NOT GERRYMANDERED.

An assignment of electoral votes by Congressional district suggests that the Republicans are a closer approximation to a national party than are the Democrats.  Now comes Michael Barone, with a finer-grained analysis of the construction of Congressional districts.

Democratic voters, particularly in the two Obama elections, tend to be clustered in black, Hispanic and gentry liberal neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas and (this makes a difference in state legislative districting but not so much in congressional districting) university towns. Democrats win districts in such areas by huge margins, with upwards of 70% of the vote in many cases. Republican voters are pretty evenly dispersed outside these clusters.

Left for further research: whether the presence of the constraint in the voting rights laws that requires some fraction of the districts be majority-minority augments the concentration of Democrats. Absent that requirement, more Congressional districts might be contested, and the House and to some extent the Senate less fractious.

Mr Barone doesn't solve that problem, but a related problem offers food for thought.

Proof [c.q.] comes from this “Electoral Reform Map” which divides the United States into 50 equal-population states. The folks who did this want to reduce the power of small states in the Electoral College. They used algorithms in order to draw the states and then smoothed out the boundaries, keeping major metro areas together in one state (or more than one when they have enough population). It’s a pretty neat looking map. And each state would have the same number of electoral votes.

It's also a pretty politically infeasible map: imagine running the State Patrol in one of the Trans-Mountain states.  The simpler way out might be for Congressional districts to be drawn on an equal-area, equal-population basis wherever possible.

GIMMICKS.

Via Media uses the behavior of the Argentinian government to make a case for proper funding of pensions.

What’s needed is an actuarially sound, adequately financed, conservatively invested pension system. Anything else is a gimmick. Unfortunately, there are lots of gimmicks floating around these days.

Yes, and there's plenty of blame to go around. The U.S. government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation exists because capitalists invested too much of the pension money in too few stocks, or because bankruptcy offered an easy way out of those liabilities.  That same U.S. government made the annual "budget deficit" smaller by using current receipts to the "Social" "Security" "Trust" "Fund" in excess of current payments to cover other governmental expenses, writing the "trustees" an IOU.  Here in Illinois, a substantial part of the supposed shortfall in the various state pension funds is the absence of the return on absent investments that the state did not make, so as to be able to pay for other pet projects.  The state has been playing the same cash-flow games with other vendors.

UNLEASH THE RENT SEEKERS.

The Highway Trust Fund is the fiction by which the truckers seek to live at the expense of everybody else, and particularly the railroads.  The trucking lobby is pushing Congress to allow heavier trucks on the public roads.  The railroaders push back.

The [Assoociation of American Railroads] has commissioned a freight diversion study that should be completed by March 14. Initial reports indicate the [association] study is going to reaffirm substantial freight diversion from rail to truck and a large increase in the number of trucks on our nation’s highways. Products most vulnerable to diversion include steel, minerals, agricultural products, food products, autos, and chemicals and plastics.

Fine, let's make sure the heavier trucks bear the full cost of the road-strengthening programs, as well as the increased congestion costs those elephants will impose on everyone behind them.  We don't want to become China, with days-long traffic jams.

SYMBOLISM OVER SUBSTANCE.

The Minnesota Vikings, probably at great expense, give the team logo a makeover, to the glee of a scribe in Packer Nation.

Maybe the team should spend more time enhancing its on-field roster and less time trying to improve its logo. As everyone in Wisconsin knows, the Vikings joined the NFL in 1961 and are still looking for their first Super Bowl title.

Chortle.

BUSINESS AS USUAL.

Democrat ward-heeler politician cops a plea.

Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife Sandi intend to plead guilty to federal charges alleging the former congressman misused $750,000 in campaign funds while she understated their income on tax returns for six years, their lawyers say.

Jackson Jr., 47, a Democrat from Chicago, was charged in a criminal information Friday with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and false statements. He faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and other penalties.

Sandi Jackson was charged with one count of filing false tax returns. She faces up to three years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and other penalties.

Jackson Jr. is accused of diverting $750,000 in campaign funds for personal use.

Federal authorities allege that Jackson Jr. used campaign funds to purchase a $43,350 men’s gold-plated Rolex watch, $5,150 worth of fur capes and parkas, and $9,588 in children’s furniture. The purchases were made between 2007 and 2009, according to the criminal information, which authorities noted is not evidence of guilt.

The editors at a local newspaper express dismay.

Ask yourself how an enormously gifted attorney, accustomed to the national limelight even before his eight terms in the U.S. House, could think his bold conduct involving staff members and other potential witnesses against him would remain secret.

Ask how he could squander a probable lifetime position in Congress. Squander all the good he might do there for the people he had sought to provide with better jobs and better futures.

Ask how he could humiliate not one but three generations of his globally known family — his famous father and his young children included.

The error the editors commit is one of thinking of a safely blue district as a mainstream Congressional district, rather than as a microcosm of a third world failed state. Here's that editorial's characterization of the boodling.

That's more money than many of the defrocked congressman's former constituents on the South Side of Chicago will earn in their lifetimes. And it doesn't include an additional $28,500 in allegedly undisclosed gifts and loans, and enough dishonest paperwork to earn hard time.

Those destitute constituents are simply a means to re-election for Democrat ward-heelers.  It's a whole lot easier to posture and call out the System for the persistence of poverty than it is to ask for an outbreak of bourgeois virtues among those constituents, or to end the policies that enable the helpless while buying votes.

Representative Jackson's seat is open.  It's a safely blue district, and there's a lot of Democrat interest in securing that potential lifetime job.  The Chicago television stations are already running the attack ads, a goodly number of which attempt to tie Democrat candidates to the National Rifle Association.  Nowhere is there a libertarian or Republican voice suggesting that private gun ownership might be the only recourse available to a citizen otherwise at the mercy of corrupt cops, gang turf wars, and of the young people rendered unemployable by the minimum wage, which Chicago Democrats state and national both seek to raise, and by the failure of the Chicago Public Schools to develop human capital.

FIVE YEARS.

Governor Quinn and President Peters spoke at the memorial service.

Northern Illinois University photograph.

An onlooker has Wisconsin present in spirit.

At a football game, watch the Northern Illinois bench closely at the change to the fourth quarter.  Many teams have the players raise four fingers, to signify ownership of the fourth quarter.  Northern Illinois players raise five.

Between the third and the fourth quarters of every football game, the team, support staff, band members and fans put up five fingers in memorial for the Feb. 14, 2008, victims.

The tradition, known by the team as “Five in the Sky,” was started by former NIU football coach Jerry Kill, according to Dan Stinson, technical assistant for athletics.

“It started after the school shooting,” said Alex Kube, a 2010 graduate and linebacker. “Coach Kill brought it up and all the captains agreed on it.”

Current players hope to continue the tradition.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

An Energy and Capital report reminds readers that in questions of resource allocation, what people choose not to do is as important as what they choose to do.

