THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PRESIDENTIAL CULT.

Michael Brendan Dougherty suggests Andrew Jackson was the prototype.  Perhaps he couldn't help it, he was reared that way.  "Jackson was the embodied zenith of Southern Scots-Irish honor culture." For a fuller understanding of what that means, and what it might have metastasized into, read and understand Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, as well as Colin Woodard's American Nations.  We focus today on how Old Hickory laid the foundation for the expectation that a president would deliver bright shiny things.

Jackson's authoritarian will, his eagerness with the veto pen, his unprincipled use of federal power against non-whites, and his ugly patronage schemes changed forever the character of the Republic. Jackson pushed America's fragile Republican institutions down in front of the march of mass democracy.  He put the executive branch on a tilt that eventually made it superior to Congress, and made the president himself into a kind of populist king and symbol of the people's will. The American nation has suffered from infantalized [c.q.] Congresses, cowardly judiciaries, and "great presidencies" ever since.

Perhaps, though, it requires the overreach of such an aspirational president for the voters to be receptive to a more modest approach to governing.

COULDN'T WAIT FOR HIS 72 VIRGINS?

All have sinned, and all have fallen short. Chicago Islamic school leader Mohammed Abdullah Saleem charged with sexual abuse.

The allegations against Saleem, who has been a respected Muslim leader in Chicago for decades, surfaced in December, when leading Muslim scholar referred to them in a blog. [Cross-reference to that post not provided in the article - ed.]

The case Saleem had created tensions in Chicago’s large Muslim community among those who believe such allegations are better handled by religious and community leaders and those who believe they should be reported immediately to police.

To his credit, Mr Saleem has returned to the States to face the charges.

But we will know we are winning when "respected Moslem scholar" takes on the same sort of odor that "Soviet ideologist" acquired in the 1980s, and that "postmodern intellectual" holds in circles more respectful of logic.

FASCHING IST.

For future reference, a paczki primer.  "If you don't eat at least one paczek, you will be unlucky all year long."  The story notes a lot of Milwaukee area fortune seekers.  Whether paczki bring good luck or not, they leave a better taste than a losing lottery ticket.

PRESERVING THAT EXPENSE PREFERENCE PLAYGROUND.

The latest development from Chicago State University is the anticipated retirement of president Wayne Watson.  To the dissidents of CSU Faculty Voice, it can come none too soon.

According to university public relations people, Watson’s achievements include “renewed accreditation, a reduction in the number of audit findings, an increase in academic standards and better relations with the South Side community.” Heady accomplishments in five years, and only one connected to the purported evaluation criteria. Interesting that the university fails to mention Watson’s singular achievement: his dramatic expansion of both the number of administrators and the salary expenditures for those persons. An article about another university president seems quite applicable to Chicago State: “a whole lot of it (money) goes directly into the pockets of a metastasizing cadre of university administrators, whose jobs, as nearly as I’ve been able to determine . . . consist of inventing justifications for their own existence while harassing faculty . . .”

Mr Watson at least brought continuity to Chicago State: it was a subprime dropout factory when his predecessor had to resign, and it remains a subprime dropout factory today.  The one bright spot might be that there are fewer students enrolling, which might cut into the number (if not necessarily the proportion) of dropouts.  And the student credit hours per vice president has fallen more rapidly than enrollments have.  For the usual reason.

Wayne Watson can create any number of Vice Presidents and Associate Vice Presidents for Chicago State. With the addition of this new Vice President’s position, we now have 12, compared to 6 in fiscal 2011.

But the academy's house organ for business as usual reported on the presidential shift at Chicago State in a way that didn't sit well with one of the president's retainers: a rebuttal to the retainer's claims reveals the true purpose of Chicago State.

There has not been enough outrage from the taxpayers of IL about what has gone on under Watson's "reforms" of CSU because they don't know about it--the agencies in place to monitor institutions in IL give CSU a wide berth--criticize and you are a racist. African American faculty and many in the community on the southside of Chicago have been conditioned not to air their dirty laundry in public and not to tear down a "successful" black man or woman no matter how outrageous his or her behavior--be it cronyism or plagiarism.

Thus does the soft bigotry of low expectations continue.

FASCHINGSDIENSTAG.

In Milwaukee, people pronounce "paczki" differently than their counterparts in Detroit or Chicago.  Perhaps you know them, as I do, as Berliner, or perhaps as a cream-filled Bismarck.

Looks like several more weeks of deep freeze coming, proper for fasting, penance, not following the news of Bruce Jenner or any Kardashians, and working on the railroad.

THE PEOPLE ARE INSUFFICIENTLY ANGRY.

Last October, I visited the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, where part of the Pacific Theater gallery includes a retrospective of propaganda posters.

