TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

USA Today notes the efforts of The Magazine of Railroading.

For anyone who ever wondered how shiny new cars seem to magically appear at dealerships around the country, the magazine says it explains it all in its next issue.

In its 50-page report in the November issue, Trains notes the latest developments in moving cars by rail and shows the routes from the plants to markets.

"Auto shipping is a success story for railroads, and one that is booming now thanks to the robust market for new automobiles," says Editor Jim Wrinn in a statement. "It's a fascinating story of how railroads respond to a customer need."

There's an accompanying picture gallery including images from a 1962 article on the railroads regaining the automobile hauling business.  A multi-deck flat car makes a lot more sense than a box car with interior hardware to stow the automobiles at odd angles. The rack car is a successful transfer of a European freight railroad invention to North American rails.

GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT.

Jonathan Marks of Minding the Campus comments on recent research on student performance at Northwestern University that appears, to commentators that haven't read the paper carefully, to reinforce the impression of a dual labor force in the academy in which the tenured research stars teach little, and poorly, while the freeway flyers teach a lot, and well, for very little money.

The reality is more subtle.

At Northwestern, especially in the college of arts and sciences, where over 80 percent of the classes take place, has career ladders with four ranks; these lecturers have long-term contracts and the same benefits as tenure-track faculty members. Many accounts in the news media have missed this point, despite our repeated statements throughout the paper, and are trying to generalize our findings to one-off and journeyman lecturers. Others are trying to generalize to upper-division courses without basis.

Mr Marks develops the point.

Northwestern's tenure system presumably favors research over teaching, so that would-be tenured professors have an incentive to limit the hours they spend preparing to teach. But other tenure systems, including the one in place at my college, weigh teaching more heavily than research. The results of the Northwestern study imply at most that at universities that value research more than instruction, tenured and tenure-track professors are on average slightly less effective teachers of introductory courses than full-time, long-term, non-tenured instructors, whose main work is teaching. Perhaps it doesn't take an all-star research team to draw that conclusion.

Some colleges and universities‒I would not count Northwestern among them‒have let the pursuit of research prestige get in the way of their educational missions. But the ongoing "disruption" Mead cheers on, which consists in replacing long-term tenured and tenure-track employees with part-timers at $3000 a pop, advances nobody's educational mission.

I'm not persuaded that making a university's profile more like Northwestern's is an error.  It is likely, though, that there is a critical mass of motivated students at Northwestern, such that a little work with like-minded friends and floor-mates can offset a lot of disengaged teaching by the Rising Star establishing a Nobel-worthy body of work.  In another reaction to the study, New APPS contributor Ed Kazarian notes,

I suspect what we might learn more conclusively if and when we get more robust data about the faculty involved in this one—is that it is probably a relatively better compensated, full time and long term 'teaching' faculty that is producing this result. Such a faculty would be on the high to very high end of the scale of how such faculty members may be valued and treated in the U.S. system.

So it's by no means clear that a better report wouldn't provide strong reason to think that treating 'teaching' faculty substantially better than most of today's 'adjuncts' wouldn't do good things for student learning. It's also not clear that such a report wouldn't show that any difference between the teaching effectiveness of such faculty and 'tenure-track' faculty has less to do with their length of tenure or job security than it does with how frequently they teach the courses in question and under what circumstances. There is, as I say above, a lot of information we don't have here which should be very pertinent to how one understands these results.

Indeed. Working conditions matter. At Minding the Campus, a retired professor notes that the responsibilities of a professor include a substantial dose of scut-work.

Loved the classroom, hated the claptrap and busy work that comes with academia. Now I'm an adjunct, (adjunct Emeritus?,) teaching two mornings a week and loving every minute of it. Many of my retired colleagues, realizing how much they missed the classroom are back as adjuncts. Free of the non-teaching effluvia that comes with full time teaching, perhaps we can now focus on the classroom to the exclusion of all else.

I'm not sure whether "effluvia" refers to producing Minimal Publishable Units, as opposed to meaningful research, or to the straining at gnats of committee meetings. I note only that faculty involvement in committee meetings is a necessary evil, in order to slow or preclude the administrative preemptions of what is properly the faculty's responsibility to uphold standards.

I also suggest that retired professors returning to the classroom as adjuncts are complicit in their university's efforts to starve the academic departments of resources.  There's something compelling about being able to walk away from it.

IT DIDN'T START WITH TOYOTA.

The Detroit Free Press offers its explanation for how Detroit went broke.

[T]he 1950s brought the first sobering inklings of crisis, and Detroit mayors for two decades made halting attempts to get ahead of it. Albert Cobo (1950-1957) formed the Dodge Committee to recommend diversifying the city’s tax base as wartime contracts dried up. Jerome Cavanagh (1962-1970) responded to falling revenue by instituting Detroit’s first income tax. Roman Gribbs (1970-1974) spearheaded an effort to revitalize downtown and Detroit’s tax base.

But two trends were undermining Detroit and the nation’s industrial centers like no foreign enemy had been able to do.

First, the federal policies that encouraged single-family home ownership undermined the existing patterns of pre-federal involvement single-family home ownership within Detroit proper.

All cities spread out postwar into the farmland at their perimeters. Automakers and road builders eager to sell cars, home builders eager to sell new houses, village mayors eager for new taxes — all promoted suburban growth. So did the federal government with its subsidies and tax incentives. Eager for elbow room, families in crowded cities like Detroit and Cleveland and St. Louis began moving to the new communities. The process of spreading out hasn’t stopped yet.

Discriminatory practices, such as redlining — denying minority buyers mortgages and access to homes in white neighborhoods — made the process in Detroit and many other cities an ugly one. Unscrupulous real estate agents encouraged white flight by stoking some whites’ fears of black people moving in next door. Rancor ran deep. Experts warned of two Americas: one privileged, suburban and white; the other poor, urban and black.

Whether public policies that were supposed to ameliorate that stratification actually enhanced it remains a topic for future research.

Second, the New Industrial State proved unsustainable.

Cities like Detroit and Flint that rose to power in the first half of the 20th Century were shocked to find in the second half how many factory jobs would be lost to foreign competition. Detroit auto executive Lee Iacocca once boasted that U.S. carmakers would kick their Japanese competitors back into the Pacific Ocean. He was wrong. American steelmakers learned the same hard lessons.

Even by the late 1950s, the signs of strain were showing in industrial cities. Population and housing values peaked in Detroit in the 1950s and began their long and seemingly unstoppable decline. The urban riots of the 1960s, including Detroit’s, accelerated the process.