Although some find it convenient to target high-speed rail as a waste of taxpayer dollars, if you dive into the numbers, you'll find that the absence of high-speed rail in this country actually inhibits economic growth...

Recent studies conducted by the Government Accountability Office, the European Union, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials found that the actual cost of building and/or improving rail lines is significantly lessthan the cost per mile of alternatives.

In the area of high-speed rail, it was found that not building high-speed rail in California would cost the state $8.2 billion in foregone benefits over 40 years...

In the Midwest: $11.7 billion over 40 years; the Northeast Corridor: $5.5 billion over 40 years; and in the Pacific Northwest: $1.1 billion over 40 years.

Interestingly — and certainly not in line with what detractors argue — we are finding more and more evidence that maintaining the status quo and not investing appropriately in rail and high-speed rail infrastructure will actually be an increasingly expensive proposition for taxpayers.

Go. Read and understand. And contemplate the private losses implied by people spending more time at the airport than they do in the air, or more time stuck in traffic or waiting for the light to change than they do actually moving.

O-BA-BLA-BLA-BLA-BLA-MEH.

You'd expect the editors at National Review to characterize Our President's most recent policy address as "halting and graceless".  A similar characterization from Democrat operative Kirsten Powers is newsworthy.

If the State of the Union address Tuesday night is any indication, it appears President Obama's chief speechwriter has been replaced by a cliché-generator circa 1960. His erstwhile oratory was a melee of cringe-inducing lines ripped straight from a sit-in.

Perhaps that's what one would expect of a university lecturer in constitutional law. It's easy enough to provoke sophomores into a pointless but profound-sounding discussion by unleashing a few Democrat cliches, and there may be opportunities to induce some semblance of critical thinking among the One-Ls  in a similar manner.  Even Democrat hacks get it.

Obama is not a liberal visionary with deep desires to institute a progressive agenda. If he is, he's a miserable failure. You need look no further than his own record (starting with foreign policy) and then Tuesday night's speech for evidence. Banalities and tropes are not a governing philosophy or a plan. The immigration piece was good, but hardly a profile in courage. After all, even the GOP wants immigration reform now. There is also the small fact that Obama promised to deal with immigration in his first term.

The edict on climate change was despotic, not liberal. I believe climate change is a problem and humans contribute to it. However, 'either do what I say or I will just start issuing executive orders' that make green energy companies rich is not the kind of governing we should be lauding, regardless of party or ideological bent.

His plea on gun control was manipulative and empty. It worked thematically, but failed on substance. The only point was to make Republicans look bad, while simultaneously lecturing about compromise and the importance of working together.

The good news, though, is that the State of the Union show is ineffective.

It’s a worst-of-both-worlds form of political communication: All the pomp of a Speech from the Throne without any of the give-and-take of Question Period.

Compare and contrast:

“Speech from the throne” is the term used (with certain variations) in Westminister parliamentary systems. The head of state reads a statement about what “my government…” will do in the coming year. Then once it, and the dignity of the Queen (or her representative in Canada and other Commonwealth Realms) pretending that the government speaks for everyone, is over, things go back to normal. And that normal involves the head of government being hissed and booed and subjected to harsh questions in parliament.

In this respect, the State of the Union is really the worst of both worlds. The head of state stands before the people’s representatives (oh, and the senators, too) and delivers something allegedly about the nation as a whole. But then, as head of government–and therefore a partisan leader–he (i.e. the same person, unlike in Westminster systems) never sticks around to answer tough questions and subject himself to ridicule for the absurdities he has just mouthed. Instead, the opposition has to send someone to a TV/radio studio to give an equally absurd speech that hardly anyone listens to, and thus an opportunity for the sides to engage each other when people actually are paying attention is squandered.

Perhaps, under Question Time, a disgruntled Member of Congress would have the opportunity to demonstrate a lie, rather than yelling about it.

VENITE PEREGRINUS.

It's possible for the faithful to obtain their Ash Wednesday blessing at curbside. "Churches all over the country are making it easier for parishioners pressed for time to get their Ash Wednesday blessing... via the drive-thru."  At some churches, the wanderer's blessing is available in the morning, at others in the evening.  At least one commentator is unimpressed. "You could conceivably get the mark of the cross on your forehead while still gulping down the breakfast burrito and hash brown you picked up at the last drive-thru."

The whole point of Lent is sacrifice and reflection.  Obtaining the symbol at little effort strikes me as missing the point.

FASCHING IST.

DEMORALIZING THE FACULTY.

Jane Shaw of the Pope Center wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal suggesting that diminished expectations in higher education diminish outcomes.

For many students, college is a smorgasbord of easy courses chosen for their lack of academic rigor. There is no serious "core curriculum." Students spend limited time studying. Faculty and administrators make matters worse by allowing students to fill up their time with courses like UNC-Chapel Hill's "Dogs and People: From Prehistory to the Urbanized Future" and "Music in Motion: American Popular Music and Dance." When students can get a minor in "Social and Economic Justice" without ever taking a course in the economics department, it's hardly surprising that businesses aren't lining up to hire them.

The column prompted a number of letters to the editor, now lost somewhere in cyberspace, but Ms Shaw's colleague George Leef chose to highlight one of them.

As the demographics change and most second- and third-tier universities compete for those students (and their dollars) we will see an acceleration of the race to the bottom. Universities will soon start selling themselves by that they can help someone earn that coveted engineering degrees in three years (and soon it will become two).

U.S. universities used to be uniquely superb but the quality is deteriorating rapidly. We must ask why and fix the problem before it it too late.

That's from an engineering professor at Alabama-Huntsville, an institution that ought to be able to exploit the proximity to the Redstone Arsenal to develop rocket scientists to do rocket science, rather than value derivative securities.  Instead, though, it appears as though Huntsville sees its future as the degree-grantor of last resort, never mind that by so doing, it might be enhancing social stratification rather than overturning it.

GET 'EM OFF, GET 'EM ON, GET 'EM OUT OF TOWN.

The Shore Line Interurban Historical Society obtains a transcript of a WBBM Radio retrospective of the North Shore Line, 50 years after it quit running.

Decades before the Obama Administration began talking about speeding up Amtrak, the North Shore was a railroad without speed limits – just occasional restrictions.

“There was something in the air about the North Shore,” said Tom Jervan, who rode its streetcars in Waukegan as a child and later worked for the railroad. “There was a period in the existence of that railroad where it was the super-interurban in the country. It was the fastest. It had the facilities like nobody else had. It did everything in superlatives.”

Let the record show that the railroad coaxed 111 mph out of an Electroliner on a test run.  The smart guys said no electric railroad using trolley poles and simple catenary could do that.  It's all in good maintenance.

Even in its final months, the North Shore operated expresses that hit 80 miles an hour between stations on the main line, the Skokie Valley Route, to Waukegan and on a branch to Libertyville and Mundelein, in addition to the limiteds that ran hourly from 6 a.m. until midnight to and from Milwaukee. The two top-of-the-line Electroliners ran every three hours, back and forth between Chicago and Milwaukee. Much of the line was served by four trains an hour, meticulously cleaned and cared for.