The display includes the obligatory obeisance to contemporary sensibilities, otherwise understood as the reflection of people, upon having won a war, asking, "did we really do that?"

But there can be no hope of victory in a future war until people are willing to countenance official scorn for their enemies.  Thus far, that is not the case in the United States, and until it is the case, Roger Simon of Pajamas Media is unlikely to be persuasive.

The country will be with us.  The average American, smarter than the elites, realizes the danger of losing. They care about their country unambivalently.  But we have to keep up the flow of information to them. We have to inspire them. We cannot stop.  We cannot give up.  We have everything to lose.

Too many aspirants to national office, however, are still too afraid of being mau-maued by self-despising multiculturalists to refer to savages as savages.

In the absence of such clarity, however, the best some opinion leaders can offer is wishful thinking.

"Are we going to let the ISIS horror show continue week after week without end?"  That draws criticism from Mr Matthews's left. "Worse than incinerating a nun, apparently, ISIS might kidnap a celebrity. Then we would have no choice but to send in a fictional character."  With a recommended alternative to making the rubble bounce.

A better path forward can only be forged by peoples’ movements on the ground in Iraq and Syria — movements that still exist, still matter, and continue to organize for workers’ rights, gender justice, war reparations, and people power, even amid the death and displacement that has swallowed up all the headlines.

Now is a critical time to seek to understand and build solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian civil societies. Heeding their call, we should strengthen awareness here at home of the tremendous political and ethical debt the United States owes all people harmed by the now-discredited war on Iraq and the crises it set in motion.

Somebody has been violating Islam's proscription of the use of intoxicants or narcotics.  Perhaps, though, the self-despising multiculturalists and the limited-intervention conservatives such as Pat Buchanan can find common ground.

But about whether ISIS is an "existential threat" to us, or if this war is really our war, there is no agreement.

North of Syria, along 500 miles of border, sits a Turkish army of half a million with 3,000 tanks that could cross over and annihilate ISIS in a month. Former Secretary of State James Baker suggests that the U.S. offer air, logistics and intelligence support, if the Turks will go in and snuff out ISIS.

But not only have the Turks not done so, for a time they looked the other way as jihadists crossed their border to join ISIS.

If the Islamic State, as Ankara's inaction testifies, is not viewed as a threat to Turkey's vital interests, how can it be a threat to ours?

There are reports that the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs would be more willing to participate in a war on ISIS if we would first effect the ouster of Bashar Assad.

Everyone in the Middle East, it appears, wants the United States to fight their wars for them. But as they look out for their interests first, it is time we started looking out for ours first.

Foremost among those interests would be to avoid another $1 trillion war, with thousands of U.S. dead and tens of thousands of wounded, and a situation, after a decade of fighting, as exists today in Afghanistan and Iraq, where those we leave behind in power cannot hold their own against the enemies we defeated for them.

Indeed, particularly because there is no regional power arguably worth preserving.

The Islamic State has plugged into the most powerful currents of the Middle East. It is anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-West, Islamic and militantly Islamist. It promises to overthrow the old order of Sykes-Picot, to tear up the artificial borders the West imposed on the Arabs, and to produce a new unity, a new dispensation where the Quran is law and Allah rules and all Sunnis are united in one home whence all infidels -- Jews, Shia, Christians -- have been driven out. Hateful as it is, ISIS has a vision.

Hezbollah, Iran, Assad, the Houthi rebels, all Shiites, understand this.

They know they are in a fight to the death. And they fight.

But it is the Sunni Arabs, the royals on the Arabian Peninsula and the sheiks on the Gulf, to whom this should be a fire bell in the night.

For ISIS is out to dethrone these perceived royal puppets of a detested America and to reclaim rightful custody of Mecca and Medina.

The Shiites are already in the field. The Sunni are going to have to fight and win this war against ISIS, or lose it all.

Perhaps. Or perhaps the Sillies are the latest manifestation of the long-running proxy war between the Persians and the Bedouins. (Or is it between the Medes and the Hittites? Oceania and Eastasia?)  And thus, the proper foreign policy response might be to stay away.

DO LAACHSTE DECH KAPOTT.

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh yourself silly (Artikel 11, Kölsche Grundgesetz.)  The Rose Monday parades will go on in Cologne, although Braunschweig's Saturday events were cancelled owing to otherwise unspecified terrorist threats.

TIME TO THINK ABOUT SUMMER.

As more snow heads into northern New England, let us look at a summertime ritual from the days of The America That Worked^(TM).

Well-heeled parents of the Official Region wanted to have as little to do with their children as they could get away with.  Thus, they'd ship them off to prep school, and, come summer, exile them to the camps.

