GOVERNANCE IS FORCE.

An editorial in London's Telegraph urges the fanatics who see Richard Nixon and Watergate behind every Obama Administration abuse of power to back off.

The breaches of public trust not only threaten the bipartisan votes necessary to pass key second term legislation like immigration reform, they undercut the president's ability to make his larger legacy case that progressive governance can be efficient and effective.

There are several possible ways to proceed.

First, there's the Cafe Hayek claim that such governance can be neither.

Because the regulators have the same psychological foibles as the regulatees – yet face far less direct feedback on their decisions than do those whom they regulate – turning more decision-making power over to government increases the frequency of human error and amplifies its ill-effects.  Markets keep those errors less numerous and their effects more confined.

Human beings are not laboratory rats to be controlled and conditioned by some elite of their number who, somehow and without explanation, manage to become higher-order creatures simply by working for government and professing deep concern for the welfare of their lab animals.

It's a challenge for me to introduce the challenge to optimal taxation and targeted tax cuts and subsidies implied by that second paragraph.  Perhaps it's too flip to suggest that carefully crafted tax incentives turn humans into gerbils, but all the same.

There's a more troubling suggestion from John Kass.  Democratic politics are not about Herbert Croly and Promise, they're about Richard Daley and Clout.

Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off.

It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.

And now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected — America understands it too.

Clout works, as long as there are rents to be generated and dissipated. But large stretches of Chicago are starting to look more like Detroit -- the ultimate case of what happens when there's nobody productive yet to strike a deal with -- and Belmont Club issues a caution.

A lying president debases his own words and undermines his own ability to hold a coalition together. Nobody completely trusts reassurances from a double-crosser. Only a fool would accept a kiss from Judas. The day comes when not even the liberals can fail to notice.

A nation as large as the United States works only if trust in its institutions is maintained. Destroy that and it’s pay as you go and as-is-where-is. Once everything comes down to the caprice of one man, to basing contracts on the secret will of cabals, then it’s all over. It’s bad for business — whatever business you happen to be in.

Doesn't matter whether that cabal is of Democrat operatives in government, descendants of Long March parents in China's Communist Party, or bridge-playing Harvard graduates in finance. People will devote their effort to opting out.

IF EVERYTHING IS HARASSMENT, NOTHING IS.

Thus does Daniel Luzer summarize Our Rulers Latest Attempt to impose liberating tolerance on campus.

Minding the Campus compiles additional Bronx cheers.

I repeat a bit of advice from the shop floor: the way to demonstrate the folly of the rule is to comply with it.  Mr Luzer notes, "Enacting such a broad and absurd definition could well cause real sexual harassment to go unnoticed, since the policy would prove so difficult to enforce." Use that feature to get the policy changed.

THE PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE.

VIA Knowledge Problem, a reminder (with music) that if public choice theory didn't exist, somebody would have to think of it.

Public choice theory and history have shown that “benevolent” men set above others are subject to the same faults and selfishness as the rest of us, regardless of the good intentions with which their offices were created. As C.S. Lewis said, “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Sometimes, though, the tormentors reveal the limitations of their condition.

Contemporary progressivism depends upon faith in bureaucracy: to collect data, to manage daily affairs on the local and national levels, and to serve as an impartial arbiter of fairness. Many of the major initiatives of the Obama presidency — from Obamacare to his expansion of executive authority to comprehensive immigration reform — demand this bureaucratic faith.

So every scandal that reveals a bureaucracy’s capacity for corruption deals a methodological wound to this centralizing enterprise. While the president might deride those who fear the subversion of a free republic into a less-than-free state, these sorts of scandals — whatever their outcomes — reveal that such fears are hardly misplaced. After all, we now know that federal tax-collection authorities systematically targeted opponents of the reigning ideology. We now know that federal agents could blithely monitor the phone calls of journalists. Those are not the figments of tea-party paranoia; as far as we can tell, they are facts.

The way it looks at the moment, there are two possible impulses behind these scandals: malice or incompetence. Neither one bears good tidings for bureaucratic progressivism. Obviously, the notion that high-level political actors would use the mechanisms of a bureaucratic empire to target their political enemies would be a very unpleasant idea. Right now, there is no evidence that such high-level actors did abuse their power in this way; it is possible that only a few rogue individuals abused or misused their authority. Media reports seem to indicate that the IRS scandal, at least, involves complicated technicalities and managerial disputes.

But incompetence is not exactly a winning defense for the case of centralized bureaucracies. The lack of approval, and the extent of the abuses, would show a bureaucracy out of control, with a broken chain of command and administrative rules. If the right hand truly does not know what the left hand does — if the brain of authority does not know what its administrative limbs do — how can we place blind faith in any supreme bureaucracy?

You're depending on the conscience of the pencil-pushers, and that conscience might be smugly confident that the pencils are being Pushed For The Greater Good.  George Will elaborates.

Liberalism’s agenda has been constant since long before liberals, having given their name a bad name, stopped calling themselves liberals and resumed calling themselves progressives, which they will call themselves until they finish giving that name a bad name. The agenda always is: Concentrate more power in Washington, more Washington power in the executive branch and more executive power in agencies run by experts. Then trust the experts to be disinterested and prudent with their myriad intrusions into, and minute regulations of, Americans’ lives. Obama’s presidency may yet be, on balance, a net plus for the public good if it shatters Americans’ trust in the regulatory state’s motives.

On the other hand, Our President may be campaigning rather than governing, precisely to head that off.

SECOND SECTION.  Ben Domenech outlines a Fourth Turning scenario.

Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is. Making this about him is a short term boost to the pleasure center of the conservative brain. Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.

The point is that these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama’s ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government. As technological capabilities advance and the scope of government expands, the types of domestic scandals we’re seeing here are only going to increase in frequency and invasiveness, with personal information shared more frequently, easier for even low level bureaucrats to acquire and manipulate. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical and cynical about their public institutions, with their trust in the federal government at historic lows. They distrust the agencies and bureaucrats even as the politicians of our age are investing more and more power in them.

Today, the media, the Obama administration, and David Axelrod are undertaking the task that conservatives could not: illustrating with each passing day that the progressive approach to modern governance and policy is inherently flawed and that vast governments are ripe for abuse. What we are seeing from the IRS and the DOJ is not something new, nor does it represent a perverse approach to benign bureaucracy: it is the inevitable consequence of an approach which puts mechanisms in place and then assumes they will not be used for ill. You should expect government to go as far as it can, whenever it can, in any ways that it can, toward the full exploitation of the power made available to it. Expecting government to behave otherwise is to expect the scorpion not to sting the frog.

The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.