“There was an espirit d’corps,” Jervan said at a reunion of North Shore employees, the most recent of which took place in November. “We kept the darned thing running. Our on-time performance was usually around 95 or 96 percent. In your dreams, Amtrak. In your dreams, Metra.”

At its peak, the North Shore reported 99.26 percent on-time performance, and it did so with equipment that, except for the two 1941-vintage Electroliners, pre-dated the Great Depression.

“Our oldest rolling stock was built in 1915,” Jervan said. “They were all still running, racking up in many cases millions of miles each. The Highwood shop, if you were to look at that shop and compare it with a modern (railroad repair) shop, you’d say, ‘How did anybody get any work done in this prehistoric cave?’”

With the abandonment order subject to judicial review, rolling stock due for scheduled maintenance was disassembled on Friday awaiting part replacement that never came on Monday.

The North Shore used to boast in its advertisements that you could set your watch by its trains. Jervan said snow never stopped the North Shore for long. Neither did bitter cold. And he said its trains moved up and down the line with dispatch. Its trains never sat in stations.

“The dwell time (time stopped) at our stations was negligible,” he said. “The dwell time that Metra has at its stations is a total joke. In this time and age, in the 21st Century, they need to look back at an interurban line that ran with cars built in 1915 on how to run a railroad.”

In defense of Metra and Amtrak, those sailors on liberty weren't schlepping their sea-bags with them, intercity travellers weren't burdened with those roller bags, and commuters didn't have laptops and smart 'phones.  All the same, the North Shore assigned enough collectors (assistant conductors) to be able to load and unload through all the doors.  On the other hand, an Electroliner had seats for 150 passengers or so, about the same carrying capacity as one Metra gallery coach.

The [Skokie Swift] is the only operating remnant of the North Shore, but many of its historic interurban cars still can be found today in museums, including the Illinois Railway Museum, in Union, which has more than a half-dozen operating North Shore cars and one of the Electroliners. The Fox River Trolley Museum, in South Elgin, has two operable North Shore cars and Wisconsin’s East Troy Electric Railway Museum is restoring a North Shore “Limited” car. Other North Shore cars reside in museums as far away as Iowa, Connecticut and Maine.

We'll look at some of those preservation efforts in the near future.

BEFORE YOU MAKE TERRITORIAL DEMANDS, OBTAIN TACTICAL SUPREMACY.

In life, Red China is making territorial claims that aren't sitting well with neighboring countries.  In Threat Vector, the latest from the school of Tom Clancy, the Red Chinese first do all that is within their power to take down the secret, super-competent Counter Terrorism Unit that got its start in Red Rabbit,  passes a few field tests in The Teeth of the Tiger, made its bones in  Dead or Alive, and got roughed up by the Soviets, er, Putinite elements in the Russian government in Locked On, and when the takedown seems to be going well enough, the Reds start enforcing their territorial claims out of the barrel of a gun, just as the Great Helmsman would have it.  It's Tom Clancy, and it's more about the action, and the good guys winning, than it is about character development.  All the same, it would help if the assistant authors were more careful about on the one hand referring to the Sino-Russian war of The Bear and the Dragon, while on the other hand having a principal character exfiltrated from China on a Russian freight aircraft returning from delivering a load of iron bombs.

I'm going to return to posting reviews of heavier stuff.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

NOT IN MY BACK FORTY.

There is still a Western frontier, and still it is closing.  Years ago, the coming of the railroad disrupted centuries-old hunting and migrating patterns of the aboriginal inhabitants of the plains.  Today, it's the centuries-old farming patterns of the Amish being disrupted.

Now that simple lifestyle is being threatened by a proposed railroad owned by a coal giant and two of the world's wealthiest men. The proposed line would bisect the Amish community's land and disrupt farm and ranching operations, [farmer Levi or David] Borntregers said.

The proposed Tongue River Railroad would open Montana's vast Otter Creek Coal Tracts — located some 15 miles to the south of the Borntregers' farm — to strip mining. According to the project's supporters, the railroad would haul an estimated 20 million tons of coal annually from Arch Coal's planned mine near the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation to Midwest power plants.

The Tongue River Railroad is owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett's BNSF Railway, Arch Coal and billionaire candy bar magnate Forrest Mars Jr. Mars, a landowner along one of the previous Tongue River routes, bought a third of the railroad in 2011 after fighting it for years. The proposed route that once crossed his land is now off the table.

The resistance of the landed gentry to the iron horse is also nothing new. There's at least one cosmetic tunnel in Britain's horse country so that some squire not be disturbed by smoke and steam.  I'd expect better of a Mars.  The candy once went to market in billboard refrigerator cars.

SLIPPING AND UNSLIPPING.

An inventor suggests that passenger trains be configured as rolling platforms so as to save time.

No matter how fast a high-speed train travels, it still has to slow down to 0 mph to pick up additional passengers. That problem has been solved by a designer who dreamed up a way for high-speed local trams to catch up to those speedster trains, picking up and dropping off passengers without requiring the express train to stop.

There's video.  Imagine track-level rendezvous, docking, opening the airlocks, albeit in the presence of atmospheric pressure and gravitational clues that the target and chase vehicles are in motion.

If you think about it, this is a problem that needed to be solved long ago. You've probably noticed that trains (and buses, too) waste a lot of time slowing down, pulling into stations, waiting to pick up and drop off passengers, and then speeding back up again. But with this idea, high-speed trains might be able to keep on rolling indefinitely, while those feeder "trams" do all the slowing down and speeding up.

Half the problem was solved long ago.

‘Through Carriage to London’ announced the proud notice at Stratford Old Town as the 7.45am train for Blisworth prepared to leave from the ‘Up’ platform sometime in the 1930s. Would be commuters were directed by station staff to a smartly maintained LNER ex-Great Central slip coach attached to the back of the train. It contrasted greatly with the two ancient now LMS owned coaches which formed the rest of the train. As the signal pulled off the train set off at a leisurely pace towards Byfield, stopping en route not only to pick up the occasional passenger but also milk churns bound for London via the Great Central route. At Byfield the slip coach would be met by a LNER loco probably an ex GCR N5 tank and whisked off around the curve to Woodford, along with the milk churns, where it would be quickly attached to the Mansfield-Marylebone express. Passengers in the slip coach would arrive at Marylebone at 10.48am after a 3hr 3mins journey. Not exactly express standard.

The return journey to Stratford would be more exciting and much quicker too by means of the crack 6.20pm Bradford express. The slip coach having been carefully checked over under cover at Marylebone, would be attached to the main train, with a further slip coach behind it which was destined for Brackley. This was to be slipped at Finmere and worked forward to Brackley tender first by a Woodford loco, often a B7 ‘Black Pig’. There was much competition for the perceived potential first class custom in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ country and the Finmere slip coach was in direct competition with GWR slips made at Bicester. Both slip coaches were protected at the rear by both white and red lamps and were manned by Marylebone based guards, while the main train guard would be a Leicester man. 