Pullman's large fleet of heavyweight cars would be put to use as additional sections of the Bar Harbor or State of Maine, or run as passenger extras, which would look something like this.

The ritual continued into the early 1960s.

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.

The wife of a Rachel Maddow fanboy argues he ought not be charged with a hate crime. "Attempting to throw a spanner into the humming rumor mill, the wife of the Chapel Hill killer told the media on Wednesday that her husband could not possibly be guilty of a hate crime because he was a committed progressive." So-called hate crimes are the postmodern version of mortal sins that call for additional acts of contrition or public penance.  Perhaps it is in applying such laws to the Rachel Maddow fanboy and the Ted Nugent enthusiast alike, that people will recognize their folly. "It will not do simply to presume that there is something intrinsic to progressivism that renders its adherents free from bigotry."

The governor of Oregon properly resigns after he is caught funneling state business to his wife's consultancy.  His successor is of the view that it's OK to cheat on her husband, as long as it is with another woman. "[Kate] Brown is married to husband Dan Little; she has publicly discussed her bisexuality in past campaigns."

And the office of freakazoid rights at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks to guilt-trip normal people.

It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive.

Whatever. Oh brave new world that has such people in it.

CROSS CROSSINGS CAREFULLY.

Semi driver claims not to have seen an oncoming train.

[Union Pacific] has a goal of zero incidents - because even one is too many. But people continue to use railroad property as a short cut, or they make bad decisions at crossings. They don't think through what they are doing; what could happen. And, unfortunately, they don't think about the people their decisions affect.

Thus, the railroad instituted a colleague-support program. Read about it. And take a few seconds to watch the video. Did the semi get across, or not?

UNDERPAID.

Thus did commentator Charles Krauthammer sympathize with State Department spinner Jen Psaki after Megyn Kelly practiced her bad-ass persona last night.

Carol Brown notes, "It’s all good. No worries. The Middle East is under control. The administration is on top of things."

Yes, the Obama Administration's cookie-pushers have had a difficult few days, parsing words about jihadis shooting up a Kosher deli.  Random in the sense that it was those shoppers unfortunate enough to be there when the bad guys showed up.  Don't be stupid about being smart.  After that, having to ad-lib a bug-out from Yemen looks almost like business as usual.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.

It’s Too Cold To Protest Global Warming At Yale.  "Yale anti-fossil fuel campaigners have indefinitely postponed a protest that was set for this weekend due to 'unfavorable weather conditions and other logistical issues.'"  Humph.  The New Haven Railroad used to be able to get through, unless something extraordinary, like a lightship on the tracks, happened.

Divestment advocates face a conflict of interest, as the hedge funds that Ivy League universities have become make money for those scholarships from, gasp!, capitalist enterprises.

So far the divestment movement has met with little success as most colleges and universities have rejected calls to divest themselves of fossil fuel holdings, saying it would hurt their abilities to provide scholarships and other opportunities for students.

Harvard was one such school to reject fossil fuel divestment. In protest, 40 students with Divest Harvard staged a sit-in in the same building as Harvard President Drew Faust’s office. But even as some students become more adamant about divesting, others are finding it to be counterproductive.

And the polar vortex pattern that brought the heavy snows to Chicago last winter has shifted to the east. The cold air is still in place, but the storms come through here with relatively little snow, then draw moisture over the ocean.

RETHINK THE PRICING.

The downside of living in Hawaii, as Jim Loomis does, is that one is pretty much stuck with flying to the mainland.

By the time all the “special” passengers had boarded–families with small children, persons needing assistance, first class passengers, Delta SkyMiles members, etc.–there was no room in any of the overhead bins within ten rows of my seat. That meant I had to find space in, on, or under seat 16F for my carry-on tote and for the heavy knee-length coat that I brought with me.

The bag and the coat fit all right, but that really left no room for me. Somehow, by pushing and shoving and severely taxing the good nature of the woman seated next to me, I got settled, but was barely able to move my legs and feet for the duration of the five-hour flight. Thank goodness I had impulsively decided to check my carry-on bag at the Maui airport.

But here’s the thing: Checking the bag cost me $25 and upgrading to that “premium” seat cost an additional $79. My God! What if I hadn’t upgraded to “Comfort Economy” or whatever it is Delta calls those seats? How did the people in plain old “economy” deal with two-inches less leg room than what I had?

We did get a complimentary drink and a snack about a half hour after we took off. The snack was peanuts in a foil bag the size of a pack of matches. I counted the peanuts. There were thirteen. For my drink, I asked for ginger ale. The flight attendant filled a small plastic cup with ice cubes and opened a can of Ginger Ale. She stopped pouring when the cup was about two-thirds full.