When this period of scandal draws to a close, if the idea still survives that a more competent and ethical president would be able to effectively govern a $4 trillion bureaucracy, it will be a sign Republicans have failed. They can succeed by ignoring the tempting bait of making this about the president they despise, and focusing instead on the false philosophy of expansive government which represents the true danger to the American experiment. Doing so will require them to go against their own short-term viewpoint, so prevalent in recent years, and look instead to the long game.

Put another way, another layer of management simply creates an additional source of rents to seek, generate, and dissipate.

A NATIONAL WARD-HEELER POLITICIAN.

Rush Limbaugh comes close to getting it.

The way that Obama gets away with this is to be disengaged, or to appear to be, and ultimately not responsible for it.  That's the key to this.  He's sitting pretty. He's not in any trouble, not with the people that elected him.  And that's what you have to understand.  With the people that elected Obama, he's not in any trouble at all.  This is all somebody else's doing, and the government is so big that not even the most competent, brilliant president ever can control it and therefore he can't possibly be to blame for it.  It can't possibly be his fault.

He's reacting to the commentariat, and the commentariat, so marinated in the Eastern Liberal Establishment's vision of Activist Presidents Promoting The Common Good in order to be able to devote Sunday mornings to mutual admiration with High Government Officials under pictures of the Capitol Dome, seem surprised that Our President is campaigning, rather than governing.  Read the full transcript, which summarizes the failings of Activist Government as seen by the ditto-heads.

The key to Our President remaining popular despite disappointing the commentariat by a lack of activism is in this passage.

You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that's been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you'll see an utter disaster. You've got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It's not just Obama. This is who liberals are.

More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate.  There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

THE CASE FOR BOURGEOIS MANNERS.

Being punctual and attentive might be so old school, but it still works as an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Younger workers believe they can multitask and remain productive, the human-resources people told the York researchers. Thirty-eight percent of respondents blamed multitasking for the lack of “focus” among younger workers. The authors of the study explained that the younger generation “believes that it is possible to multi-task effectively” and that using social media, for example, is an efficient way to communicate. In interviews, the applicants check their phones for texts and calls, dress inappropriately and overrate their talents.

The article offers a mixed evaluation of the role of the education system in enabling irresponsible behavior.

Let’s agree that everyone is at fault, more or less. The burden falls heaviest on the workplace. High-school teachers have few direct incentives to toughen up their classrooms. The steady drag of uninterested students and school bureaucracy beats them down to the point where using higher grades and lax discipline are the easiest ways to make it through the week.

College professors, too, have no direct incentive to raise the bar on behavior, given the influence of student ratings of their performance and pressure from administrators and parents. Most of all, poor behavior by students doesn’t immediately threaten the livelihood of teachers.

A bad worker, however, jeopardizes a whole unit’s productivity, and a manager can’t simply pass a low performer to the next level. Teachers who allow delinquent students to slide merely compromise their own integrity. Dereliction in the workplace puts profits at risk.

This, then, is the real transition into adulthood in the U.S. today -- not graduating from high school, leaving home or learning how to succeed in college, but performing full-time work for bosses who can’t compromise, and all too often must say, “Your work isn’t up to par, you’re not as great as you think, and if you don’t improve, you’re fired.”

There's another dimension of the school dynamic that might reward careful study. Is there more than anecdotal evidence of coaches, whether in high school or college, seeking special treatment for academically marginal yet athletically talented people? The coach gets to screen for focus, for proper performance, and doesn't have to negotiate standards.  Why not apply that model more generally?

TOM SWIFT AND HIS ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE.

Amtrak's order of the latest attempt to replace the GG-1 is rolling out, and the greenies are enthusiastic about regenerative braking.

Each engine centers on a regenerative braking system that can recover up to 5MW of energy, much of which goes back to the power grid. The machinery is smarter, too: it can self-diagnose problems and mitigate the impact until repairs are possible. Commuters won't immediately notice the difference when ACS-64 trains reach the rails between this fall and 2016, but there should be important behind-the-scenes savings.

With a simple enough locomotive, sufficient instrumentation, and a competent engineer, you can cut out the misbehaving circuits and roll on. Regeneration is a simple flick of a switch.

Contemporary control circuitry, with a.c. transmission and thyristors, achieves results that the traction pioneers could only dream about.

You put all that technology over fewer wheels and less unsprung weight.

On the other hand, that Bi-Polar is more distinctive than the beefed-up Class 87 profile of Amtrak's latest power.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE AT WORK.

Ron Radosh suggests that the use of liberating tolerance might be too subtle for the Internal Revenue Service.

If you criticize Obama Care, by Marcuse’s logic, you are what the Soviets called “an enemy of the people,” and the full power of government should be put into place to stop you. And were he still with us, he would be penning an op-ed praising the IRS for its clever action in denying conservative groups non-profit status.

Who would make that judgment? Perhaps it would be the people’s courts, the revolutionary assemblies, or the left-wing professoriate, which is acting on behalf of the people before they realize their duty to develop revolutionary consciousness.

Let me end on a serious note. The IRS personnel are probably not smart enough to read or even know about Herbert Marcuse. But they have acted in a way he would have been proud of, having obtained an understanding of how to act against conservatives all on their own. And, it seems, they have an unknowing ally who lives in the executive mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It strikes me as rash to suggest what position a mid-twentieth century intellectual might take on a contemporary policy issue, particularly a mid-twentieth century intellectual who late in life had to deal with the pushback his epigones engendered.

I also suspect that the practitioners of liberating tolerance have more than an unknowing ally in the Executive Mansion.

[T]he Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private.

The letter states that "sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as 'any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature'" including "verbal conduct" (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an "objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation"—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.

Apparently the efforts of Student Affairs to develop a revolutionary consciousness in their students haven't been good enough.

The way to demonstrate the folly of this rule, though, is to comply with it.  Rather than make a federal case out of the law, overwhelm the enforcers in the administration with complaints.  There's a good list of complaints to consider right at the post commenting on the policy.

PULLING UP THE LADDERS?

In recent weeks, labor unions and Occupy-inspired protesters have organized one-day strikes of fast-food workers as a way of securing either increases in the minimum wage, local living wage ordinances, or union contracts for the workers.  One such strike just took place in Milwaukee.  The usual interests take the usual positions.

"The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO is proud to stand in solidarity with striking fast food workers whose actions today are calling attention to income inequality, worker exploitation, and the right to a living wage and to a union," said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.

Scott DeFife, executive vice president for policy and government affairs for the National Restaurant Association, said the organizing campaigns in Milwaukee and other cities were targeting an industry that "has not been heavily unionized."

"Restaurants care about their employees, and the restaurant industry provides opportunities for millions of Americans, women and men from all backgrounds, to move up the ladder and succeed. In addition to providing more than 13 million job opportunities, the industry is one of the best paths to achieving the American dream, with 80% of owners and managers having started their careers in entry-level positions," DeFife said.