It's not the safest practice, and in the United States it is unlawful to move occupied passenger equipment without a locomotive attached.  In Britain, slipping might have originated by accident, but it became a way for a railroad to deliver passengers to intermediate stops more quickly.

If a carriage could be left behind by accident, and convey passengers safely to a station at which the train did not stop, why could it not be done deliberately and thus save delay ? In a short time the slip-hook coupling was evolved, and the slip-coach, as we know it to-day became a regular feature of railway operation.

The slip portion of a train is not limited to one coach only ; so long as the coach with the slipping apparatus is placed next the "fixed" part of the train, the slip portion may be made up to any required length within certain limits.

With fully-automatic couplers that make or unmake brake and communication line connections concurrently with the addition or deletion of cars, wouldn't the simpler solution be to do adds and drops on the fly? On the other hand, particularly with rapid-transit equipment, a drop or add can be made in a stop of about a minute.

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

I ended last year's Fifty Book Challenge with a study of the run-up to World War II in the bloodlands, followed by a history of the first Christmas of U.S. involvement in that war.  Here it's half-past February, and the first entry in this year's Challenge will be Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945.  Long ago, Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle told this story from the perspective of those soldiers, civilians, and government officials who were able and willing to comment for the record.  Mr Kershaw has been able to make use of records that were on the other side of the Iron Curtain from Mr Ryan, and he's accordingly able to provide a more accurate and detailed account of what went wrong.  It's not as simple as the existence of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender giving the German government no reason to lay down their arms, nor can the German resistance be laid off completely on the aftereffects of the 20 July 1944 coup attempt against the German dictator.  German fear of what the Soviet forces would do likely had an effect.  But a formulation Cornelius Ryan came up with in advance of the Market-Garden campaign might also have mattered: the Germans were losing the war more rapidly than the Allies, east or west, could win it.

Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.

THE REAL REGIONAL PARTY.

Court intellectuals for the Democratic Party have been peddling two narratives about the Republicans: first, that its evangelical and Tea Party factions are poisoning the party's appeal with mainstream Americans, relegating the party to southern or relatively unpopulated states.  The current presidential electoral map reinforces that perception.

Electoral map retrieved from The Atlantic Monthly.

Second, their reaction to Republican legislators in swing states implementing "as Maine goes, so goes the nation" allocation of electoral votes is typically that it's an attempt to reverse, or to steal, the presidential election.  The dorks and prissy women and near men on MSNBC were able to speak of little else, at least for one segment per hour, for much of the last few days of January.

THE ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES.

A reader will not find much cheerleading for gee-whiz bullet trains at Cold Spring Shops.  What some critics of improved Passenger Rail call "half-fast" is part of a more incremental approach.  It's all about the frequency, connectivity, and reliability.

A colleague at the University of Minnesota whose work on these things passes peer review makes the same case.

Actual [Amtrak] ridership is highest in the Northeast corridor, where the Acela service, along with other conventional passenger rail runs today. The other big Amtrak markets are between San Diego and Los Angeles, between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area, between Seattle and Portland, and between Chicago and a variety of midwestern cities, in particular St. Louis.

Corridors that get traffic now with relatively slow service are more likely to get higher levels of demand when upgraded (made faster and more frequent) than corridors that get almost no ridership now. This argues for (1) incremental upgrades where the benefits outweigh the costs, (2) focusing on specific proven markets rather than trying to connect random large cities.

We should be looking for routes where train is more cost-effective than either driving or taking an airplane. This distance is certainly less than 600 miles for most of the US, under current costs of travel. (Once we have proven we can connect large places closer than 100 miles, we should connect large places less than 200 miles, and then expand outward. We should not start with a grand vision which will simply collapse of its own weight). We should also be looking for routes with large trip generators at either end.

There are two problems, though. First, anybody with a serious case of Potomac Fever thinks almost exclusively in Grand Visions. Second, state governors and passenger rail authorities are quite happy to have Grand Visions paying for projects that ought more properly be financed locally.

This is not to say there are not segments which could productively be (and are) served by rail. The Northeast corridor is one. Chicago to Milwaukee is one. Los Angeles to San Diego is one. There are a few others. The key point is they are local serving, and should be locally supported. There is no need for US federal involvement. If the projects are worthwhile, the states and cities and private railroads should fund them. Almost all the benefits are local, the costs should be borne by those who benefit.

Local governments seem quite willing to appropriate funds for road salt and cold mix, but somehow buying railroad cars or multiple train paths from the local freight carrier is for somebody else to do.

PROFESSORS GET PAID TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

The Deep End of the Pool reopens, and the manager meditates on responsibility.

Our students are, in my view, starved for discipline, and I think we regularly disappoint them concerning it. Of course, as people grow up, most adjust their ideas about authority greatly. It’s a pretty safe bet that their hopes, fears, and expectations about their teachers do not correspond point for point with our own ideas about our roles as helpers and authorities. The child thinks of it in terms of power that might or might not be justified; we, I hope, put reasonableness and justification far forward, and, because it is not the reason we signed up for this teaching gig in the first place, we have to remind ourselves periodically (or rather, students do regularly point out) that we are in fact arbiters and have to exercise the power of our offices responsibly, fairly, and gently.

But we have to exercise them. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote of the space-travelers who salted the galaxy with sentinels, "sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed."

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY.

The National Association of Scholars looks at course outlines from the flagship public institutions of Texas, and asks if Race, Class, and Gender are dominating U.S. History.

There are a number of dog-whistles being blown in the title of that report.  A right-handed dog might hear that Marxoids in the faculty are introducing their orthodoxies into the curriculum to the exclusion of other modes of analysis.  A left-handed dog might hear another attempt to purge the curriculum of excessively radical thought.  The reality is probably more complicated.

Texas historian Jeremi Suri notes, possibly on the basis of a prior about the organization, that to conclude any one mode of thought dominates the Texas history curriculum, is dumb.

No one cares more about teaching politics, foreign policy, and military affairs more than me. It is what I study. It is what I talk about all the time (so my wife and kids complain!). To teach the history of these subjects requires attention to slavery, American Indians, labor unions, women’s suffrage, and everything else I listed above. Politics do not occur in a vacuum. The outcomes of war are not decided only by a few smart men. Elections, like the one we just experienced, are driven by many factors that include race, class, and gender.

The comments section gets somewhat more heated.

Retired Texas historian Richard Pells offers a different perspective for readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Texas has an extremely conservative legislature, which has already intruded on how faculty teach and on defining "accountability," and has contemplated a host of other educational "reforms." At the same time, state support for the university has been severely reduced over the past several years.

I do not, nor do my former colleagues in the history department, think that the legislature or any other outside group should interfere with how to structure a curriculum, or apply financial pressure to force faculty members to teach certain courses in certain ways. Such interference would be a dangerous infringement on academic freedom.