Sorry, Delta, but economy passengers –this one anyway — come away from your flights with the very clear impression that we have been run through a wringer and every possible dollar has been extracted. And after all that, the flight itself was crowded and uncomfortable. It’s not a good feeling.

Yes.

I made a weekend trip to Santa Clara for O Scale West.  Used the automated check-in at Chicago.  Maybe three screens of substance, and more than three screens of up-selling (first class?  more legroom?  membership in Suckers Club?)  I always check my bag rather than stock up on special travel supplies, but then I feel like a fool for having done so when the herder informs the passengers authorized to board late that there's no more room in the bins, and we'll check your bags for free.

Has anyone in an airline run the numbers?  Suppose you check one or two bags for free, and charge for the use of the storage bins?  Might do something about the clutter.

Might also work as a productivity measure.  Departing, 33 minutes or so to load a stretch 737 with the seating capacity of one Metra gallery coach.  On return to Chicago, about 25 minutes to unload the plane.  A lot of that is people making their way from their seats to wherever their stuff is, and gathering their stuff.  Price the congestion differently, might be able to get one or two more trips a day out of the same fleet of planes (note ... fleet, one or more trips a day out of each plane, there'd be no need for airline subsidies.)

Incidentally, that Metra gallery coach I mentioned: its entire passenger load generally disembarks in Chicago in about six minutes, all through one door.  Two Amtrak coaches, each of which has a door attended ...

RENDERED UNEMPLOYABLE BY THE MINIMUM WAGE.

I use that expression as an indictment of policies intended to raise the incomes of unskilled workers that induce inventors to create ever more effective robots.

To me, that's a bug.  Jeffrey A. Tucker offers evidence that to the self-styled progressives of a century ago, rendering unproductive people unemployable was the goal.

But the minimum wage is in a special category because, these days, its effects are so little understood. One hundred years ago, legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes and the undesirables, and thereby to disincentivize their reproduction. A polite gulag.

As time went on, the blood lust of the eugenics movement died down, but the persistence of its minimum wage policies did not. A national minimum wage passed in 1931 with the Davis-Bacon Act. It required that firms receiving federal contracts pay prevailing wages, which meant union wages, a principle that later became a national minimum wage.

Speeches in support of the law were explicit about the fear that black workers were undercutting the demands of white-only unions. The minimum wage was a fix: it made it impossible to work for less.

His article relies heavily on a Journal of Economic Perspectives essay by Princeton's Thomas C. Leonard. Much in that essay to digest.

CONVERGENCE IN WISCONSIN.

Governor Scott Walker's proposed mission change for the University of Wisconsin system, and Marquette University's dismissal proceedings against political scientist John McAdams might be two symptoms of the same institutional rot.  "The future of the academy is already precarious. The least administrators could do is stop making it so easy for people to wave goodbye."

Peter Lawler summarizes the multiple ways in which the academy squandered much of the goodwill it once enjoyed.

Generally, the evolution has been away from “faculty governance” in the direction of rule by administrators (facilitated by accrediting agencies). The latter function increasingly as, and are often compensated like, corporate CEOs. That this evolution has not lent itself to efficient or effective cost-control apparently has not come to Governor Walker’s attention.

But let’s be fair. Faculty share lots of the responsibility for this irresponsible change. Too many tenured professors have become careerist specialists without spirit or heart, knowing more and more about less and less. That’s as true in the social sciences and humanities as it is in the more technical or techno-light fields. Such faculty have lost interest in the broader purposes of higher education, including the indispensable function of a content-rich “general education” or “core curriculum.” They have been willingly complicit in the surrender of such comprehensive concerns to temporary and adjunct faculty, and to the administrators who hire and supervise them.

Too often, it’s not been the case that “shared governance” has been wrested away from faculty; it’s been surrendered, and all too often without a fight.

Give the administrative power-grabbers credit, though: first they appealed to the liberalitas of much of the faculty and sold their usurpations as promoting affirmative action or diversity; next they appealed to the pusillanimity of the careerists with "let us be proactive, rather than have it imposed by the legislature.

For all the good it did. Yes, Professor Lawler notes, some people fought the good fight, but by the time a Scott Walker comes for the mission statement, who is left to fight back?

To be sure, tenured faculty have, here and there, roused themselves from their complacent and dogmatic slumber to defend their turf. But they’ve done so on the administrators’ terms, by trying to talk the talk of skills, competencies, and measurable outcomes. Such efforts are typically both inauthentic and too little, too late. It’s just starting to be noticed that an important factor in the recent rapid decline in majors such as history and English has been the pervasive trend toward truncated, competency-based general education—a trend driven by the administrative thought that educational reform should obey the priorities and methods generated by accreditors.