By the 1960s, in Detroit as in city after city, the process was well under way. And mayors and civic leaders, here and elsewhere, began their long, anguished battle against decline.

There's plenty of blame to go around.  It wasn't the Japanese or the Germans who introduced near-net-shape continuous casting or thin-slab technology that could recycle scrap into sheet suitable for washing machines.  It was Nucor Steel, operating out of a small office in the South.  But raising taxes on residents and businesses without providing public services commensurate with the taxes simply induces anyone who is able to flee to flee.

AWARE OF YOUR WORSENED CIRCUMSTANCES?

Children of the Great Depression often told their Baby Boom children, "We didn't know we were poor.  Everybody else was just like us."  These days, perhaps the better-off people are easier to see.

For decades, the vast majority of Americans have seen themselves as "middle class" or "working class." Even during earlier downturns, so few people called themselves lower class that scholars routinely lumped them with working class. Activists for the poor often avoid the term, deeming it an insult.

When people call themselves lower class, "we'll say, 'You're not lower than someone else. You just have less money,'" said Michaelann Bewsee, co-founder of Arise for Social Justice, a Massachusetts low-income rights group. But many don't consider it insulting today, Bewsee said.

"They're just reflecting their economic reality," she said.

So much for raising self-esteem by way of self-delusion.

For many, "the feeling is that things are not likely to get better any time soon," said Michael Zweig, director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at Stony Brook University.

Last year, less than 55% of Americans agreed that "people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living," the lowest level since the General Social Survey first asked the question in 1987. An unusually high share of the unemployed  — more than 4 million Americans as of August — have been out of work for six months or longer.

Jobless people have long been more likely than other Americans to call themselves lower class, but in recent years people who work at least part time have been increasingly likely to do so too. Activists say workers are frustrated as jobs with fewer hours and less pay have proliferated, a hallmark of the sluggish recovery.

"It's not surprising if the American worker is thinking, 'I'm working harder than I've ever worked, yet I'm being paid less — and I'm working two or maybe three jobs,'" said Lola Smallwood Cuevas, project director of the Los Angeles Black Worker Center. "It creates a feeling that you're trapped."

The concept of the industrial reserve army is 150 years old. Consciousness of your status in that army requires additional information.

Census data show poverty rates were just as high in 1983 and 1993 — years when far fewer Americans called themselves "lower class." One difference this time around, some scholars suggested, is the widening gap between rich and poor.

Last year, the richest 10% of Americans enjoyed more than half of the income nationwide — the biggest share in nearly a century, a recent UC Berkeley study showed. In countries around the world, the starker the difference between rich and poor, the more likely people are to think of themselves as worse off, said Robert Andersen, a professor of social science at the University of Toronto.

People seem aware of the growing gap. When Americans are asked how much chief executives and unskilled workers make, they have reported bigger differences over time, said Leslie McCall, a Northwestern University sociologist who studies attitudes about inequality. McCall added that the media also paid more attention to inequality during the Occupy Wall Street protests and the last presidential race, making "the 99%" a new catchphrase for the struggling.

High school dropouts are much more likely to call themselves lower class, but the numbers have also jumped among Americans who spent at least some time in college, the General Social Survey shows. From 2002 to 2012, the "lower class" among Americans with one to four years of college more than doubled — from 2.6% to 5.8%.

The new thinking, though, illustrates a class-consciousness different from the version propounded in Marxian political economy.

Besides facing new stresses and inequalities, Americans might be thinking differently about class today.

University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who pointed out on his blog the rising numbers of people identifying as lower class, hypothesized that more struggling twentysomethings were doing so because fewer have been raised in union households. Many people told the Los Angeles Times they had no idea what separated the working class from the lower class.

"Working class used to be a term of pride," said Betsy Leondar-Wright, program director for Class Action, a nonprofit focused on class issues. "That's somewhat faded out."

Yes, that working class entailed a union card or a journeyman's license, a seniority system or a sole proprietorship with a fleet of white vans.  It may not be a conceptual error for a person attempting to hold things together with three part-time jobs to view himself as lower-class, rather than as a member of the lumpen-proletariat.  And let us not rule out the possibility that at least some of those collegians have been sucked in by slick marketing and packaging, and rendered unemployable by some combination of access-assessment-remediation-retention and business lite degrees.

GETTING THE MODEL RIGHT.

The 91^st Reason Not to Go to Graduate School is actually a call for the lower-profile institutions to lift their game.

As a general rule, when you complete a PhD, you can only expect to be hired by institutions that are less prestigious than the university at which you earned your doctorate. That is why the prestige of your graduate program is so important.

Presumably, a few graduates can be hired into a comparable institution, and on rare occasion, a genuinely promising graduate can go up.  And affiliation with a less-favored institution might affect one's chances at getting research published.  Other aspects of the job, however, are within the faculty's control.

However, it's just as likely that your new institution (where you may spend the rest of your career) will have lower standards, a greater number of ill-prepared students, fewer resources, and less name recognition than the university at which you completed your graduate work.

Admission and grading standards are within the purview of the faculty. To acquiesce in lowering standards because the institution isn't Princeton or Wisconsin deprives the students enrolled there of the challenges they deserve, and saps the morale of the faculty.

THE ESSENCE OF ECONOMICS.

No fixed points were invoked in this Econ Log report.

The trick is not to manipulate for one's own gain. The uniquely human trick is to integrate strangers into a "we" for voluntary mutual gain.

Yes, and the emergence of cooperation isn't guaranteed, even in experimental settings.

WISHFUL THINKING.

Highway commissioners have been deferring bridge maintenance, and it's showing.

An Associated Press review of national bridge records found that some 7,795 bridges nationwide are classed as both “fracture critical” and “structurally deficient,” a combination that experts say is especially problematic.

The first designation refers to bridges that were designed with no redundant protections, putting them at risk of collapse if a single, vital component fails. The “structurally deficient” label is attached to bridges that need rehabilitation or replacement because at least one major component has advanced deterioration or other problems that have led inspectors to deem its condition “poor” or worse.

The most recent federal data available identifies 189 such bridges scattered around Illinois.

Move along, though, nothing to see.

“We don’t feel that the public should be worried,” said Carl Puzey, chief of Illinois’ Bureau of Bridges and Structures, which subjects fracture critical bridges to a more intensive inspections regime than the rest of the state’s roughly 26,000 bridges.

