, “There’s nothing like a little wine while you are waiting for a train.”

Indeed so, and those Talgo trains have bar cars. Wisconsin, are you listening? Nothing could be finer than Miller Time in the lower level lounge of a Super Dome.

NO DEFENSE.

The Quest to Become the Next Boise State comes up short, again.

Winning at Central Michigan for the first time since 2005 was a goal for this senior class. No one was looking toward the end of the season and the ultimate standard this team was to be judged by: winning a Mid-American Conference title. For the past seven days, players and coach said all the right things.

Which made it shocking when the Huskies trailed by 17 points after the first quarter, a hole it never dug out of in a 48-41 loss in front of 16,539 fans at Kelly/Shorts Stadium on Saturday.

Everybody sees the problem.

Among the numerous problems facing the 2-3 Huskies right now – a defense that abandons fundamentals in critical situations, an offense not meeting its own expectations – is that NIU seems incapable of playing well for four consecutive quarters.

Perhaps these teething troubles will be put right, although a solid mid-major team with six or seven wins isn't a good get for a bowl game.  The strong Mid-American teams tend to lose money on their bowl games in any event.  And the push for increased enrollment in the form of commuter and online students is unlikely to put many more bodies in the stands on game day, although those enrollments might be a source of additional student fee revenue to subsidize the sports program.

Meanwhile, in the fieldhouse that hosted at least two NCAA tournament basketball games an impromptu sports program has been thriving without any student fee moneys

Tamara Carlson admits it’s kind of nerdy. However, that doesn’t stop her from getting together with a group of Northern Illinois University students each week to play Quidditch – a sport lifted from the pages of the Harry Potter book series.

Carlson normally wouldn’t be found practicing for a sport in the field house. But for Quidditch, she makes an exception.

“I’m anti-sports,” Carlson, a senior, said during practice. “This is enough nerdiness to make it fun.”

Though the game was designed for wizards with magical powers, “muggles” have figured out a way to play, too. The game played at Hogwarts requires players to fly on brooms and seek out the elusive “golden snitch” to win the game. At NIU, Quidditch players do use brooms, only they run while holding one between their legs. That means players need the skills to catch and throw the “quaffle” and “bludger” balls using one hand.

I hope that "NCAA nihilius" is among the spells in the Hogwarts curriculum.  But deeper in the story is a troubling observation.

NIU junior Mary Clabots said even the least likely sports fans can enjoy a game of Quidditch. But the game, she said, isn’t necessarily about the competition.

“Quidditch is a way to relive our childhood,” Clabots said. “The transition into college is hard enough as it is. You feel like a kid again.”

We see a lot of that. I suspect the popularity of beanbag (apart from the opportunities to keep score with a six pack) is in part a consequence of those overscheduled childhoods, too full of the organized sports that benefit a few people and turn off the likes of Ms Carlson.  On the other hand, there's something encouraging about spontaneous, self-structured play.