The result is the emptying out of the content or substance of liberal education and the proletarian-ization of the faculty. Professors are more and more subject to soft-despotic forms of assessment, induced to justify their salaries through the submission of reports based on “time on task.” When it comes to assessment measures allegedly required for accreditation, for example, faculty are involved in what amount to pointless time sucks that distract them from their real vocation. It’s the least lazy faculty who are most reluctant to comply.

Or, when the expected gain from pushing back no longer exceeds the gain from doing something else, better to stop faking it.

THE CLEANSING POWER OF MARKETS.

There is a great deal of money to be made in Marshallian entrepreneurial districts.  Land rents adjust, and land uses change.  And thus do markets reallocate resources, yes, even markets that traffic in goods and services better not mentioned in polite society.

Monied men in Silicon Valley create a demand for highly-compensated sex work that can easily be coordinated using the same apps and services they create at their desk jobs. As a narrative, it contains the holy trifecta that has come to replace sex, drugs, and rock and roll: sex, tech, and the hollow optimism of neoliberal capitalism. There’s just one problem: it’s not exactly true.

For the last two years, the media has been fixated on the idea of a mutually beneficial arrangement between Silicon Valley employees and sex workers.

Plenty of time to invent the Next Big Thing (or, perhaps to debug it) but no time to cultivate human interaction.  The article focuses on how the high-rollers behave badly toward comfort women (insert your stereotype of choice here) but the backstory is pure Ricardian rent theory.

The tech industry may have brought plenty of overworked men with disposable income to the Bay Area, but not only is that new wealth failing to trickle down, it’s also putting tremendous pressure on the working class—sex workers included—to either take on more work or move out.

As the anonymous former escort told me: “It feels like an exclusive society filled with spoiled children who up our rents.”

But the oldest profession is all about negotiating over price. If the rent goes up, the fee for service goes up. No reason a Silicon Valley comfort woman can't take a page out of Harvard's book, and raise the rates.

That is, if she's willing to cater to mainstream tastes. There's a simpleminded view of markets that invokes "one dollar, one vote," and the Silicon Valley money evidently isn't going to the freakazoids.

Maxine Holloway adds that there is a painful irony to the way in which income inequality is transforming the historically diverse San Francisco from “the perfect location to create movements for social justice issues such as queer, trans, and sex worker rights” into an economically homogenous space.

And Siouxsie Q recalls: “In my career as a sex worker, the cost of living in San Francisco has gone up double or more. Have I doubled my prices? No.”

Perhaps Ms Q considers herself an inframarginal seller, or perhaps the horny geek market pays better than the alternatives.  Unfortunately, because it's the Bay Area, the sellers' minds are clouded by culture-studies bafflegab and freakazoid privilege.

The anonymous former escort I spoke with did acknowledge that “they were still totally clueless about their economic and male privilege,” recalling that a client once told her, much to her chagrin: “If I was a woman, this would just be my perfect job!” But when asked if they were generally good clients in terms of respect, payment, and behavior, she eagerly replied, “For the most part, yes!”

But they don’t have to be particularly stingy clients on a personal level for their industry as a whole to make sex workers’ lives more challenging on a systemic level.

A closer reading of the article, though, suggests that as the comfort women seek affordable locations to conduct their trade, they run afoul of zoning and quality-of-life laws enacted by municipalities seeking to shed their hardscrabble or ghetto reputation.  Those laws, the article suggests, sometimes are at the urging of the very tech workers who are also the comfort women's clientele.

I MUST HAVE MELLOWED.

Ten years ago, I was the academic ninja.  But perhaps the type of student who would post a grouchy remark on Rate My Professors or one of the other public venting sites figured it wouldn't do much good.  I submit a rating from a service called Locazu.  "This professor is the reason we go to universities. He is smart and cares about student learning. If he was a Harry Potter character, he would be professor Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody. He is that awesome."  Small sample and all that.  Not that it matters, as I've still not seen the kind of inducement to bring me out of retirement.

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, ENJOY THE INCOHERENCE.

In a recent review of Arthur M. Meltzer's Philosophy Between the Lines, Francis Fukuyama suggests that it matters how people read for meaning.

Esotericism is the practice, widely employed by a variety of thinkers prior to and up through the early Enlightenment, of disguising their real meaning through ellipsis, surface contradiction, dispersal of their real arguments, and the like (indeed—they were misleading casual readers about their true intentions!). The understanding that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle made use of esotericism was central to Strauss’s own project of returning to their thought as an antidote to what he called the “crisis of modernity”, since it pointed to deeper truths hidden behind the evident meaning extracted by superficial readers. It was probably also one of the sources of distrust of Strauss and his followers by other academics, since it implied that initiates into the art of esoteric interpretation had access to meanings unavailable to others.