“In very rare cases, if it’s necessary to ensure the safety of the traveling public, we will close the bridge. So, if a bridge is open, it’s safe,” he said.

Famous last words?

The main problem in battling the maintenance backlog is money. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars – sometimes as much as $1 billion – to replace a major crossing with a heavy traffic load.

Federal fuel taxes, a main source of highway funds, do not keep pace with inflation and have not been raised since 1993. Meanwhile, politicians in control of scarce funds are often more keen to take credit for brand new facilities than to support something as un-sexy as bridge maintenance.

The role of triple trailers, 53 foot trailers, and overweight trailers in subjecting the roads and bridges to greater live loads doesn't seem to come up. You'd think, though, that there might be some way for public officials to get the truckers to kick in additional money to provide contemporary bridges with sufficient load-carrying capability, and then the politicians will have plenty of ribbons to cut.

THAT SLIDE INTO BARBARISM.

Vox Popoli riffs off a New Yorker cartoon that, shall we say, transgresses the usual Liberal Pieties.

Think about how dumb your senior yearbook quote is. Then imagine it following you around for the rest of your life, advertising how your mind hasn't improved since you were a teenager.

The increased popularity of tattoos and other forms of body decoration are visual reminders of the gradual decline of civilization in the West. Like music and art, personal decor is indicative of the long term societal trend. It's more than a fad, it is a sign of the descent into savagery.

Unlike your eighth grade transcript or your juvenile arrest records, your body decorations stay on your permanent record permanently.

THE ULTIMATE NANNY HAS A MASTER'S DEGREE.

The ultimate First World Problem: the winners of the credentialing race seek the also-rans to watch their spawn.

[Cliff] Greenhouse [president of a search firm identifying good help for the 1%] assured me that race has never factored into his clients’ requests—that he has placed comparable numbers of whites, blacks, Latinas, and Asians in a range of homes, and that they make comparable salaries. It's simply that, in the wake of the recession, homegrown college grads are pursuing new career options. And that, as Greenhouse told NBC, moms these days "aren’t going to work full-time unless they can leave their children in the care of someone they consider a peer." Who counts as a peer, exactly, is never specified.

The article, from (not surprisingly) Slate, includes the obligatory hand-wringing about competition from over-credentialed graduates seeking some way to pay down their student loans (or keep up their social and professional networks in upscale cities?) crowding out the au pairs and striving immigrants.  "It would be a shame if parents’ misguided preoccupation with academic credentials forced qualified people out of one of the few fields that remain viable to them." On the other hand, perhaps the more reflective yuppie moms will use the life story of their nannies to motivate their kids to greater effort, or perhaps, more practical majors.

Via Joanne Jacobs, from whom I borrowed the post title.

TODAY'S E-T-T-S REPORT.

It's really too nice a day to spend a lot of time grumbling.  For the first time in September, there's a touch of fall weather, and hot chocolate will be in order at the local high school football games this evening.

The decline goes on, though, and today's Cruising the Web has enough E-T-T-S for the most determined pessimist.

EPIC INCOMPETENCE.

Thus does Charles Krauthammer evaluate Our President's "Strike Syria, Maybe" speech.  If you'd like a more measured assessment of Mr Obama's dilemma.

President Obama believes in universal justice; while Americans must limit their use of power overseas, when we do use that power, we should use it for good things.

What this leads to may be quite admirable, abstractly considered, from a moral and humane point of view, but leaders have a hard time translating this approach into policies that can win broad support. You claim there are universal values that guide your actions, but there are strict limits to how far you will act in defense of them.

It's a long essay, perhaps it will calm you down. Let me raise your blood pressure, though, by quoting critics right and left.  It's no surprise that Victor Davis Hanson would point out, once again, the failure of symbolism when substance matters.

After five years of this, the world caught on, and sees juvenile and narcissistic petulance in lieu of statesmanship—and unfortunately a sinister Putin takes great delight in reminding 7 billion people of this fact almost daily. In terms of geostrategic clout, Obama has nullified the power of his eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, Putin through his shrewd insight and ruthless calculation of human nature, has added five where they didn’t exist.

Helena Cobban breaks bad on several key members of Our President's foreign policy team:

The deal is definitely not good for Susan Rice, Samantha Power, or John Kerry. The attempts these three have made to (a) hype the threat in Syria, (b) express certainty where none was warranted, and (c) sell the war to Congress and the American people– let alone that 95% of humankind who are not U.S. citizens!– have been mendacious, ill-informed, and unsuccessful. They have led the president into looking pretty stupid. Should they keep their jobs? I don’t know.

Better to point that out to Common Dreams readers now, than to continue to sit on information that isn't exactly a state secret.

THEY ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON.

The Cold Spring Shops position on highway construction is that widening existing roads is often not cost-effective.

There's something called the Law of Peak Expressway Congestion that suggests road improvements divert traffic from other roads, until travel times are the same on the improved road as they are on the unimproved roads. (Indifference at the margin, anyone?) An elaboration of the law suggests that additional capacity shortens the duration of the peak subject to the same indifference condition, which makes sense as long as the total volume of trips stays the same, but a shorter crush hour serves as an inducement for more people to relocate.

A recent guest column in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, in objecting to providing additional lanes on the original East-West Freeway, makes precisely that point.

Even though people are driving less, it's possible to get them to drive more. How? Build more lanes. Whenever capacity is expanded, more driving is induced. Don't take it from me; listen to the most recent newsletter from HNTB — one of the nation's biggest road builders:

"Conventional wisdom suggests that we simply need to build more capacity. Adding lanes, however, will never fully solve the congestion problem. When new general-purpose lanes are built, they immediately fill up. They may help compress rush hours slightly, but the congestion problem remains."

Precisely.  Ribbon-cuttings are fun.  Implementing policies that work, less so.

The "most effective" policies are also those most difficult to sell to the public: peak-hour pricing of all expressways and arterial streets, possibly including satellite tracking of vehicles to enforce time-of-use tolls (invasions of privacy be hanged?); higher gasoline taxes (conscripting soccer moms into the Pigou Club?); expressway expansion in the form of high-occupancy toll lanes only; and surcharges on long-term parking in the morning. The policies favored by technocrats tend to be "very ineffective": concentrating jobs in clusters in new-growth areas; driving bans based on license plate numbers; zoning to put jobs closer to houses; higher automobile licensing fees; growth limitations.

To his credit, the columnist shows the garlic to the vampire.