According to the Milwaukee Workers Organizing Committee, the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs has forced workers to rely on low-paying jobs in fast food and retail. The group cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says seven out of 10 growth occupations are considered low-wage.

Hidden among the usual give and take of the talking points is a reality in which fast-food is no longer an entry level job.

Some restaurants have said they'll trim the hours of employees this year to get below the 30-hour threshold that will make them pay health insurance, starting next January, under the new health law.

Until recently, there had been no efforts to unionize fast-food employees because the industry has been beset by high turnover and largely populated by teens and young adults working in part-time or seasonal jobs. The recession and sluggish recovery, however, has given rise to a new class of adult fast-food worker who can't find other employment.

"It's a job for adults supporting families," says Tsedeye Gebreselassie, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project.

The ranks of limited-service restaurant workers have increased 11.5% to 3.8 million since the job market hit bottom in February 2010, nearly twice the rate of all private employees.

Identifying the causal responsibility for the disappearance of manufacturing jobs is a bigger challenge than I can hope to rise to in a brief post.  There may be researchers able to investigate the refractory evidence in future, that is, if there are any careers for academic researchers in the future.  It can't help, though, that public policies include incentives for employers to reduce working hours rather than pay additional fringe benefits (that in itself a reversal of the incentives) at the same time that working adults whether out of desperation or as more sympathetic individuals to union organization are making careers out of what used to be entry-level jobs.  Not a good time to be a young person.

NO LONGER ACTING LIKE THE PALACE GUARD?

It's easier, dear reader, to keep current with the Opposition's calling out of Senator Present, er, President Obama, by going to the usual sources.  It's what Our President's defenders in the entertainment business are doing that's telling.  Margery Eagan -- apparently sympathetic to the Democrats -- sees something different at MSNBC.

You know the worm has turned when even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow hold their noses at the stench from Barack Obama’s scandals — when so many stories from the so-called liberal press now describe the erstwhile Messiah as “aloof,” “arrogant” and “holier than thou.”

The best Mr Matthews could do this evening, just before I switched to the hockey game, was suggest that Senator Present acted decisively, for once, discharging the acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue (who may or may not have accelerated the date at which he decided to stop acting).

The Chicago Black Hawks took the first game from the Detroit Red Wings, who have played 800 games with the Hawks since 1926, and who will now require close to 300 years to play the next 800, under the screwy conference-heavy scheduling the National Hockey League uses.  Ten games with Nashville or Colorado, and two each with Boston or Detroit, let alone Montreal?  I suppose that's a first-world problem, and the third-world politics, otherwise, business as usual in Chicago, are more important.

It may also be significant that Jon Stewart, providing the heavy sarcasm for younger voters who might not get the more subtle sarcasm of their indoctrinators area studies professors, is also breaking bad on Our President.

THE OLYMPICS HEAD FURTHER DOWNSCALE.

The barons of the Olympics, in order to achieve something, propose to drop wrestling.  The governing body for Olympic wrestling proposes to become more like All Star Wrestling (sans The Crusher and the Vachon brothers) or, in the quintessence of prole drift, emulate Mixed Martial Arts.

"We need to think about ways to change how the stage is presented," [world champion Bill] Scherr said. "They compete in an octagon and we compete on a mat. We don't have to compete on a mat. We can compete in sand, we can compete in grass and we can compete on a mat or an octagon. I don't know. We can get survey groups together and see what looks best."

Scherr said MMA officials have helped from the public relations perspective and partnerships may be explored in the future. However, that doesn't mean the ancient sport is going to go the way of the arm bar and head kick. "The non-violent perspective of wrestling is not going to change," Scherr said.

Olympic champion Jordan Burroughs is all for adding some flair to his sport. "In face-offs it would be good to have something cool other than two guys walking on to the mat, shaking hands, wrestling, then walking off. It shows great sportsmanship but not very good showmanship."

Not that anyone is going to ask me, but I vote for Gorgeous Bobby Heenan throwing a chair onto the mat, or into the octagon.

GOVERNMENT IS FORCE.

THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES will argue that government is in a position to be a force for The Good, facilitating Improvements in the Human (pronounced youman) Condition.

Every so often, though, they rediscover what happens when you strike "in a position to be a", and ask what is the good.

Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done.

Particularly instructive:

To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.

Yes, Insta Pundit and Reason and National Review and Rush Limbaugh and the like are all over Chicago Democrats behaving like Chicago Democrats. It's so g*****n refreshing to see writers at Common Dreams maybe, just maybe, discovering that Chicago Democrats behave like Chicago Democrats.

So refreshing, indeed, to find a second one on the same day.

And you'd have to be a toddler or a fool to believe that Eric Holder could go off on his own and take as politically volatile a step as this. But, let us take the White House at its word. Eric Holder did this by himself. He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic. Nobody likes the press, I will grant you that, but the administration is soft if it thinks the public distrusts the press that much. And to have this genuinely chilling revelation emerge simultaneously with the Benghazi, Benghazi!,BENGHAZI! mummery and the IRS dumbassery is pretty much a full broadside below the water line of this administration's credibility. Good god, this is going to be one long-ass summer.

And Egil Krogh and the Plumbers come up, repeatedly.

Does it really come as any surprise to people who push for more Presidential Power because Electing The Right Democrat President Is Good leads to the Mifufe of Prefidential Power?

SECOND SECTION.  Much more at Betsy's Page.  In particular, check out Chris Cillizza.

 Group Benghazi, the IRS and the AP into a single narrative and it reads something like this: The government knows better than you. As a result, the government can do whatever it likes.

It's not malice, it's not stupidity, it's simply believing that Acting For The Greater Good is Licenfe to Do Whatever.  Politico co-authors draw the proper inference.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.

After National Greatness Conservatism comes a cropper in nation building where the concept of nation is still too modern, and after Liberating Tolerance shows itself for what it is, perhaps all that remains is to try something more modest.

TEASING MIDGAARDSORMEN OUT OF ITS LAIR.

Bryan Caplan of Econ Log issues a call for papers, or perhaps for noodling around with a spreadsheet.

What happens if you regress annual global temperature 1880-2011 on CO2, linear trend, and other stuff trending positively or negative over this era?  The list of regressors should ideally include not just other climatological variables, but placebo variables like church attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per capita, etc.

Key question: Does CO2 really dominate in such a regression?

Dig further into the comments and into a follow-up post, and all the standard econometricks reveal themselves: cointegration, unit roots, autocorrelation, multiple causes.  It's representative of the state of the empirical art in economics these days, in which the technique often crowds out the story itself.