Mr Fukuyama's focus is on rehabilitating the reputation of philosopher Leo Strauss.  In the course of his argument, though, he gets at the heart of the disarray in the higher learning.

I am much struck today by the total disarray of the humanities in American academia. The job market prizes quantitative skills far higher than qualitative ones; there is also a widespread feeling that while anyone can become an English or classics major, learning a “hard” skill like statistics or physics is far more difficult. The humanities as taught in many contemporary universities have only themselves to blame for the latter view: Under the influence of postmodernism and deconstructionism, textual interpretation has become lazy, arbitrary, indulgently expressive, and scornful of the idea that books have anything true to teach their readers. Esoteric reading reestablishes a discipline that has been lost, for it requires close and slow reading, and it restores an assumption that there is in fact a “true” interpretation reflecting the author’s intent that is not simply the whim of the interpreter.

Yes, and in the absence of standards, all that remains is a muddle.

Many contemporary inhabitants of liberal democratic societies are perfectly comfortable with relativism because they think that it encourages toleration and liberal politics. The opposite of relativism, after all, is absolutism (is it not?)—the arrogant and potentially tyrannical belief that there is only one truth. This is true enough in one sense. But as Melzer points out, the postmodernist project is itself incoherent and self-undermining. If all beliefs are equally true or historically contingent, if the belief in reason is simply an ethnocentric Western prejudice, then there is no superior moral position from which to judge even the most abhorrent practices—as well as, of course, no epistemological basis for postmodernism itself.

Moreover, compared to our easygoing democratic relativists today, Nietzsche and Heidegger were ruthlessly consistent. Relativism could easily support a doctrine like fascism that promoted the rule of the weak by the strong, for if there is no basis for “right”, then all that remains is “might.” We see echoes of this dilemma all around us today: We (believers in liberal democracy) see practices we don’t like in places like China or by the Islamic State in the Levant, but when asked to explain why this discomfort doesn’t simply reflect our own ethnocentrism, we are tongue-tied because we have already denied the premise that reason can help uncover truth, even if incompletely and contingently.

Properly viewed, relativism is intellectual discipline: upon encountering a novel practice, ask yourself why that practice might have emerged, without immediately judging whether the underlying reasons are desirable or not.  That discipline, however, does not lead to the conclusion that all beliefs are equally true.  Historically contingent, yes.  Emergent, yes.  Condemning adherents to a crabbed existence, sometimes.  Evolutionarily stable, thus not necessarily.

That's second nature to anyone who has been exposed to the distinction between positive and normative economics.

THE CROSS PURPOSES OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

Peter Wood notes that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's proposed (or not) re-purposing of the University of Wisconsin system is well within the realm of the academy's quest for meaning.

Higher education, at least since the time of Plato, has always had four basic purposes that tug in different directions: the pursuit of truth for its own sake (“intellectual curiosity”); preparation for practical life< (“jobs”); the transmission of culture (“civilization”); and the shaping of good character (“citizenship”).  Sometimes these can be brought into balance, but usually they jar against each other.  Aristophanes, who favored the transmission of traditional culture, mocked Socrates as a charlatan; Cicero criticized the Greek philosophers for distracting student from preparation for public life.  Jefferson extolled education as essential not for the pursuit of truth or the preparation of students for work, but as foundation of civic life.

Those of us today who defend liberal education—and we are many—often make arguments for it that go well beyond the value of “intellectual curiosity,” though to be sure intellectual curiosity is important.

At different times, these purposes take on different emphases.

If we are, as many feminists and college administrators say, in the midst of a “rape culture” in higher education, what could be more pressing than to stop it?  Would protecting “intellectual curiosity” trump protecting undergraduate women from sexual predators?

Then again, many Americans attentive to the rise of ISIS and the aggressive new barbarianism of radical Islam have come to believe that liberal education today ought to prepare students to stand in defense of Western civilization.  It is a hard sell, since a substantial portion of the American professoriate is ambivalent whether the West is worth defending.  Still the idea of defending the West against Islamo-fascism is one strong way to uphold the importance of liberal arts education.

Let’s add to this list the concern that many Americans have over our nation’s economic prospects.

Put simply, universities are failing, and Professor Wood suggests the failure has more causes than the complaints of the Chamber of Commerce.

Missing altogether from [Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Dan] Berrett’s timeline are things like the 1962 Port Huron Statement, in which the SDS laid out its agenda for using colleges and universities as instruments for radical transformation of American society; the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which was the opening phase of the successful effort by the campus left to unseat the curricular authority of the university; or the success of the effort to establish racial preferences in admissions and “diversity” as the regnant campus creed.  The fragmentation and trivialization of the liberal arts curriculum had a lot to do with these developments.  And the disaffection of millions of Americans with higher education today is in very large part a consequence of the self-destruction of the ideals on which the liberal arts were once based.