If needed, use price signals to control traffic. One example would be to charge large trucks a fee for using the freeway during peak congestion — that would send a signal to use an alternative route or an alternative time, reducing congestion on the highway. There are many other non-structural, cost-efficient ways to better manage traffic. This would all cost a lot less than adding a lane.

The problem with a special toll for trucks is that National Avenue is available for the elephants to pound to pieces. It's a start, though: a political coalition of environmentalists and libertarians and investors in freight railroads can find common ground in identifying just how much corporate welfare is present in the ability of the truckers to cause havoc with 53 foot trailers everywhere.

EPIGRAM OF THE DAY.

Phil "Sports Economist" Miller on Ronald Coase. "JC Bradbury once quipped on Facebook that if Coase had a Twitter account, he’d rarely post, he’d use all 140 characters each time, and they’d be the best posts in the world."  So mote it be.

PLACARDS MATTER.

At the time of the Lac-Megantic train explosion,  I suggested that corporate restructuring oft involved cutting corners.

Park a train for crew rest with the operator on short time, though, and there's lots of potential for bad things to happen.

That seems to be the common error in all corporate downsizing efforts: as long as nominal conditions prevail, the bottom line gets richer.  Let something small, or something large, go wrong, and things turn sour for the company, and its neighbours, very quickly indeed.

It transpires that the corner-cutting began at the oilfield.

Canadian rail investigators say tests confirm crude oil involved in the Lac Mégantic crash behaved more like gasoline than expected.

In a mid-morning news conference, Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigators told the news media that samples they took from the tank car train involved in the July 6 crash in Lac Mégantic, Quebec, and one train behind it, had lower flash points, making the oil more dangerous than it was described in shipping documents.

Don Ross, the lead English-speaking transport agency investigator, says the crude oil in the trains was described as Packing Group III, which includes diesel fuel and “bunker-type, thick, gooey oils.”

Instead, Ross says, crude oil in the trains tested would be more appropriately described as Packing Group II liquids, that include varieties of gasoline and kerosene. Ross says the finding are limited to the two trains tested, and that the Transportation Safety Board cannot comment on whether the shipments are representative of other crude oil trains.

Never mind those other trains. We have evidence that on at least two trains, a loading platform foreman accepted the wrong kind of car for the consignment, or a carman put the wrong placard on the car.  I am not prepared to attribute malice to what simply might be sloppiness.  That's up to Canadian courts to adjudicate.

Provincial police have conducted an extensive investigation since the incident.

According to the unnamed source, the first wave of arrests will target individuals in connection to charges of criminal negligence. A second wave will be aimed at various companies involved in the wreck. While the railroad is an obvious target, investigators are also examining the role Dakota Plains Holdings Inc. played in the trans-loading of the oil into DOT-111 tank cars, as well as others companies on both sides of the border, with the help of the FBI.

Under Article 219 of the Canadian criminal code, someone can be found guilty of criminal negligence if by doing something or omitting to do something that they are required to do they show reckless indifference to life or the security of others.

The company that owns Montreal Maine and Atlantic is in bankruptcy protection. The chain of liability: is Montreal liable for accepting cars improperly placarded? is going to make for some instructive reading going forward.

PUTIN SCHOOL.

The Tsar of Only Russia wrote an open letter to the American people in Komsomolskaya Pravda The New York Times.

Washington Post foreign policy guru Max Fisher offers a fact checking that does not rise to the level of a Fisking, although it has trouble sometimes rising above the level of tu quoque.

Still, you’ll be shocked to learn that Putin does not hold himself to the same standard he’s setting here for Obama. Putin’s Russia launched a war against Georgia just five short years ago. He would argue that the war was justified, but it certainly wasn’t approved by the United Nations Security Council.

Countries have permanent interests. Keeping a court logician in the Ministry of Propaganda isn't one.

It takes Rush Limbaugh to point out where Tsar Vladimir got his closing argument.

My God, we have the communist leader of Russia more proudly quoting the Declaration of Independence than our own president does! We got Vladimir Putin asserting a "moral superiority" to the president of the United States.  Vladimir Putin! Do you people in the White House not know what's happened here?  Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as a mature adult who stopped your immature child from messing around in somebody else's sandbox that he had no right being in and didn't know what he was doing.

Let us remind the Tsar: American exceptionalism is conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  And let us remind Our President: it has nothing to do with the international community's credibility.

MANAGING THE DECLINE.

In 2006, I mocked the University of Florida. "The University of Florida is discovering that attempting to pass off Yugo U. as Fairlane U. isn't going to work terribly well." Their merit pay policy, such as it was, reduced to "if you can find a better offer, perhaps we'll match it."  Or not.  State officials pursued a policy of proliferating degree mills.  Key point for today's return to Florida: "[T]he creation of additional capacity that looks like a degree mill is unlikely to make good use of tax dollars, and the imposition of the responsibilities of a degree mill on faculty who aspire to more is unlikely to do much for their morale."

In the latest development, even upwardly mobile Florida takes on more of the aspect of a degree mill.

Like many public universities, the University of Florida faced significant budget cuts in the recent economic downturn. Such cuts led to reductions and eliminations of Ph.D. programs across the country, including at Florida, where the computer-science, engineering, psychology, and statistics programs have downsized. But it is rare for an economics program to be on the chopping block.

The number of economics Ph.D. programs housed in business colleges has held steady since 2008, according to a survey of 407 American institutions accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, and the job market for new economics Ph.D.'s is relatively healthy. In 2010-11, almost 89 percent of all economics graduates who sought employment got jobs, and 62 percent of those landed academic positions, according to a survey of 191 economics departments by the Center for Business and Economic Research.

The economics faculty is extremely small for a university its size, and the graduate faculty have been admitting new Ph.D. students only in alternating years.

If university administrators think their economics departments are rebellious and too prone to speak back now, they ought keep in mind that fewer Ph.D.s coming into the pipeline from inter alia Florida and Case Western and Emory (all solid programs) further skews the job market in the economists' favor.

ON ANY TRACK, AT ANY TIME, IN EITHER DIRECTION.

The Northwest Indiana Times thought it might be fitting to showcase the local football talent in an industrial setting.

Big mistake.

To illustrate the story, it chose to pose the players in a CSX Transportation yard in East Chicago, which later caught the eye of the railroad's special agent.

The photos show the players posing with shovels on tracks and railcars. One player is sitting on the coupler of a covered hopper, another is on a coil steel car, and there is a group photo posed on a flatcar with the photographer apparently on top of an adjacent railcar.