Perhaps I'm an antique, but is anyone else as troubled as I by the use of the expression "tease out" as description of a research strategy?  Here's the usual dynamics: investigator proposes a testable implication, investigator downloads from a public source some information that proxies reasonably well for the causes and the effects, investigator does the recommended laundering of the data (sorry, all this talk about filtering and screening is too much to resist), investigator runs the recommended regression package and comes up with a bunch of estimates lacking statistical significance, let alone the  correct sign.  Resulting seminar becomes a collection of suggestions for using additional scrubbing techniques or adding explanatory variables (often under the rubric of "controlling for") so as to get confirmation of the prior, rather than looking for possible reasons the prior is incorrect.

So might it be with rising global temperatures.  Until someone obtains the signature of Midgaardsormen, the carbon content hypothesis may be provisional at best.

HOW THE 1% DOES DISNEY.

Purchasing the priority boarding pass isn't good enough for some of the well-off and well-connected.

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

Via Newmark's Door.

Boy, does that make research on the incentive-compatibility of priority pricing more difficult.

Yes, I suppose one can argue that hiring an invalid at a premium simply extends the incentives of priority pricing to a higher willingness to pay cohort.

I'm hard pressed to view the behavior as anything other than the tackiness of New Money, or perhaps the tackiness of Money in a era of No Guardrails.  Perhaps, though, Old Nick will someday put these people at the head of the line to board the Cyclone Inferno, a large wooden roller coaster that legend has making midnight appearances in the Rust Belt during the summer.

THANK YOU FOR LOOKING IN.

Here's the traffic report for the past year.

Site Meter monthly visits and page views.

I'm not sure how accurate the Site Meter count is, and there's no longer as assiduous a production schedule for Cold Spring Shops, as other projects are either more urgent or more interesting.  Summer may be for standing down.

But while the spirit moves me, I'll be keeping up the fight.

MIDGAARDSORMEN IS AGITATED.

I'd referred to Peter Freuchen's Book of the Seven Seas to see if any of the events in Vikings had some versimilitude.  (Sort of.  Check the comments.)

But before returning the book to the library (you'll see its resting place, two shelves below the S-1, left end) I flipped to a couple of other chapters, and turned up additional quaint and forgotten lore.

Here's a passage from page 44.  Keep in mind, this book dates to 1957, at a time when anthropogenic carbon dioxide accumulation was esoterica from the seminar room.

One, which many scientists think is going on now and could accelerate in the not too distant future, is the almost complete liquidation of the last ice age.  A lot of the earth's water is tied up in glaciers, enough that even the melting of a substantial part would cause the oceans to rise about 100 feet.  If it all turned to water -- a very remote possibility -- it has been estimated that the sea level might rise as much as 500 or 600 feet.

Alternatively, though, the Ice Age could return, and the sea level would fall.  Three paragraphs at page 46 summarize.

With the great ocean extending its warm waters nearer to the poles and the refrigerating effects of huge ice masses gone, almost all the world would have the equable climate we associate now with the tropics.  Fruits and vegetables would grow in soil which now has only tundra.  It takes a large land mass to create the extreme changes of temperature we know in the temperate zone, and there would be no more land masses big enough to maintain the sort of weather we now have.

On the other hand, a new ice age would cover with glaciers much of the territory on which people live, and the rest would have to take lessons from the Eskimos on getting along with cold.  Caribou would return to the shores of the Mediterranean, where relics of primitive man show that these animals once thrived in an earlier ice age.

Neither of these glacial extremes is altogether fanciful.  In fact, both have happened four times in the last million years or so, in the Pleistocene age.  While most scientists believe that the earth is in a period of melting glaciers, and that this must go much further before another ice age descends, there is no certainty.

That's the extremely long run.  Starting at page 284 is a discussion of work by Swedish oceanographer Otto Pettersson, who proposes an 1800 year cycle of tidal magnitudes, influenced by the combined gravitational pulls of Moon and Sun.

At the margin, are time and tide beyond the power of our Industrial Age fuels to add or to detract?

MAKING THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY.

The editorial board at the Erie (Penn.) Times-News uses a reporter's favorable experience with Amtrak to take up the Cold Spring Shops cause.

"Long Distance Trains: A Foundation for National Mobility," a new white paper by the Midwest High Speed Rail Association and the National Association of Railroad Passengers, recommends investing in long-distance routes such as the Lake Shore Limited. Such train service becomes more economically efficient when the routes travel greater distances, connect more cities and add more passengers, according to Brian Pitzer, executive director of All Aboard Erie.

Ridership on long-distance trains has grown rapidly since 2000, the report says, and more growth could occur by making train routes longer; increasing frequency of service; improving tracks, signals and stations to shorten trips and improve on-time performance; and procuring high-performance, modern equipment, Pitzer said. You can read the white paper by visiting www.narprail.org.

When your community has fewer trains than Penn Central operated on the eve of Amtrak, there has to be a lot of upside potential. Had Penn Central implemented the same sort of corridor concept from Buffalo to Cleveland and Toledo that it was implementing east of Buffalo, residents of Erie might already have more trains. As it is, people in Mendota, Illinois, Lynchburg, Virginia, or Sturtevant, Wisconsin, enjoy more frequency and connectivity than do residents of Erie, or, for that matter, Cleveland.

A VICTORY WE CAN LIVE WITH.

Last week, I took issue with some silly commentary by Tom Engelhardt.

What would the commentariat say about a hyperpower that put an end to the insurgencies in the most brutal and final way, never mind the collateral damage?  And would that commentariat welcome the same sort of governmental ruthlessness, if applied to sharing the wealth or rebuilding the roads or making the trucking and airline companies pay more for their roads and airports, or imposing party discipline on the Congress?

Jim Lacey takes the occasion of the removal of the last U.S. tanks from Germany to elaborate.

It is worth noting that our problems crushing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not a result of insufficient American power to do the job. Rather, they were the consequences of that almost uniquely American trait of rarely using all the power at our disposal. First off, we fought both wars with only a fraction of our latent power. More importantly, we fought them in a manner that few armies have ever shown a willingness to do.

There is a formula for winning against insurgents. It is harsh, brutal, and often immoral. For examples, look at how civilized countries conducted earlier wars — how Britain won the Boer War, or how Belgium crushed rebels in the Congo, or what France attempted in Algeria. America eschewed those methods in favor of treating the population humanely, rebuilding nations and societies, and doing everything possible to keep our military power squarely focused on armed enemies. Were mistakes made? Yes; war is never as clean, as simple, or as antiseptic as we would like. Still, when the final histories of our involvement in the Middle East are written I am certain they will demonstrate levels of restraint and morality no other power would have troubled itself with.