Berrett is among those defenders of the status quo who are unable or unwilling to look more than momentarily at the bonfire the left has made of the curriculum and of academic standards.  Where will liberal education go next?  I hope it not only survives, but that it thrives in years to come.  That will happen, however, only if we get serious about defending the essentials and return to Reagan’s distinction between the higher uses of liberal learning and the distractions that merely appropriate the name of the liberal arts.  We need more discernment, less distraction.

My advice to Governor Walker:  don’t fall into the simplistic distinction between the “search for truth” and “workplace needs” that your opponents have set up.  It is a net at your feet meant to trap you.  Asking and expecting universities to address workplace needs is legitimate—more than legitimate, it is urgent.  But it is a goal that can be pursued without making yourself a supposed enemy of open-minded inquiry.  It is your foes who, rightly understood, have snapped their minds shut against the danger of new ideas.

Precisely.

OUR PRESIDENT'S SLOPPY REASONING.

The National Prayer Breakfast occurred last week, and Our President used the occasion to shore up the self-despising multiculturalists.  The passage that is most annoying to anyone with a brain might be the use of a tu quoque unto the thirtieth generation.

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities -- the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.  Michelle and I returned from India -- an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhi, the person who helped to liberate that nation.

So this is not unique to one group or one religion.  There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.  In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance.

It's not hard to find commentators calling out Our President for such a foolish statement.  Let me recommend remarks by Victor Davis Hanson, who has probably forgotten more ancient and medieval history than the man who will not release his college records ever learned.

The problem with all such high-horse declarations by Obama is his continual omission of historical context and, in this case, his conflation of the frequent with the rare. The Crusades began in 1095, almost a millennium ago; the Inquisition in 1478, now over 500 years past. When the president says “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he should remember that all religions at the time committed terrible deeds that shock the modern sense of morality — given the savage wars between Christendom and Islam, and the religious purifications and civil discord common to all the religious factional strife that played out, violently, in accord with the ethos of the times.

Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Jim Crow ended officially a half-century ago. Indentured servitude, however, continues, almost exclusively among some Islamic groups in the Middle East and Africa. The caste system and ethnic and religious tribalism that institutionalized discrimination and second-class status, quite akin to Jim Crow, persist in places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I doubt today whether a Jew of any nationality would be allowed to immigrate and buy real estate in too many corners of the Islamic Middle East. Outside of the West, women and homosexuals are often treated no differently than in the Seventh Century.

In fact, Christian countries were the first to legally end the age-old human sin of the slave trade, and the first to outlaw slavery’s continuance. The president, is fond of historical sloppiness and moral equivalence (cf. the Cairo Speech). But what is the point of citing sins of 1,000, 500, 150, or 50 years ago, without acknowledging 1) that such pathologies still continue today outside the West, especially in the world of Islam, and 2) that Christianity had a unique role in ending these wrongs?

So the question for the president is, why does such medieval violence persist to a much greater degree among so many Islamic extremists in the present world than among most zealots of other religions? (This is an empirical statement. Cf., for instance, the nature of recent global terror attacks in resources such as the Global Terrorism Database). And why search the distant past for examples of moral equivalence, unless the present does not offer suitable data?

Precisely. No Moslem slave-traders, no African slave trade.  And thanks to the efforts of Righteous Christians such as Henry Ward Beecher, with a little help from Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and William Sherman, there are no cotton planters to buy the latest captives from Boko Haram.

BELLICOSE WOMEN.

Megyn Kelly interviews new Member of Congress Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican with experience flying A-10s.

Apparently Our President and the rest of the self-despising multiculturalists are still pushing the idea that holding enemy combatants in a military prison is encouraging more jihadis.  As if making special efforts to be nice to people who despise you will make them less likely to despise you.

MCSALLY: Look, we are in a generational fight with radical Islamist extremists. And I can say that, I guess the president won't. But it's a generational fight. We have enemy combatants, and it seems like, again, even this week, you know, the king of Jordan was more emboldened and showed more resolve than our own commander in chief is in dealing with this very serious threat.

So the last thing we need to be doing is returning any of these to the battlefield. They are enemy combatants. So, let's focus on fighting the fight with a real strategy that addresses this threat that is more serious than I've seen in my whole lifetime. Not these campaign promises.

Well, the Sillies are closer to an existential threat to Jordan, particularly to the Hashemite dynasty, than our cookie-pushers perceive them to be to the United States.  The cookie-pushers might even be right: compare and contrast all the implications of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia with Islamic State.

Toward the end of the interview, we have this.

MCSALLY: We've had a lack of a strategy and we need to use all elements of power to destroy this threat.