A coupler is a particularly unsafe place to be if something couples to the other end of the string, and standing atop a car that's not under a blue flag is a good way to get hurt.

Times executive editor William Nangle acknowledges the error.

The photos in the preview section show the players around, on and inside rail cars. It made for an interesting backdrop.

The problem is the rail yard is private property, and no one at The Times thought to secure permission to photograph there.

Worse yet is that in some cases, the photos depict players in situations that are deemed unsafe. In short, we left the players vulnerable.

In addition, trespassing at the rail yard is a criminal offense. That means the photographer and each player involved with the East Chicago photo session could be charged. Not a happy prospect.

Robert Mahan, of Cedar Lake, special agent in charge of the CSX Railroad Police’s Chicago Division, saw the preview section and came to see me. He pointed to the trespassing, the photos reflecting unsafe practices and the fact criminal charges could be leveled.

Well, the high school students can rest easy. Mahan is an understanding man and isn’t going to seek charges.

Instead, he wants a lesson to be learned — about trespassing on railroad property and how unsafe a railroad site can be without knowing proper safety procedures.

Those who labor daily in the rail yards know well of the dangers there and are trained to operate safely.

As for The Times, I apologize to the railroad and to the student athletes we unwittingly put in a bad situation.

The railroad track is no place to play.  Digital cropping and enhancement allow me to take train pictures from a safe distance, and bring the viewer closer in a way that is hazardous only to a few pixels.

THE DIFFICULTY OF INVOKING GODWIN.

First person to invoke Hitler loses the argument.  What happens, though, if people simply channel Hitler.  His declaration of war on the United States blamed the Jews for U. S. aggression.

It's not much of a surprise to find Patrick Buchanan opposing a war because the Israeli lobby apparently favors it.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has joined the Israeli lobby AIPAC in an all-out public campaign for a U.S. war on Syria

What happens, though, when a commenter to Chris Hayes sees the same hidden hands at work?

Moving beyond the FAILED Israeli/Israeli Lobby effort to hoax the US into a war with Syria (the House is at 217 vote majority against the strikes) - a whole new world opens up; rapprochement with Iran

With the Neocons/Israeli Lobby out of the way, bruised from their defeat, we can snatch the main prize in the Middle East, US engagement with Iran, whilst the Neocons are too stunned to react

Let’s make hay while the sun shines and relegate the Israeli Lobby and Neocons to the dustbin of history where they belong. Before they wakeup and CONTINUE to try to hoax/mousetrap us into a war with Iran.

Nation readers and Human Events readers can debate among themselves whether the Neocons or the Israeli Lobby are the new Freemasons.

LIFE AT A PARTY SCHOOL.

With a few days' lag, the Badger detox report.

Police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they arrested nearly twice as many people for underage drinking at this weekend's football game than they did during the Badgers' opening game Aug. 31.

The department says 24 people, including 23 UW-Madison students, were arrested during Saturday's home game against Tennessee Tech. A week ago, when the Badgers played Massachusetts, the numbers were 13 and 11.

The highest preliminary breath sample Saturday was 0.30 percent. Last week, it was 0.33 percent. The legal limit for driving is 0.08 percent.

Campus police ejected 45 people, including 38 UW-Madison students, from Camp Randall Stadium on Saturday. In all, 27 were kicked out a week ago.

This week is an away game, let's see what the police blotter from Arizona State looks like.

CONCRETE PROOF.

Some years ago, I suggested a photo study of the Hennepin Canal might be forthcoming.

This canal was an early application of concrete casting technologies later applied on the Panama Canal. Unfortunately, the Hennepin was built bigger than the old Illinois and Michigan canal and smaller than the Mississippi or Illinois River locks, rendering it uneconomic. It's a good linear park, with a towpath suitable for hiking or leisurely bike riding.

For almost as long, the Iowa Interstate Railroad's steam locomotives have eluded me.

Sometimes, though, everything comes together.

Lock 17, just east of Wyanet, illustrates the use of concrete.  The girder bridge across the lock used to roll to the north to provide additional vertical clearance.

At the Panama Canal and the Welland Canal, the triple flight locks are part of one massive casting.  Here, where there locks do not come in pairs, there's a meeting basin at which barges going up can trade places with barges going down.  The view is downhill toward the Illinois River.

There are a few spots along this stretch of the canal offering views of the adjacent former Rock Island main line, now operated by Iowa Interstate.  Steam trains are running today, to raise money for the Tiskilwa and Sheffield Fire Departments.  I took videos.  There was plenty of time to walk along the canal from one photo spot to another.

Concrete everywhere ... the abutment for the truss bridge just upstream of Lock 17.  The truss bridges remain as historic relics.  You can walk across them but the use of motor vehicles is prohibited, and not advisable.

This ruin, upstream between Lock 17 and Aqueduct 4 (with an unobstructed view of the Iowa Interstate at an elevation below the canal grade), is the workshop for casting concrete fittings.

A concrete bollard, just downstream from Aqueduct 4.

A few concrete utility poles remain near the workshop.

But there were trains to catch.  I had time to follow the noon departure from Tiskilwa into Sheffield, there to discover that a ticket to ride could be had.  Nothing like smoke and cinders on a warm day (the one day of relief from this very late heat wave being not much relief.)

The Sheffield fire department had left a message on its non-emergency line that the trains had sold out.  Apparently early sales were slow, thus neither community arranged with the railroad to offer a late afternoon trip, then tickets went very quickly.  The presence of a steam train on the Iowa Interstate did take at least one transient by surprise.

The power for westbound trips: Iowa Interstate 7081, a 1986 product of Datong.  The Chinese QJ is based on the Soviet LV which itself borrows a few ideas from the Baldwin Tb 2-10-2 built as part of the Big Engine approach during the Stalin years.  There are a lot of details of the tender, cab, turret, and fittings that are similar to the Andreyev 4-14-4, and digital cameras are useful tools for such research.  Behind the locomotive: additional water, the tool car, eight coaches that used to haul Montreal commuters on the Canadian National, and a diesel for leading eastbound moves.

The coaches have lots of capacity for passengers.  The lower windows are the kind of plastic that's prone to fogging, and the seats look to have been removed from school buses, probably not what Canadian National used.  The safety messages inside, though, are in Quebecois.

Upon return to Sheffield, most of the passengers may have been sufficiently sated, or the kids sufficiently cranky, that unobstructed views of the locomotive were relatively easily obtained.  This locomotive retains some of its Chinese styling.  The other one has black driver centers in the North American fashion.