In this brief interlude, while the United States remains a global hyperpower, no one in the world goes to bed fearful that America will misuse its power to dictate to other nations. More often the opposite is true. We live in a world where small pariah regimes (North Korea, Iran) feel free to continuously threaten the global peace, sure in the knowledge that our ire is slow to rise.

I'm intrigued, though, by a passage in the essay in which President Lincoln secures the withdrawal of French forces from Maximilian's Mexico with a warning that Grant and some of the Army of the Potomac might be headed that way.  President Lincoln lived only a week beyond Lee's surrender, and Johnston's surrender to Sherman happened after that.  Must.  Conduct.  Further.  Research.

THE 1% AT LEISURE.

There's this annoying phenomenon called "scanner lag" with digital cameras.  With a high-end-enough camera, though, automatic mode captures the moment.

[USA Today sports photographer Steve] Mitchell was busy transmitting photos to his editors when [Chicago Bull center Joakim] Noah got thrown out of Game 2 Wednesday night. He said he didn’t even see the play, but once the commotion started, he grabbed his camera and started shooting.

“I see him arguing with the refs, so I quickly jump up and grab my Nikon 600 mm lens,” Mitchell said. “I see him get ejected and I see him walking and I’m just taking pictures, and as I’m taking these pictures, the shutter, which is a Digital SLR, is going so fast I can’t see her hand. I see him walking and I thought she was just trying to touch him.”

The back-story to the spectator caught behaving like a typical courtside basketball fan might be a parable of life among the noveaux riches.

So who is the woman behind the finger?

She's the 47-year-old widow of a hedge fund owner who, under mysterious circumstances, was found dead five years ago in the pool of the couple's mansion. It was her fourth husband.

Sounds like quite the piece of work.  The highlights, or lowlights, are enough to make a Marxist giggle.

In the documents, Filomena Tobias described herself as a "housewife" who spent $47,000 in expenses a month, including $4,400 for clothes, $1,500 for beauty salons and $5,000 for the upkeep of her Porsche and Range Rover, according to a 2007 Sun Sentinel article.

On Thursday, reacting to the backlash from Tobias' finger waving, her grown daughter told the Sun Sentinel in a phone interview that her mother "was having fun just like any other fan."

Victoria Racanati said her mother had this to say to her critics: "People need to get a life."

We've come a long way, though, from the adventures of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. Lawyers and hedge fund managers as exes are so declasse.

PEOPLE TAKE NOTES, THEY TAKE TESTS, AND THEY TAKE OFF.

Thus is life at a college catering to commuters, non-traditional students, returning adults, yes, all the Sacred Causes.  But verily, such students ought to have the option, indeed their colleges ought to offer the preferential option of a chance to deal with a faculty member who has a meaningful stake in the institution.

It’s not surprising, then, to learn that community colleges that rely heavily on part-time faculty have higher attrition rates and lower graduation rates — part-time faculty have (even) fewer opportunities to engage with students. In short, student engagement with other students and faculty on a community college campus promotes retention and academic success.

One of my students described the importance of classroom-based interaction in a course evaluation. “My mindset was that it was just going to be another English class, and I was not going to try my hardest or get much out of it.  I was taking it as a class that I needed to get out of the way for my program of interest.  As time went on I realized how into teaching you were and that the people in the classroom really wanted to learn and to get something out of the class.  I then decided that maybe I should apply myself and that was the best choice I made the whole semester.”

It’s highly unlikely this student would have had a similar realization in an online course that offered no face-to-face interaction.

There is, apparently, a frontier beyond which attempts to appear customer-friendly, or student-centered, becomes counter-productive.

Community college students often state they take courses online for the sake of convenience and/or because of a harried life -- two reasons accepted without debate -- in order to get done with school as quickly as possible. The course becomes merely an obstacle on the path to accumulating credits.

And community colleges -- driven by convenience, economics, and, ironically enough, the completion agenda -- are quick to respond to “customer demand” by offering more and more online courses.

But instead of promoting an online model of education, community colleges should be doing more to keep faculty and students on campus and to foster a classroom and campus-based culture built upon a sense of academic engagement and community.  That may sound outdated and unfashionable, but it’s a model of education that, as research supports, actually increases community college students’ chances of being academically successful.

Put another way, higher education involves effort on the part of both the student and the professor, and to neglect the role of either is to fail to educate.  It's particularly encouraging to read an essay originating from a community college, as the lowering of standards at the comprehensives and mid-majors has too often been in a misguided attempt to mimic the convenience of the for-profits and the most retention-obsessed two-year colleges.

SO MUCH FOR THE CHESS CLUB?

In the interest of greater inclusivity, Hartford's Trinity College (which can no longer refer to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost) eliminates fraternities and sororities by mandating balanced membership of student sanctioned organizations.

The Trinity social code is more subtle and insidious: It makes it impossible for Greek houses to exist. First of all, all campus "social organizations" must henceforth meet nearly 50-50 gender quotas, both in membership and leadership. So much for the traditional single-sex Greek structure. Then, they must be officially approved by the Trinity administration--and students who associate with unapproved groups "will be subject to separation from the College." The houses must also terminate their affiliations with national Greek single-sex organizations. Furthermore, Trinity has given itself the right to sieze and sell the houses of fraternities and sororities that do not comply with the above rules and turn them over to more compliant organizations. And notably, the code exempts campus athletic, musical, and academic organizations from its strictures: it's aimed squarely at the Greeks.

Perhaps the chess club qualifies as an academic organization. What happens, though, if a model railroad occupies a substantial part of a floor in the student center?

A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH?

Tom Engelhardt takes stock of the curious frailty of the unipolar world.

Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s remarkable is how much -- and how little -- has changed.

On the how-much front: Washington’s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet.  It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe’s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly -- so everyone said -- plunged into a “multipolar world.”

Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax Americana in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing.  The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the hemorrhaging of national treasure into losing trillion-dollar wars, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.

Or perhaps, an unwillingness by a hyperpower to behave like an evil empire?

Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas.  Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure  rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward the national security state.  Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.

What would the commentariat say about a hyperpower that put an end to the insurgencies in the most brutal and final way, never mind the collateral damage?  And would that commentariat welcome the same sort of governmental ruthlessness, if applied to sharing the wealth or rebuilding the roads or making the trucking and airline companies pay more for their roads and airports, or imposing party discipline on the Congress?

What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining?  What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events -- the rise and fall of empires -- fuse into a single disastrous system?

What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.

On the other hand, what if the story of our times is this: centralized expertise, whether of the national security state or Big Finance or Big Business or Big Education, yields to the sovereign individual?

LIBERATING TOLERANCE.

Isn't it sufficient to suggest that the work wasn't peer-reviewed, or that it relies on Wikipedia?

The offending text, “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism,” challenges the validity of man-made global warming.