Still, what University of Texas historians need to do is stop railing against the report and start re-examining their hiring practices. Historians, like all academics, tend to clone themselves when they employ new faculty members. They think that since my field is vital, we need more people teaching the same thing. But what American historians at UT really should do is expand their far-too-limited intellectual horizons.

That means abandoning their current political and intellectual biases, opening themselves up to new subjects and new ideas, and recruiting new sorts of faculty members. Only then will the history department fulfill the true mission of a great university by fostering debate and exploring alternative ways of understanding America's past and present.

I do not question that those faculty members who specialize only in the plight of women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are in any way ignoring legitimate problems in American history from which those groups have long suffered. Moreover, academic historians before the 1960s ignored the experiences of those groups for far too many decades.

But I am arguing that the National Association of Scholars' report is not a document that should be sneered at or ignored. Rather, what the history department at the University of Texas needs (and what history departments all over the country could benefit from) is a willingness—in fact, an eagerness—to hire people who are pursuing different interests. And who don't simply replow the same topics, teach the same types of courses, and reinforce the same (as Orwell said about the ideologues of the 1930s) "smelly" orthodoxies.

Put another way, where tenure committees were once upon a time excluding left academics, they're now excluding non-left academics?  At Minding the Campus, K. C. Johnson weighs in.  Not Even Past comments, with an index of follow-up links.  Historiann's response induced one of the authors of the Association report to comment on his methods, and the comment section includes quantitative hair-splitting of the most recondite kind.

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?

A Via Media post complains about the current political establishment speaking of government spending as "investment" without making any, well, investments.

Besides promising themselves fat pensions that they refused to save money or tax themselves to pay for, the boomers let the country’s infrastructure run down. The next generation is already staggering under a rising tax burden, student loan debt, and retirees’ massive health care bills. On top of all this, they now have to pay through the nose just to keep the roads, bridges, and tunnels in good repair after years of neglect and deferred maintenance.

Let us be grateful that railroads and some parts of the electric, gas, and oil transmission and distribution networks are owned by investors who, depredations by the short-termers at the corporate level notwithstanding, remain subject to market tests.

At Insta Pundit, there's a little laying of blame.

Reader Juan Paxety writes: “With regard to boomers letting the infrastructure decline, remember that neither Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi are boomers. I’d submit that their generation, The Silent Generation, still maintains a lot of political control and is at least equally culpable.”

Advantage, Cold Spring Shops.

[T]he Speaker of the House is a very early Baby Boomer and the Senate Majority Leader a member of the Silent Generation, quite possibly the most spoiled and indulged generation in U.S. history.

David Broder is no longer among us, and yet his cohort continues to do damage.

Perhaps it will be up to some future generation to say "enough."

The counterculture got all the ink. The rest of us had to grow up in the world they left us. And, Mr Broder, your Silent Generation cohort is complicit -- by its acquiescence -- in the mess.

I've been giving the process-worshippers grief for years, and don't intend to stop just yet.

SOMETIMES X MARKS THE SPOT.

At Voluntary Xchange, an economist deputises for Indiana Jones, and suggests that the remains of Richard III were hidden in plain sight all the time.

LEAD US BACK INTO PENN STATION.

And deliver us from evil.  The New York Times reports that an ambitious plan to provide more passenger amenities in The Pennsylvania Station was a casualty of the financial crash of 2008.

Both the old Penn Station and the post office building were designed by the same firm — McKim, Mead & White.

But the development partners had a far more ambitious, $14 billion plan in mind. They sought to demolish Madison Square Garden, which sits over Penn Station, and build a new arena for the Knicks and Rangers inside the post office. With the Garden gone, they planned to overhaul Penn Station, erecting a glass-enclosed train hall, along with department stores and, nearby, office and residential buildings.

The complicated plan collapsed in 2008 because of the recession.

That plan probably had some support from Times management, which went on record recently as favoring the removal of Madison Square Garden from above the station.

Whether the new train hall would have the grandeur of the original remains to be seen.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, as built.

They also exhibit frustration with what passes for process in New York, in light of the new plan to move some community college facilities into the old post office building, and build some kind of additional waiting and ticketing facilities on the Eighth Avenue side.

“We do need to get going on this station,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, a civic advocacy group. “I’d like to see something exceptional done there.”

The long delay on the Moynihan project is typical of large, complicated redevelopment efforts involving partnerships between private developers and government, like Battery Park City, Hudson Yards or the rejuvenation of Times Square. The projects can languish through the ebb and flow of the economy, legal challenges and changes in Albany or at City Hall.

Last December, I had this to say about procedural delays.

This outlander notes only that Pennsylvania Station was about five years in the construction, and five years to redevelop. The Empire State Building was less than five years in the construction.

The hole at Battery Park is being filled in, but only slowly.

TINPLATE TRAINS AS PERFORMANCE ART.

They can be deployed in the traditional form at the Festive Season.

At New York's Whitney Museum, they provide a gateway to the current feature exhibit, Blues for Smoke.

New York Times photograph by Karsten Moran.

Here's the reviewer's interpretation.

You get a sense of all this in the David Hammons installation “Chasing the Blue Train” that opens the show. Its parameters are set by a half-circle of six turned-on-their-sides baby grands. A pile of bluish coal sits on the floor; an electric toy train, tinted cobalt, tunnels through it and circles the room. Several recordings play — Coltrane, Monk, James Brown’s “Night Train” — simultaneously, loud.

On an obvious level this is a playful homage to Coltrane’s 1957 “Blue Train” album. But it’s also an essay on the ceaseless, questing movement of blacks, often by night, through American history: on the underground railroad, on the freedom train, on the A train to Harlem. The installation had its debut at Exit Art in SoHo in 1989, but has been in Europe ever since. It’s great to see it, and hear it, in New York again.

I may have to rip off the multiple soundtracks for an upcoming Festive Season.

THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND SPEED.

A colleague provides a link to an instructive post illustrating how skimpy the Amtrak network is.

Texas, for example, has three of America's ten largest cities: Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. But the inexplicable lack of a direct rail connection between Houston and Dallas makes the state look, on [the national] map, emptier than Missouri. In fact, the nation's second-largest state had only 465,000 riders in 2012. Missouri, meanwhile, had 739,000.

There's this baseball city on the west bank of the Mississippi River that has two trains a day to Sedalia and Kansas City, four trains a day to Springfield and Chicago, and an overnight train to Little Rock and Texas points.  That's a lot of travel potential for Missourians, even with weak connections among the routes at St. Louis, or onward at Kansas City or Chicago.

There's a map showing the southeastern states, including the Carolinas, which benefit from something resembling an emerging corridor, including extensions of the Northeast Corridor to Savannah and Charlotte, and some of the medium-sized cities of the Old Confederacy have more boardings than some of the larger cities of Texas.  The national map shows substantially more boardings at Detroit and Kalamazoo than at any of the big cities in Texas.  There's a business-friendly (when it's on time) schedule between Longview and St. Louis, but to get anywhere from Longview, you're renting a car or catching a bus.