CRACKING THE TOP 25.

I've often referred to Northern Illinois University as the best-kept secret in the state.

Business Insider noticed.

THE RAIL PROFESSIONALS TAKE UP THE CAUSE.

Trains stringer Brian Schmidt has a few days to explore the corridor services radiating from Chicago, discovers he doesn't have enough days.

There are still four corridors and a few other routes out of Chicago I've never seen. But, unfortunately, lack of foresight and planning on behalf of the states supporting the corridors conspires to make them pretty much useless as connecting services.

Yes. When the additional frequencies rolled out in the fall of 2006, I noted,

The additional frequencies are encouraging, although I hope the Amtrak and Illinois DofT performance reviews consider the potential for connectivity. The geography of Illinois makes some connections impractical via Chicago (e.g. Urbana-Bloomington or Carbondale-St. Louis) but there might be some value in having good connections such as Milwaukee-Bloomington or Kalamazoo-Macomb or Ann Arbor-Urbana or Lansing-Springfield. Here, there are a few niggling details.

Mr Schmidt quickly discovers the details are more than niggling.

The first southbound Hiawatha departs Milwaukee a 6:15 a.m. and arrives in Chicago at 7:57 a.m. That's a much easier train trip to the Windy City than I ever had out of Toledo. (And six days a week, there are seven round trips!)

My first thought was to go to St. Louis, ride some light rail, see the Gateway Arch, and come home on Sunday. The southbound trip works out great. The first Lincoln Service departure from Chicago is at 9:25 a.m., a reasonable 1.5-hour layover from my inbound Hiawatha. The return trip, however is the weak link here.

The last northbound Hiawatha departs Chicago at 8:05 p.m. The 3 p.m. Lincoln Service departure from St. Louis arrives in Chicago at 8:40 p.m. Close, but no connection. The next previous departure? The Texas Eagle at 7:55 a.m., which gets me back to Chicago at 1:52 p.m. (in theory). And the two morning Lincoln Service departures leave St. Louis at 4:35 and 6:40 a.m.

So my "weekend" in St. Louis turned into a 3 p.m. arrival and an early morning departure from the hotel the next morning.

Because the Illinois Department of Transportation underwrites those trains, their schedules have Illinois State students and Springfield politicians and shoppers headed for the Mag Mile in mind.  In the very early days of Amtrak, his overnight in St. Louis would have been feasible, with the early morning departure from Milwaukee on the Prairie State, and a return on the afternoon Prairie State that got away from Chicago at 10.30 for a midnight arrival in Milwaukee.  A St. Louisan out for a weekend in Milwaukee would use the Abraham Lincoln.  Cardinal fans headed to Milwaukee can manage with the existing schedules, although some of those have inordinately long layovers in Chicago.  "Hiawatha 332 arrives Chicago four minutes after 303 leaves."

HE'S NO DR. WIN-THE-WAR.

War presidents are never irresolute.

More in the same vein compiled at Betsy's Page.

LEADING THE BIG TEN'S WESTERN DIVISION.

Never mind that pathetic Iowa student bragging on her .341 blood alcohol content.

The professionals go to Wisconsin.

In one instance a 19-year-old woman seen stumbling around Camp Randall Stadium before Saturday's Badgers football game had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.33. Another 19-year-old woman found passed out near D.C. Smith Greenhouse facility had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.37.

The legal level of proof of intoxication for motorists in Wisconsin is 0.08.

"These are extremely high levels of intoxication and incapacitation," UW-Madison police Chief Susan Riseling said.

"It's very possible that in the .37 case, if no one called for help, this student may have died."

Commenters on the story note inter alia the sun rises in the east and the Pope is Catholic.

ELEVEN PRIME.

When Cold Spring Shops opened, I promised to provide content sporadically.  I kept the promise in part, in that daily posting never happened, nor is it likely to happen going forward.  On the other hand, persisting for eleven years isn't exactly sporadic.

BAD HISTORY.

Secretary of State John Kerry made an emotional and factually imprecise case for Operation "Just The Tip."

Towards the end of a four-hour hearing, John Kerry invoked American soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy in World War II, suggesting that America has a similar responsibility to intervene in Syria.

“Have you ever been to the cemetery in France above those beaches?” Kerry asked the House Foreign Affairs Committee this afternoon, in an attempt to convince members to approve military action. “Why’d those guys have to go do that? Because we were standing up with people for a set of values and fighting for freedom.”

When all else fails, try a guilt trip. Never mind that "those guys" had to go do that because the leader of another power declared war on the United States, making a case that sounds a lot like complaints I've heard about current presidents.

The circle of Jews around Roosevelt encouraged him in this. With Old Testament vindictiveness they regarded the United States as the instrument that they and he could use to prepare a second Purim [slaughter of enemies] against the nations of Europe, which were increasingly anti-Jewish. So it was that the Jews, in all of their satanic baseness, gathered around this man, and he relied on them.

The American president increasingly used his influence to create conflicts, intensify existing conflicts, and, above all, to keep conflicts from being resolved peacefully. For years this man looked for a dispute anywhere in the world, but preferably in Europe, that he could use to create political entanglements with American economic obligations to one of the contending sides, which would then steadily involve America in the conflict and thus divert attention from his own confused domestic economic policies.

Before those troops were able to cross the Channel to Normandy, they had to cross an Atlantic Ocean infested with U-boats. Perhaps Secretary Kerry ought to try wind-surfing the Outer Banks.

Visitors to Cape Hatteras National Seashore are often surprised to learn that this tranquil setting was once an arena of death and destruction due to rampaging German U-boats. In the dark days of early 1942, enemy submarines descended upon local waters, wreaking havoc on defenseless merchant ships in full view of the Outer Banks. The pivotal naval campaign that followed, one marked by conspicuous instances of ignorance, frustration, and heroism, came perilously close to knocking the United States out of World War II.

Had the Battle of the Atlantic gone badly, the North African campaign and all that followed might have been delayed, or not taken place.  Had Overlord gone badly, the backup plan was under development at Oak Ridge and Hanford.

I see no evidence of a similar resolve to blast and sponge and purge every stain of Islamofascism's infected, corroding fingers from the face of the earth.

Without a clear purpose and resolve (sorry, the construct of a "world community" doesn't cut it), there's no reason to send a message that may or may not lead to a regime change in Syria that may or may not be (compare Egypt and Libya) an improvement on the status quo.

THERE ARE STANDARDS.