The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, sent the book to the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at [San Jose State]. Department chairperson Dr. Alison Bridger and assistant professor Dr. Craig Clements eagerly posed for a photo depicting them applying a lit match to “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism.”

Despite it being the end of the semester, the department's web-master had time to post (temporarily) a picture of the colleagues "testing the flammability" of the book.

Das war Vorspiel nur. Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.

RUNNING EXTRA.  Marquette Warrior follows up with the faculty pranksters.

We wrote one of the scientists in the photo, Craig Clements, and he responded as follows:

Thanks for your email. No, the book was never burned. We never intended to burn the book. The Department of Meteorology and Climate Science has removed the material in question from its website, and regrets what was clearly an ill-conceived attempt at satire. Please be assured the university does not condone book burning for any reason.

It’s nice that they considered this a form of “satire,” but the symbolism was absurdly bone-headed.

That's reassuring.

FAILED ADMINISTRATOR, FAILED SCHOLAR?

Former University of Illinois chancellor Richard Herman, a casualty of the clout admissions scandal (was that really four years ago?) obtained a golden parachute returning him to faculty, in the college of education.

Richard Herman doesn't have to do much teaching as part of his $212,000 faculty job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

When he resigned as chancellor after a high-profile admissions scandal, he made a deal to teach just two classes a year in the College of Education, where a professor typically teaches four.

But Herman's class this semester was canceled for low enrollment — the second time that has happened since 2011. His biography on the College of Education's faculty website is blank. Herman, who lives in Chicago, said through a university spokesman that he goes to campus about once a week.

While Herman still plans to meet the teaching requirement in his contract this year, the situation raises the question of whether the cash-strapped university is getting its money's worth. Herman is one of several top U. of I. officials who resigned under pressure in recent years and subsequently moved into high-paying faculty positions.

You'd think that there'd be some interest in "Issuing Favors to Legislators and Calling it Access" or "Giving Lip Service to Inclusion While Serving Political Masters", but apparently not, nor for the expertise of some of the other fallen leaders.

In addition to Herman, other top officials who have moved into faculty roles include former U. of I. President Michael Hogan, who resigned last year after months of controversy with the faculty. He is now on a paid sabbatical, but in keeping with his contract to teach two courses a year, he plans to teach two history courses this fall on the Springfield campus. His salary will be $285,100.

His predecessor, President B. Joseph White, is assigned to the Urbana-Champaign campus' College of Business, where he receives about $288,000 a year and has been keeping a regular teaching load, including two classes during some semesters.

But Herman, 71, has had a more difficult time fulfilling his teaching obligations, and has twice switched to teaching online classes to make up for on-campus courses that were canceled for low enrollment. He did not respond to requests for comment from the Tribune, instead relaying his answers through university spokesman Thomas Hardy.

In response to a question about whether he thought Herman was meeting his responsibilities, U. of I. President Robert Easter replied: "I look forward to an increasing portfolio of activities in the future."

Herman, chancellor of the state's flagship university from 2005 to 2009, resigned in October 2009 after a Tribune series revealed that the campus had a shadow admissions system that allowed well-connected applicants to get into the public university over more qualified students.

What's revealing, though, is a paragraph of elaboration on the chancellor's difficulties filling his classes in the College of Education.

"I don't think you should expect him to teach a freshman calculus section with a ton of students, but on the other hand, you don't want to give him an easy out when he is supposed to live up to the agreement," said U. of I. emeritus aerospace engineering professor John Prussing, who has served in various faculty leadership positions.

The concluding paragraphs of the story suggest he already has been given an easy out.

Herman's current teaching arrangement goes until 2014, at which point campus officials will decide whether he should continue teaching in the College of Education and how many courses he should teach.

A mathematician by training, Herman has indefinite tenure as a mathematics professor at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

I'm not sure how mathematics departments operate. In economics, the understanding is that any microeconomist is capable of offering price theory, and any macroeconomist, income theory. Assigning a former chancellor a section of calculus, when one of the usual professors is on sabbatical or managing a grant, strikes me as feasible, and there are probably lots of sections of developmental remedial not-for-credit junior high algebra listed on the books as taught by "Staff." Perhaps the prospect of administrators being exiled to the required courses is sufficient incentive to avoid malfeasance while acting in the general interest of the university.

RUNNING EXTRA.  University Diaries.

Don’t try this at home. For all of these elements to come together, for all of this sausage-making to make a sausage, you need high-level strategic skills plus extremely high-level connections.

Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to have inside information which, if released, could ruin the careers of the high-level connections.

Or being saved by one of His Majesty's favorite cushions?

A DISSENTING VIEW ON THE NEGATIVE INCOME TAX.

The most effective way to provide money to low-income people might be by way of a negative income tax.

The idea of a negative income tax (NIT) is commonly thought to have originated with economist Milton Friedman, who advocated it in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom. Others, notably the late Joseph Pechman, long-time tax dean of the Brookings Institution, credited the University of Wisconsin's Robert Lampman with at least simultaneous discovery and with bringing the concept to the attention of government policy planners in 1965.

In its purest form a NIT promised a revolution in American social policy. Gone would be the intrusive and costly welfare bureaucracy, the pernicious distinctions between "worthy" and "unworthy" recipients, the perverse disincentives for work effort and family formation. The needy would, like everyone else, simply file annual—or perhaps quarterly—income returns with the Internal Revenue Service. But unlike other filers who would make payments to the IRS, based on the amount by which their incomes exceeded the threshold for tax liability, NIT beneficiaries would receive payments ("negative taxes") from the IRS, based on how far their incomes fell below the tax threshold.

Cornell's Robert Frank explains, though, that getting the outcomes right is not as easy as it looks.

Mr. Friedman’s policy prescriptions were shaped by his desire to minimize adverse economic incentives, a feature that architects of earlier welfare programs had largely ignored. Those programs, each administered by a separate bureaucracy, typically reduced a family’s benefits by some fraction of each increment in earned income. Rates of 50 percent were common, so a family participating in four separate programs might see its total benefits fall by $2 for each extra dollar it earned. Under the circumstances, no formal training in economics was necessary to see that working didn’t pay. In contrast, someone who worked additional hours under Mr. Friedman’s plan would always take home additional after-tax income.

The negative income tax was never adopted in the end, because of concern that a payment large enough to support an urban family of four might induce many to go on the dole. With a payment of $6,000 per person, for example, rural communes of 30 would have a pooled annual payment of $180,000, which they could supplement by growing vegetables and raising animals. Because these groups could live quite comfortably at taxpayer expense, there would be an eager audience for accounts of their doings on the nightly news. Political support for such a program would be difficult to sustain.