The good news is, Passenger Rail advocates are catching on.

Unlike airplanes or buses which must make detours to drop off passengers at intermediate points, trains glide into and out of stations with little delay, pausing for under a minute to unload passengers from multiple doors. Trains can, have, and continue to effectively serve small towns and suburbs, whereas bus service increasingly bypasses them.

Ten years of Cold Spring Shops commentary on the value of intermediate stops and dependable service, all in one article. Go, read, and understand.

THE LUXURY OF BEING A SOLE SUPERPOWER.

The Navy claims uncertainties over the budget sequester, or not, are delaying class repairs for CVN-72 Abraham Lincoln.

The U.S. Navy will delay the refueling of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln for an unknown period because of the uncertain fiscal environment due to the ongoing legislative struggle, the service told Congress in a Friday message obtained by USNI News.

The article suggests the Navy is planning other postponements or deferrals of carrier maintenance. With something resembling an arms race in aircraft carriers taking place among Pacific Rim powers, these announcements by the Navy might be the service equivalent of the National Park Service threatening to close Grand Canyon National Park (the country having gotten along despite the canonical Washington Monument being closed for the past year and a half).

Class repairs midway through the expected 50-year service life of a carrier take time.

The Navy had budgeted $92 million for the Lincoln refueling in its FY 2012 budget.

Each Nimitz-class carrier undergoes a refueling and complete overhaul at the halfway point in its 50-year service life.

The overhaul will take four years. I suspect that there'd be more urgency if carriers served a purpose other than giving admirals large flagships.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's navy brought 29 new fleet carriers and 122 new escort carriers on-line and eliminated the Imperial Japanese Navy as a strategic force in less time. Abraham Lincoln's navy built Monitor in under 100 days, augmented the fleet over the next few years, and cut off rebel commerce in less time.  Some of the later monitors remained in commission for close to half a century, presumably without any four-year overhauls.

STOP ENABLING DYSFUNCTION.

John Hawkins takes the relatively high ground.

When you reward bad behavior with money and fame, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get more bad behavior. Snooki may be a skanky loser, but I wonder how many young girls are thinking, “A skanky ‘loser’ with money, fame, and a TV show sounds pretty good to me!”

If you don't get a gig on reality TV, self-promotion is easy enough. Another brawl in a Chicago area high school received wide circulation and a segment on the local news.  Another day, another high school, another fight.  What's more instructive is the reaction in the comment section.  Shall we say there is little sympathy for the notion that people behaving badly might be responding rationally to crummy social conditions, and a lot of sympathy for the counter-contention that bad behavior perpetuates crummy social conditions.  Here's the John Hawkins summation.

We seem to start out with an assumption that our culture is healthy, vibrant, and can’t be damaged by any of our societal tinkering. It’s hard to understand what would give anyone this impression when roughly a third of the population has been divorced; 73 percent of black children, 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites are born outside marriage; and 1 out of every 32 Americans is in prison or on parole

Yet we slur Christianity, encourage gay marriage, talk up single motherhood, push deviancy in TV and movies, mock morality, and scoff at codes of honor. Throughout most of history, civilizations haven’t looked at attempts to stave off cultural rot as religious zealotry or prudishness; they’ve considered it to be simple common sense.

There's disagreement in the comment section there, at a somewhat higher level of discourse than prevails at the Chicago report.

GETTING THE MODEL RIGHT.

Kevin Carey looks at the effects of the Wayne State model for higher education.

People may vehemently disagree about how to help minority students in K-12 education, but nearly all agree that the students need help in the first place. Yet in every big city with a headline-making, underperforming school district, there’s a public higher education system receiving not 1/100th of the scrutiny. Detroit, for example, is widely seen to have the worst public school system in America—so bad that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he “lose[s] sleep over” the plight of the city’s 50,000 students. But how many people know that Wayne State, Detroit’s main public university, has an 8 percent—yes, 8 percent—graduation rate for black students? Who’s losing sleep over them?

Detroit is, no surprise, a worst case. But it’s hardly the only city with a pervasive and largely ignored higher education problem. In Duncan’s hometown, 19 percent of black students who enroll full-time at Chicago State University graduate within six years. At California State University, Los Angeles, it’s 22 percent. The University of the District of Columbia matches Wayne State for futility, with an 8 percent graduation rate for black students. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee? 19 percent.

Regular readers will have noticed the Cold Spring Shops solution.

I submit that higher education has broken the social compact with the citizenry, by substituting a misguided inclusiveness and access-assessment-remediation-retention for common standards, in such a way as to antagonize precisely the well-to-do people who in previous years would have sent their kids to the local state university.

That same post concludes with an evaluation of the effects of providing lots of subprime college to disadvantaged kids.

[S]tudents from poorer neighborhoods aren't getting the educational fundamentals or the life-management skills to enroll at the land-grants, let alone to make an impression at the job fair.

It's encouraging to see Mr Carey, who has elsewhere pointed out the folly of focusing extensively on the top of the U.S. News rankings to the exclusion of what most collegians encounter.

America’s higher education system is comprehensively failing to give minority students what they need, and this has little to do with elite college admissions. Including community colleges, fewer than one in ten undergraduates attend colleges with admissions rates below 50 percent. By definition, affirmative action only affects the small percentage of students who are qualified to attend elite schools. Many of the minority students washing out of public universities in droves are the survivors of our infamously substandard K-12 schools, attending local, open-admissions institutions. Their problem isn’t getting into college—it’s getting out with a quality degree in hand and no terrible loans on their backs.

Mr Carey's policy prescription is one that critics of higher education arguing from a different perspective might agree with.

States need to start practicing financial affirmative action by devoting more public resources to colleges that enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Along with the federal government, they should also penalize institutions with terrible graduation rates, student loan repayment rates, and post-graduation employment and earning rates, compared to peers with similar student populations. Those who set the national education agenda need to look past the handful of universities that graduate the ruling class and focus on improving the neglected institutions that educate future minority school teachers, scientists, doctors, and engineers.

Those are the same institutions that provide most of the degrees, and there are probably substantial gains from trade between the legislators and the universities, as both sides restore the social contract that once prevailed.

PROLE DRIFT.

Paul Fussell noted it years ago, and it's now captured the Super Bowl.

What happens off the field can tells us much about the state of our shared culture. You can call it “pop culture,” but today, all of American culture is pop culture. For a start, compare the most recent halftime performers — The Who, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and last night, Beyoncé, with some of the performers at the first Super Bowls: Carol Channing, Ella Fitzgerald, Woody Herman, Charley Pride, Mercer Ellington (Duke’s son), Pete Fountain, and Al Hirt. Those early performers were grown-ups; today’s are perpetual adolescents.

Or perhaps, it's product differentiation gone mad.