Mixed martial arts fighting is either the quintessence of Thirteenth Generation crude, or a perfect metaphor for a diverse demographic gone downscale.  Whatever it might be, it is Not. Proper. Entertainment. in Naperville.

[City Councilman Paul] Hinterlong said fighting of this kind has no place in Naperville, where the city has worked within the past year to quell bar fights that cropped up on weekends by deploying more police officers downtown, increasing the number of security cameras in the area and better enforcing occupancy limits.

"I don't want that here. Enough fighting already," Hinterlong said. "I don't think it's an image Naperville needs."

The event would have included fighting, music and alcohol for sale — a combination Councilman Bob Fieseler said is too similar to the conditions that led to the string of bar fights.

At least one commenter on the article finds the city's "upright, snobby image" off-putting.  Another suggests that "equating a bar fight to a sanctioned sport" is sloppy thinking.

What is the world coming to?  What it deserves.

THE UPLIFTING POWER OF WATER.

London's Tower Bridge is simply a fancy version of the canonical Chicago bascule bridge, apart from the water-powered machinery.  The towers include standpipes necessary for proper operation.

In Milwaukee's Third Ward, Hoffco shoe polish comes from a factory with the last working hydraulic elevator in the city.  The factory building is a converted sail loft, now commingled with brew-pubs, art galleries, and loft apartments.

Developers covet the shoe polish factory. "I tell them, 'Thank you, but we are making shoe polish here. I'm not interested,'" says owner Lorraine Hoffman.

THE ROAD TO RICHES.

Longtime UCLA historian Joyce Appleby explores the evolution of contemporary economic institutions in The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.  Book Review N^o. 26 suggests that readers put aside all their priors (historian?  relentless?  capitalism?) and read and understand the book.  Turn to page 77 on primitive accumulation.  "The countryside's most salient division became that between those who engaged in improvements and those who didn't."  In case readers didn't get the message, the next paragraph reads "These may sound like innocuous statements, but they challenge the Marxist position that the conversion of agriculture from primitive reproduction to enhanced productivity began with farsighted landlords who coerced their tenants into commercial leases."  No surprise to readers of The Lever of Riches or How The West Grew Rich or Human Action, but how many history students, let alone casual readers, have even a passing familiarity with works that are obscure or recondite even to working economists?  Likewise, regular Cold Spring Shops readers get that Complex Adaptive Systems Do What They Darn Well Please.  It's encouraging to see a discussion of The Great Depression that notes (p. 279), "[I]n a free market economy, though some people have much more power than others, no one is in charge.  All the material aspects of the economy ... rely on personal and institutional choices."  Thus "an unforeseen development is usually in the offing."  Let nobody misinterpret Relentless Revolution as a pro-capitalist tract.  The critics, whether of a Marxist, Third-World-o-philic, or religious bent, receive a judicious hearing.  And the tensions between the libertarian and religious members of the Republican coalition have a long and intellectually serious pedigree.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

KEEP 'EM ROLLING.

Electropneumatic interlocking plants still govern the movement of trains, and WMAQ reports on an important one at the hottest hot spot of the Metra system.

Lots of good block bell and lever action sound effects.

OPTING OUT.

The Washington Post notes that many government bureaucrats are choosing to walk away.

With retirement accounts on the rebound, many veteran workers are finding little reason to remain in government, especially at a time when agency budgets are being slashed, workers are being furloughed and morale is tumbling.

In some cases, government workers are leaving because of unkind things Members of Congress are saying about their agencies, although Cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries retain the bureaucratic imperative to protect their fiefdoms.

Contrast that with public higher education, in which when the administrators and legislators are not in pissing contests with each other, they are imposing additional burdens on faculty and staff, and ask yourself how much longer the senior people will continue to put up with it.

OPERATION "JUST THE TIP".

I got that code word from Ed Schultz this evening.  The big network appears still to be attempting to sell the people on the necessity of Doing Something about Syria.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Obama Network affiliate in Chicago also aired local politicians attempting to convince the public.

I was unable to find another clip from the same weekend, in which Chicago citizens suggested that protecting Chicago children was more clearly in The Public Interest.  Milwaukeeans made a similar case.

"Seven thousand black males die in homicides every year in the United States," said Muhibb Dyer, 38, of the Wisconsin Chapter of the League of Young Voters, which sponsors the annual event. "This is a critical issue of our time, and we have to do more as a society to address it."

Locally, August was one of the most violent months in recent memory, according to Milwaukee police, with eight people killed and nearly two dozen injured in the first week alone.

The city has had 66 homicides so far this year. The August spike in violence comes after a 19% increase in nonfatal shootings in June and July, compared with the same two months in 2012.

The government proposes to calibrate strikes on Syrian military targets in such a way as not to affect the outcome of a conflict between al-qaeda and a Baath party. I submit that a crime-control policy in the big cities can be calibrated in such a way as to not affect the re-election chances of Bobby and Gwen and John and Maxine.  On the other hand, a serious electoral challenge to one-party rule in the big cities might also be a way to enhance the life chances of residents therein.

Meanwhile, Our President is taking justifiable stick for redefining his red line as somebody else's red line.

“I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line,” Obama said. “My credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’ credibility is on the line because we give lip service to the notion that these international norms are important.”

At an August 2012 White House press conference, Obama warned that “we have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

Margaret Thatcher is not available to point out that there is no such thing as "the international community." Nor have any postmodern philosophers deconstructed the construct itself.

MY BLOGPALS HAVE KEPT CURRENT.

No reason for me to create a lot of original content today, given the work of others.

On the long weekend, I went to the Illinois Railway Museum for its 60th Anniversary gala (the collection first established in 1953 in the back lot of the Chicago Hardware Foundry works in North Chicago).

Union Pacific recognized the event with a diesel from its Historical Motive Power collection.

Eighteen is from the museum collection.  It is one of only a few General Electric 10,000 horsepower gas turbine electric locomotives to be preserved.  Behind it, 6936 is Union Pacific's own, and it's as meritorious of its place in the collection as are 844, 3985, and 4014.

Two visiting steam locomotives brought out the casual enthusiasts.

At left, Lehigh Valley Coal 126, from the anthracite fields of Hazleton, Pennsylvania.  At right, an oil-burning replica of Central Pacific 63 Leviathan.  Resident Russian Decapod 1630 is still under repair.  It passed the hydrostatic test this summer.  Because of the way regulations start the clock on boiler life, it is unlikely to be steamed up until the beginning of next summer.