Instead, Congress adopted the earned-income tax credit, essentially the same program except that only people who were employed received benefits. One of the few American welfare programs widely adopted in other countries, the earned-income tax credit has proved far more efficient than conventional programs, just as Mr. Friedman predicted. Yet because it covers only those who work, it cannot be the sole weapon in society’s antipoverty arsenal.

That is, if the earned-income tax credit is in fact a poverty program.  In Salon, Michael Lind (via Mahablog) suggests that the credit is the latest regressive transfer to the remnants of the planter aristocracy.

Ruthless and callous as they are, the old families and nouveaux riches who make up the Southern elite don’t want their workers to starve.  On the other hand, they prefer not to pay a wage adequate for the necessities of life.   The solution favored by the Southern oligarchy is the earned income tax credit, a wage subsidy to workers that tops up a too-low wage paid by the employer.

The major champions of the EITC in national politics have tended to be conservative Democrats from the South, like the late Lloyd Bentsen, a reactionary born into the South Texas aristocracy, and Louisiana’s Sen. Russell Long.  What makes the EITC so appealing to Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans alike is that it forces the Northern and Western states, by means of the Internal Revenue Service, to subsidize low-wage businesses in the South, even as the South is using the poverty of its workforce to lure high-wage businesses from the North and West. Every penny spent on the federal EITC is a penny that Southern state governments and Southern employers do not have to spend on Southern workers to keep them from starving. By paying taxes to the federal government to fund the EITC, Americans in high-wage states are literally subsidizing the South’s job-stealing program. The progressive policy wonks who prefer a higher EITC to a higher minimum wage are useful idiots, from the perspective of the crafty Southern political-business elite.

Finally, there is the welfare state. Universal, portable social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare increase the bargaining power of workers, by reducing the penalty for quitting a job because of poor wages or poor treatment.  If they quit, they don’t endanger their healthcare access or their retirement security. Workers with adequate social insurance are more likely — to use a time-honored Southern phrase — to be “uppity.”

Apart from a high federal minimum wage, nothing could be a greater threat to the Southern cheap-labor economic strategy than universal, standardized federal social insurance. In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be best to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).

But if there must be a modern welfare system, then the Southern oligarchy prefers a system that allows state governments, rather than Washington, D.C., to control eligibility and benefit levels.

Perhaps so. But as the research on the negative income tax discovered, workers are also capable of migrating to higher-wage locations, or perhaps to jurisdictions with more generous public assistance.

Competition from welfare was a severe problem for the New Jersey experimenters. Many of the families in the study were actually receiving welfare benefits worth more than the experimental payments. Therefore, some experts questioned the experimenters' findings that the NIT had only a minimal effect on work incentives, and indeed questioned whether the experiment had really measured anything at all. HEW attempted to solve these problems by launching subsequent income-maintenance experiments in Seattle and Denver (SIME/DIME). These experiments more carefully integrated existing welfare programs and offered more generous NIT plans. But the generosity of most of the tested plans made them unlikely to be replicated on a national scale, and more complicated to analyze.

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which analyzed the SIME/DIME findings, found stronger work disincentive effects, ranging from an average 9 percent work eduction for husbands to an average 18 percent reduction for wives. This was not as scary as some NIT opponents had predicted. But it was large enough to suggest that as much as 50 to 60 percent of the transfers paid to two-parent families under a NIT might go to replace lost earnings. They also found an unexpected result: instead of promoting family stability (the presumed result of extending benefits to two-parent working families on an equal basis), the NITs seemed to increase family breakup.

Furthermore, because an earned income tax credit is portable, residents of any state are not placebound by the social policies of that state.

Robert Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University and a leading authority on the NIT, notes another advantage of the program over other forms of state assistance: “No stigma attaches to the NIT.” Everyone fills out the same forms, and no infantilizing government meddles with a household’s food, shelter, and health care, as under the current system. The NIT simply provides the poor with money, which they can use to meet their various needs. Friedman strongly believed that individuals have the capacity to promote their own interests.

Yet another NIT advantage is a freer labor market. No minimum wage would be necessary, since a minimum income would now be guaranteed. This would boost employment: as economists recognize, a legal minimum wage tends to increase joblessness by discouraging employers from recruiting unskilled labor. The NIT would reduce illegal immigration, too. Managed by the IRS, it would apply only to citizens and legal residents, and since it would eliminate welfare programs, aliens would have less incentive to cross the border illegally for government benefits (though local authorities would still have to decide whether to grant them access to schools and hospitals). “From an economist’s perspective, the negative income tax is the perfect design,” Moffitt says. “The only reason an economist would oppose it would be from a strict libertarian perspective—opposition to any kind of government-managed welfare.”

Taken together, there's little economic evidence to suggest that a relatively small negative income tax contributes meaningfully to the entrenchment of the planters' aristocracy.

IT MAY JUST BE MISTAKEN.

Thus does the dean at Pioneer Valley Community conclude a meditation on remedial, er, developmental, college courses.

Go ahead and criticize developmental classes if you want, but get it right.  They’re well-intended, but flawed, holdovers from an earlier time.  They’re not anti-student conspiracies, financial aid scams, or profit centers.  If they were, the for-profit colleges would have embraced them.  Instead, the for-profits ducked them, and community colleges are starting to figure out that the for-profits may have had a point, even if for different reasons.  Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s nefarious. It may just be mistaken.

Some of the comments on the post suggest that remediation, er, development, doesn't feel like college to students, and contributes to student disengagement.  Since remediation comes close to paying for high school twice, perhaps that's not totally out of place.  Yes, that post is from eight years ago.  I've seen nothing to reconsider my position.

TRAIN YOURSELF TO RELAX.

I'm stealing an old New Haven Railroad marketing slogan.

New Haven Railroad advertisement courtesy New Haven Railroad Historical and Technical Association.

A travelogue offered by a scribe in Erie, Pennsylvania, suggests the idea still has merit.

The logical choice for a spring break trip in the midst of a mid-March Erie deep-freeze would be to head south to hit the beach. So in February my wife, Deb, and I set our sights on sunny Florida, with visions of basking in sunshine and hearing the crack of the bat.

Yet our enthusiasm faded considerably when we checked on airfare for a family of four. Then every hotel, condo or rental I called or e-mailed was booked solid. There were some rooms to be had at Disney, but the thought of wading through spring-break crowds didn't feel much like a vacation.

We were nearly resigned to just staying home when Deb threw out a curveball -- what about New York City? We'd been wanting to take Ben and Sara there, and it had been years since Deb and I visited the Big Apple. I liked everything about the idea -- except the prospect of driving to and through New York where daily parking costs more than a tankful of gas. And the idea of flying into a frantic New York airport followed by a long and pricey cab ride downtown didn't hold much appeal either. Then Deb offered up the answer to all of my misgivings. "Let's take the train."