I remember when tattoos went from being the province of middle-aged men who had survived World War II and picked up a tat on the night before they hit the beach in Normandy, and began to be worn on the arms (or butts, in Cher’s case) of “transgressive” pop stars. That was in the late ’70s and early 1980s, thirty years ago.

And yet, the trophies are named for such squares as George Halas and Vince Lombardi, and next season's game might reprise the conditions of the 1962 title game.

WITHOUT IRONY.

Governor Quinn gave his State of the State speech today.

Quinn laid out a series of choices in a 13-page speech.

“Do we want, in the years to come, a prosperous Illinois where working people continue to have good jobs, where businesses thrive, and where all our children have a world-class education?” Quinn told the House and Senate. “Or do we want to stop the progresss and watch our economic recovery stall?”

Quinn wants Illinois' minimum wage to increase from $8.25 to $10 an hour over the next four years. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but Illinois' rate has been higher for years. Business groups are likely to oppose such a change.

Oppose by leaving the state, or not locating in the state.

So much for the recovery.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME.

More trains, faster trains, dependable trains, sufficient cars to provide additional seating, ridership increases.

Amtrak’s Hiawatha corridor set a ridership record in 2012, carrying 832,500 passengers, up from 823,163 in 2011 when ridership surpassed 800,000 for the first time. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation said the record ridership was the ninth record set in the last 10 years.

Amtrak’s Hiawatha Service operates between Milwaukee and Chicago, with seven round-trips Monday through Saturday, and six round-trips on Sunday. The 86-mile trip from Milwaukee to Chicago takes approximately 90 minutes.

The more salient timing may be the approximately 75 minutes between Union Station and Milwaukee's Airport Station, with ample parking and easy access to the freeway.

Is it too much to ask for free rein to 110 again, and for a proper lunch-lounge car?

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT?

Our President claims authority to preemptively bomb potential terrorist masterminds.  That's not sitting well with some of his cheerleaders.

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

Credit Ed Schultz with bringing some of his usual chin-pullers to question the policy, and to wrap up the segment with an observation about how such an announcement from, e.g., George W. Bush, would rile up the anti-war Left.

REVERSE THE FLOW

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article from a year ago suggests that restoring the flow of the Chicago River into Lake Michigan offers more benefits than costs.

Such a project would have dramatic and expensive consequences for the way Chicago manages its waste and storm water. It would require significant sewage system upgrades because the city would once again send at least some of its effluent into Lake Michigan instead of down the canal system into the Mississippi. It also would affect barges that ply the canal, and the industries that rely on the materials they haul.

But it also would go a long way to protecting the Great Lakes, the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for more than 30 million people, the study says.

The study reports that the cost for separation ranges between $3.2 billion and $9.5 billion and is targeted for completion between 2022 and 2029, depending on where the barriers would be built and to what extent waste-water treatment and navigation systems would be upgraded.

It cites no specific funding sources but suggests local, regional and federal financing to bankroll the work.

That is a load of cash, but the stakes of doing nothing could be equally high. Many biologists fret that just the Asian carp, which have already infested the Mississippi River basin and could colonize the lakes via the Chicago canal system, could wreak havoc on the Great Lakes sport and commercial fishing industry, which has an estimated annual value of $7 billion.

The paper followed up last month.

Biologists predict the number of unwanted organisms moving on the Chicago canal will only grow until the waterway is somehow plugged. And it is much more than a Great Lakes problem because biological pollution travels both directions on this invasive species superhighway.

Not only do rapacious Asian carp threaten to unleash havoc on the lakes' multibillion-dollar fishery, but some troublemakers such as pipe-clogging zebra and quagga mussels already have ridden canal waters in the opposite direction - out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi basin. From there they have hitched rides on recreational boats towed over the Rocky Mountains and now plague irrigation and hydroelectric systems across the West.

The cost of these unwanted organisms is hard to comprehend, but it is growing. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predicts that if the fingernail-sized zebra and quagga mussels get into the Northwest's Columbia River hydroelectric dam system, they could do more than a quarter-billion dollars in damage. Per year.

Other noxious invaders are poised to make the same trip. A fish-killing virus now menacing the Great Lakes could do incalculable damage were it to slip down the canal and into the South's aquaculture industry.

In this sense, the Chicago canal system isn't so much a waterway as it is an open wound.

"This is not about Asian carp," said Peter Annin, a Great Lakes author who is managing director of the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative. "This is about two artificially connected watersheds that many people argue never should have been connected."

Fixing the problem would be a massive public works project that would likely cost at least $4 billion and take years to accomplish. But beyond stopping invasive species, it could lead to dramatic improvements in water quality and flood control, as well as fuel a navigation boom on Chicago's increasingly neglected canal network.

I'm not sure what sort of navigation boom the report contemplates, although there are some promising riverside neighborhood properties along the various canals and the interior rivers draining into the Illinois River. It's interesting, though, to put tax dollars to work undoing the effects of previous tax dollars put to work, unproductively.

The canal project was considered an environmental success in an era before the lakes were open to global shipping, when nobody pondered the biological costs of bridging the two massive basins. But now the threat posed by dozens of unwanted crustaceans, protozoa, algae, plants, mollusks and fish spilling through the breached divide has become clear as a zebra mussel-infested lake.

Today the canal is recognized by many as one of twin blunders that destroyed the ecological isolation of the Great Lakes. The other was construction of a shipping channel between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean.

The St. Lawrence Seaway, which was completed in 1959, tamed obstacles such as Niagara Falls and the roaring St. Lawrence River with a system of canals, channels and locks to allow deep-draft ocean vessels - and all the biological pollution clinging to their hulls and lurking in their ballast tanks - to sail into the lakes from ports around the globe.

The Great Lakes are now home to 186 non-native species, some of which have ravaged native fish populations, spawned noxious algae growth and triggered botulism outbreaks that have killed tens of thousand of birds. Federal regulators this year ordered a multiyear phase-in of ballast water treatment systems on Great Lakes-bound freighters to block new seaway invasions, though many are dubious the regulations are stiff enough to solve the problem.

This would be mostly just a Great Lakes dilemma were it not for the back door from the lakes that Chicagoans opened to the middle of the continent.

Pressed by the Asian carp threat to examine the extent of ecological danger posed by the canal, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last year identified dozens of "high risk" organisms poised to ride its waters into or out of the Great Lakes. Most are species few have ever heard of. The tubificid worm. The testate amoeba. The bloody red shrimp.

The Seaway has been a commercial failure, although the upper Lakes are a convenient way to move bulk commodities to elevators and mills. The interior river system is also useful for bulk commodities, although there's ample rail capacity in case the Illinois River canal is reversed.

HUMAN CAPITAL, RAILROADS, AND AIR CONDITIONING.

Joel Kotkin contemplates the possibilities for what he calls the Third Coast, or what ferroequinologists would understand as the further development of the Chemical Coast.