The serious enthusiasts noted some more distinctive rolling stock.

At left, South Shore 803 is one of twenty motors built for the USSR and stranded in the Americas by Cold War embargoes.  It is the only one currently operable, unless one of the five that went to Brazil is still running.  At right, Burlington 9911 Silver Pilot, still capable of sustained running at track speeds, is the only diesel of its type in preservation.

Soviet railroads used light rail, thus steam locomotives had as many as 14 driving wheels, and the South Shore motors 16, to reduce axle loadings.

There's always reason to post another picture of Silver Pilot and the Nebraska Zephyr.

And thus does the school year properly begin.

THE MORALITY OF CANNIBALS.

A silly Slate columnist asserts, "You are a bad person if you send your children to private school."

The best rebuttals, and more than a few snarks, are nailed to Newmark's Door.

REMEMBERING RONALD COASE.

There's a link-rich recollection at Knowledge Problem.

Coase’s observation is apt — strong assumptions to enable excessive formalism in our theory formation reduce our ability to use our models to understand how the world works, and that’s a tradeoff that we confront constantly.

Indeed.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

Bardiac confronts the do-more-with-less mentality.

I want to say, for every hour that someone suggests I should do an additional X, I'd like them to tell me what I can drop from my duties to make the time work out, since I already have a full time job, and I get tired, and so on.

I tried not to rain on the parades at the meeting though.  But gosh, I felt like a fogey.

It is necessary to rain on those parades.

You're looking at the workload policy politicians and more than a few administrators see as ideal for the faculty.

VOLKSWAGEN DOES IT AGAIN.

I've always been partial to Volkswagen Rabbits, and their descendants, for a number of reasons. Here, a Chicago Tribune car guy takes a hypothetical with someone looking to spend $30K, recommending good cars that will leave $5K for other purposes.

Among compact sedans, the Chevrolet Cruze, Honda Civic and Hyundai Elantra are economical models that will go out the door for less than $25,000 loaded. In the midsize class, the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry are two excellent choices, though if you would rather not drive the same car as your grandparents you could look at sexier sedans such as the Ford Fusion or Kia Optima.

If you want sportier handling along with the practicality of a hatchback, the Volkswagen GTI would be a good fit. Perhaps the most practical choice of all would be a Toyota Prius, which is extremely economical to operate, has a sterling reputation for reliability and offers the flexibility of a hatchback.

The latest version incorporates the latest stupid design fad.

This phenomenon of LED lights is one of my least-liked in current car design. Part of it does come down to the execution, and I can think of several cars that look as though designers were given a crate of stick-on LEDs from a craft store on Friday and told to come up with something interesting by Monday.

It's carried off well by Volkswagen, however.

I've always thought of a Golf to be a friendly looking car and even in recent GTI and R forms, it's looked aggressive without being too intimidating. That appears to be changing as the Mk VII R gets these great semi-squircular LEDs up front that combine with the shape of the hood and headlights to make it look like the car is staring you down if you're in its way. It's worlds better than the silly LED dots that used to surround the headlamps on the Mk VI.

Perhaps by the time I return to the market for another Golf, there will be a dependable hybrid drive version available, something now an option that I'm no longer towing a sailboat anywhere.

HUSKIES GET HIRED

Heldentenor Jim Cornelison, best known for singing "The Star Spangled Banner" with fans roaring their approval, has further ambitions.

“And, while singing the anthem for the Blackhawks is an honor and a thrill, it is not the only thing I am capable of doing. I want to sing many kinds of music,” the classically trained former opera singer told the students.

He is currently working on an album of patriotic music, and would love to sing with the Boston Pops, perform with a live orchestra in Grant Park during Fourth of July fireworks or sing at The Lincoln Center.

There are more than a few business programs in Chicago proper, including Booth and Kellogg, and DePaul and Loyola and Illinois-Chicago.

Mr Cornelison is working with Northern Illinois University.

Helping build the “Jim Cornelison brand” and laying out a pathway toward reaching those goals will be a pair of NIU students who will spend the semester hammering out a business plan as part of their coursework in applied entrepreneurialism, said NIU alum and entrepreneur Eric Wasowicz, who teaches the course.

The competition is open to all students in the entrepreneurship class. Their first assignment is to submit a "napkin sketch" of their plan.

“It’s not like we are teaching math here, where the answer to everything has been known for 2,000 years,” Wasowiz said. “Diving into the unknown is the very spirit of entrepreneurialism.”

The story includes video of a Cornelison performance, with colorguard, in the atrium at the College of Business.

AT WAR.

The town of Wielbark, Poland, notes the beginning of World War II.

Gmina Wielbark Facebook post.

When my great-grandfather was baptized in the Evangelical Church that still stands along the main street, Wielbark was Willenberg, East Prussia.  He subsequently moved his family to Volhynia, and from there, to Wisconsin, in advance of all of the territory east of the Oder and west of the Don becoming the bloodlands.

May any surviving relatives still in Wielbark or points east enjoy the peace.

WISCONSIN ESTABLISHES THE FRONTIER.

The Wall Street Journal evaluates two dimensions of college football performance.  On the horizontal axis, they plot expected performance, on the vertical, their familiarity with scandal.

The shame component is based on five categories: each team's four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall "ick" factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)

At the outer reaches of the first quadrant, Wisconsin, Clemson, and Stanford define the frontier, although the convex closure of the first quadrant is not vertical, because Alabama ranks higher on expected performance, albeit it's in the fourth quadrant for somewhat greater familiarity with scandal.

Northern Illinois is clustered with Fresno State and Brigham Young within the convex closure of the first quadrant.  I suspect that's because Northern Illinois, along with most of the other Mid-American Conference teams, make heavy use of student activity fees to support the revenue sports.

On the Journal's scatter diagram, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, and Purdue all rate above Northern Illinois on unfamiliarity with scandal, but below Northern Illinois on expected performance.

The weekend's returns give no reason to question those powerhouse ratings.

Northern Illinois University Media Services.

Five for the Fourth, at Iowa City.  The new coach and the new president continue the tradition.

The carping from the Des Moines Register is priceless.

Let’s be clear: Northern Illinois, an Orange Bowl team a season ago with Heisman Trophy contender Jordan Lynch at quarterback, is nobody’s slouch — tabbed the No. 24 team preseason by Sports Illustrated.

A Big Ten team needs to beat a Mid-American Conference team on its home field, though. Period. End of discussion.

Let's be clear: Northern Illinois went out of the selling wins for money games business years ago.