They were able to procure coach tickets on the Lake Shore Limited, a train that is often sold out, and their family experience was positive (no mention of lounge car passengers who had too much to drink, or of immigration authorities behaving like East German inspectors on the Hamburg to Berlin service). The concluding paragraphs, however, make the case for increased frequency and capacity.

Would we do it again? Absolutely. We're already thinking of a future trip to Boston -- and perhaps the Chicago run if we wrap our minds around catching the train at 1:30 in the morning. Maybe that trip is next spring break, if the long Erie winter doesn't drive us south -- no matter what the cost. Or if Amtrak ever comes up with an Erie-to-Florida route, we're all in.

On one of my trips to Milwaukee, a number of Syracuse basketball fans depended on the Lake Shore being punctual enough to get them to Union Station in time to catch a Hiawatha Service train to Milwaukee in time for the tip-off of a Marquette game.  Milwaukee and Chicago have proper frequency and some connectivity, apart from some late night departures for people going to the shows or the sporting events.

Erie, on the other hand, was somewhat better served by Penn Central, with a 9.55 departure westbound, arriving Chicago at 7.25, with food service available Buffalo to Chicago, as well as a 6.25 departure westbound, into Chicago at 5.00, on the coach-only remnant of the Empire State Express.  The precursor train to the Lake Shore retained the pretensions of the Twentieth Century and New England States, passing Erie without a stop.  The eastbound version of the former Century and New England States made a conditional stop at Erie at 11.51, arriving Grand Central Terminal at 10.00, offering ample time to get to Penn Station for the Silver Meteor, Champion, or Florida Special with coaches and sleepers to both coasts of Florida.  The passenger off today's Lake Shore has to spend a night in New York before boarding one of today's Florida trains.

MORE EVIDENCE OF A BUBBLE DEFLATING?

We earlier noted that a Chicago 50,000 watt radio station dropped Northern Illinois University football coverage for, horribile dictu, Illinois, despite Northern Illinois making a trip to the Orange Bowl not too long ago.

Perhaps it's a symptom of an oversaturated sports programming market, or perhaps there are gathering political forces at work.  Rush Limbaugh suggests as much.

I think the National Football League is over, just nobody knows it yet.  And there's a chance to save it.  It's not totally gone, but it's on track.  It has all the ingredients for being a target. It has all of the modern relevant ingredients the left doesn't like and sees as an opportunity to change or eliminate.

Part of his case is a John Kass column suggesting football is headed downscale, as has been the fate of boxing, the perennial status of wrestling, and mid-week horse racing. (I ask readers to imagine Churchill Downs on any day other than the first Saturday in May.)

Football is dead in America.  Even through all the chatter and cheerleading and media hype, football as an American cultural institution lies in final spasm. It's as dead as the Marlboro Man. And, if the professional game survives at all, it will be relegated to the pile of trash sports, like mixed martial arts or whatever is done in third-rate arenas with monster trucks and mud. It won't be as American as apple pie. Instead, football will become the province of people with face tattoos.

Perhaps so, although at University Diaries football may still have a place as long as it is a source of revenue.

Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.

The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor,pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.

Perhaps so. Watch, though, the television contracts for the mid-majors. The end of Wednesday night college football is an outcome much to be desired. The nonrenewal of those ESPN contracts is likely, as well, to be a signal that the revenue is no longer there.

PROCESS BECOMES OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

A veteran Syracuse high school teacher tenders his resignation, detailing the ways in which the administrivia crowds out the learning.

I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that  “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.

There's much more of substance in the essay.

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

Indeed.

Go. Read. Understand.

A FAIRY TALE BEGINS "ONCE UPON A TIME."

A good sea story, on the other hand, begins, "No s***, this really happened!"

Vikings is part legend, and part sea story.

In the past few days, I've discovered a number of sources to assist in sorting out the historically accurate from the dramatic.

Check out Medievalists.net for commentary from people whose writings might be peer-reviewed.  A recent posting reviews the cliff-hanger episode that ends the first season.

God of Wednesday suggests a number of ways in which drama might trump versimilitude.

Hot Diggity Daffodil is an emergent phenomenon, with weekly reviews of each episode, and a geometrically increasing list of comments over time.

A service called IGN (it does not refer to the International and Great Northern Railroad) presents reviews of a variety of television shows.  The Vikings episodes are all in there, although it helps to have sun-stone and course-barrel at hand.

The second season will sail in time for March Madness 2014.

THE RISING STRESS LEVEL.

Today has been Reading Day.  It has also been the latest installment of Spring Deferred.  I suppose we should be grateful Winter: The Sequel went to the north.  Journalism's Jason Akst meditates on the changing nature of Reading Day.

Reading Day is an upbeat euphemism for “Dead Day,” the end of “Dead Week,” in which colleges and universities in theory relax assignments, projects and tests.

Fun fact: Google thinks a search about Dead Day is really a search about Day of the Dead, the celebration of dearly departed relatives and friends that’s popular throughout Latin America.

Anyway, the reason teachers should chill is to give students time and space to prepare for finals.

Until a few decades ago, many colleges really did observe Dead Day/Week, but it wasn’t a vacation. Classes, notes and reviews occurred; people learned. The learning was purposeful, more reflective, slower and less painful.

Nowadays (if the Internet is any indication), what happens is that far from chilling, faculty members are serving extra helpings of papers, projects and tests.

We do this because we’re sadists, bad planners and as foreplay to the big event – finals – next week.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The group project, or the capstone course, are modifications to the traditional structure of courses not necessarily proposed by students, or by faculty. Surely the bloating of the syllabus into a course outline into Conditions of Carriage is not the fault of the faculty.

The syllabi [c.q.] faculty are required to disseminate the first week of classes are legal documents that clearly specify what’s required, when it’s due and how grades are calculated. If they read syllabi, students know what’s coming nearly every day. Many assignments can be accomplished without penalty in advance.

Perhaps it's the usual, plenty of time to do it at the last minute phenomenon at work. Or perhaps, something more nefarious is at work.

No one ever accused me of being deficient in cynicism, but whenever I hear that colleges should be run more like businesses, my first reaction is that that mindset is one of the main things wrong with colleges.

The main point of a college education now is to help get students a job. It’s preparation for a culture of work in which short-term profits are valued more than long-term quality, where projects, meetings and priorities unfold at crushing speed and often without legitimacy, where people at the top get ridiculous paychecks while the wages of those in the trenches remain flat, and so on.

I'd be more sympathetic to the gripe if I were more confident that calling meetings and changing focus on short notice were an occupational disease of deans and deanlets only. In 34 years in the service of various institutions of higher learning, I can assure readers that that is not necessarily the case.

My final examination schedule, and exam week office hours, have been made available through several outlets to students.  We shall see how they do within a week.