Perhaps more troubling are social problems, some the legacy of centuries of underdevelopment. Despite the influx of skilled and college-educated workers, Third Coast states continue to lag in college graduation rates and the percentage of their adult populations with college degrees. Of the 18 metropolitan areas across the Third Coast, only two—Tallahassee and Houston—have a higher percentage of college grads than the national average of 30 percent. When you rank states by their students' proficiency in math and science, only one Third Coast state—Texas—sits near the middle of the list. Efforts to reform public education—notably, Louisiana's new statewide voucher program and aggressive expansion of charter schools—offer some hope of addressing these weaknesses. In a new report, government efficiency expert David Osborne describes New Orleans's reforms as a "breakthrough." The results, he says, are "spectacular: test scores, graduation rates, college-going rates, and public approval have more than doubled in five years." He adds, "I believe this is the single most important experiment in American education today."

And the obstacles facing the Third Coast today aren't so different from those that once confronted other American economic dynamos. In the nineteenth century, New York was seen as a hopelessly corrupt sewer. In the early twentieth century, Los Angeles was dismissed as superficial and equally corrupt, with only one industry: fantasy. Few would make those claims today.

It is much the same with the Third Coast. Weather, education, and, in some places, a legacy of corruption still present considerable challenges to its ascendancy. But if the region can surmount these challenges—and it appears to be succeeding at this—the Third Coast could become one of the major forces in twenty-first-century America.

There is already a critical mass of the right kinds of human capital for energy, steel recycling, and chemical processing to be self-sufficient in embedded knowledge.

THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IS LIMITED BY THE EXTENT OF THE MARKET.

Two articles with differing points of view, offered at Newmark's Door, suggest that the point is still not well understood by everybody.

GENEROUS SHORE LEAVE.

Apparently, naval aviators are able to combine stick time with family visits.

DeKalb Daily Chronicle photo contributed by Ashley Bell.

The DeKalb Airport has runways long enough for Lear Jets, MIG-21s, and FA-18s, and touch-and-go with a stopover is not contrary to the Articles of War.

At least, that’s what Ashley Bell, who works as a line service technician at the airport, told [editor Eric Olson] this week.

“It was like a training mission kind of thing,” Bell said. “[The pilot] came out here to visit his family and then went back to base.”

Bell said the pilot was a Navy lieutenant who flew the jet from his base in Norfolk, Va. He landed in DeKalb late in the afternoon Jan. 26, then took off again Sunday around noon. The flight time from here to Virginia is about an hour when you’ve got afterburners, he said.

Going west, you can take off at noon (Eastern) and land before noon!

IT'S SUPER BOWL SUNDAY.

Somewhere there may be women of the fevered brow fretting about a nonexistent upsurge in domestic violence, all in preparation to take the hearts and flowers out of February, all in the name of consciousness raising.

Perhaps the solution is to do as Eve Ensler says.

We don't have any idea what's going to happen when one billion women and men protest on the same day. We do know that the preparation for it over these last months has already announced, united and catalysed a movement that, like the violence, can and will no longer be denied.

Now is the time. One month. 14 February. Rise in the streets, in the schools, on the buses, in your homes, in the dark alleyways, in the offices and factories and fishing boats and fields. Let our rising reveal our understanding that, until women are equal, safe and free, no society can prosper and life is diminished. Let our rising announce our commitment to make ending violence against women and girls the central concern of our times.

Or perhaps it is to do as she does.

That picture's got to be more effective than a cold shower.

INDEED.

If I should die before I wake, Charleston's Daily Mail provides the organizing theme for Cold Spring Shops. "The United States and its students need to rethink higher education. Not every person is college material, and not every degree is a sound investment." And people are borrowing money on these false hopes.

A SWAP MEET.

The annual O Scale West gathering took place in Santa Clara last weekend.  The purpose of a swap meet is to bring your stuff and take somebody else's stuff home.  Organizers recognize that some participants might not have enough stuff to justify hiring a table and sitting at it for the better part of a day, and there's this table to leave a few items for possible purchase by others.

I made no purchase at this table.  But I did come home with a string of freight cars and a road-switcher to pull them.

Model railroading is supposed to be fun.

The swap meet takes place at the Hyatt hotel on the corner of Great America and Tasman.  Nearby, the 'Niners are building the third iteration of Kezar Stadium in the Lambeau Field era.   There is no rapid transit service to Lambeau, but there will be a trolley to the game.

We have it on good authority that the Harbaugh brothers have an uncle who is an avid O Scaler.

The assembly area for construction of the stadium is using part of the Great America amusement park's parking lot.

Silicon Valley is far enough north that the amusement park closes for the winter, or for what passes as winter (the conditions were warmish for late January, although the high temperature in Chicago on 29 January exceeded the high temperature for Santa Clara.)  The beginning of football season overlaps with the end of the summer high season for amusement parks.  Along Great America Boulevard, office towers encroach on the perimeter of the park.  At some time, the management is going to remember what opportunity cost is.

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD.

The end of January and the beginning of February are time to reflect at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"I use the term 'celebrate' because we have to remember that, yeah, we lost some valiant people — but what their sacrifice brought is what we should really be thinking about: the fact that they dared to challenge and do things differently," [agency administrator Charles] Bolden said. "Because of what they did, we're well on the cusp of going deeper into space than we've ever gone before."

With archival footage, and additional coverage.

GRAND CENTRAL CENTENNIAL

It's still the world's largest passenger train terminal, and a New York Times tribute notes that the concept was advanced for its day, or for today.

Electric motors produced fewer noxious fumes and no obfuscating smoke or steam. Moreover, as [project chief engineer William] Wilgus explained, electricity “dispenses with the need of old-style train sheds,” because it made subterranean tracks feasible.

Absent the smothering smoke, soot and cinders, the depot could be expanded on the same footprint by delivering trains to platforms on two levels, the lower for suburban commuters and the upper for long-distance trains. For the first time, the entire rail yard all the way to 56th Street, to where the maze of rails that delivered passengers to the platforms coalesced into four main-line tracks, could be decked over. The “veritable ‘Chinese Wall’ ” that bisected the city for 14 blocks could be eliminated. The air above the yards could be magically transformed into valuable real estate in the heart of Manhattan.

For starters, Wilgus envisioned a 12-story, 2.3-million-square-foot building above the terminal that could generate rents totaling $2.3 million annually.

That air-rights concept almost became the terminal's undoing, as subsequent owners contemplated the possibility of office towers replacing the open spaces of the great room and associated waiting rooms, as realized a few blocks away at Pennsylvania Station, and in an ugly form on the concourse building portion of Chicago's Union Station.

Although the terminal has been cleaned, and Lex Luthor evicted, it is no longer possible to board a sleeper for Chicago or a parlor car to Rochester or a coach to Wells River, there are still enough suburban trains to overwhelm the plant at rush hour. One such suburban service is the Harlem Line, and there's enough Grand Central material at I Ride the Harlem Line to occupy a reader all the way to Brewster.