KELLY: May I just say on behalf of women everywhere, you really -- you sound like a bad ass. Can we say that on TV?

Empowering, indeed. And good for the morale.

MARKING OFF.

Enough of the snow, and the administrative follies.  I have other things to do.

That's the milk run.  Locomotive has to get Boston and Maine paint yet.

TOSSED FOR DISAGREEING WITH THE STATUS QUO?

Marquette University will begin tenure revocation procedures against John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams.  (Back story and additional links here.)  Inside Higher Education have the story.  John Wilson, writing for the American Association of University Professor's Academe weblog, characterizes Marquette's reaction as "alarming." "AAUP regulations, and Marquette’s own policies, explicitly prohibit what Marquette is now doing: punishing a professor for publicly expressing his opinions." He elaborates.

Tolerance requires that a university not fire professors for their expression. Marquette is perfectly free to condemn McAdams for an alleged breach of civility, but not to punish him. And although some faculty might legitimately fear being criticized by McAdams, no one has a right to be free from criticism, or to punish McAdams for their own decision to self-censor.

Professor McAdams has retained counsel, and it appears that the Association will be brought in on his behalf. "Marquette’s decision to fire McAdams, like its earlier decision to suspend him, is a violation of the AAUP’s standards for academic freedom and Marquette’s requirements in its policies."

But his non-suspension suspension is not the only case of a professional being excommunicated for dissenting from the orthodoxy.  Here's Charles "Strong Town" Marohn being called out by an engineering guild.

Last week I received a notice from the board of licensing that a complaint has been filed against my professional engineering license. The complaint indicated that I had engaged in “misconduct on the website/blog Strong Towns” for things I have written critical of the engineering profession. While this development is disappointing, it is far from surprising.

The complaint was filed by a former American Society of Civil Engineers fellow who is currently an outspoken member of the Move MN coalition, the organization advocating for more transportation funding here in my home state. The complaint was filed on the day I wrote No New Roads, a blog post that called out both organizations for their self-serving support of endless transportation spending. Again, an effort to take away my professional license for speaking out is appalling, but it isn’t surprising.

I’ve long opposed the American Society of Civil Engineers. They don’t represent me and they should not be allowed to speak for this profession unchallenged. Their stands on how our country should be developed are frequently cited, despite how stunningly radical they are. American prosperity is not simply a function of how many roads, pipes and hunks of metal we can construct.

I'll keep following both cases.  Anyone who works on Northern Pacific Road in Brainerd deserves allies.

LET KIDS BE KIDS.

Megan Fox:

Our children are suffering under unreasonable restrictions and we should be concerned about their ability to function independently as adults. And maybe that’s the purpose — to retard the development of dependent children into independent adults so that children go seamlessly from dependence on parents to dependence on an all-powerful government. We should fight this in our own homes and seek to produce highly independent and therefore inherently American citizens.

Over the top, perhaps. But as long as all the kids understand that when the street lights come on, it's time to come in, they ought otherwise be free to structure their own play.  Perhaps that means parents limiting the scheduled activities (exercise class, sports practice, music lessons) to the weekends.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

As part of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's plan to reduce state spending on the University of Wisconsin system whilst granting the universities greater autonomy, he or someone on his staff proposed to amend the purpose statement for the university system, substituting "workforce development" in place of any mention of  "search for truth" or "improving the human condition."  The governor and his handlers are spinning the revised language as "drafting error" or perhaps as "blank, simple mission statement."  The drafting of mission statements, and the latest corporate assault on clear thinking, re-visioning the vision, is just another administrative time suck for a downsized and demoralized faculty being called upon to deliver more credit hours to increased numbers of unprepared, disengaged, or intoxicant-addled students.  Here's the Inside Higher Ed observation thereon, if more moderately.

“In recent years university mission statements tend to be revised so that they lean dangerously to the omnibus fallacy -- trying to be so encompassing that they become generic and saccharine in tone and content,” [University of Kentucky historian John] Thelin said in an email. “I think that is a function of two things: probably reliance on external public relations firms and marketing consultants, and, second, a reflection of the growth, diversity and complexity within an institution -- especially a large state university and its system.”

In other words, deanlets and deanlings go off strategizing and meeting and retreating and revisioning for the same reason economists offer quarterly interest rate forecasts: because others expect them to do so.  It has nothing to do with improving the learning conditions for the students or the working conditions of the faculty.  Here's Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Richard Krusin

If these proposed changes succeed, [University of Wisconsin system president Ray] Cross will have sold the University of Wisconsin System’s birthright to Scott Walker for less than a mess of pottage, and is likely to go down in the history of public higher education as a modern-day Esau, the System President on whose watch a once-respected public University System was reduced to a second-rate “public-benefit corporation.”

The late Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell put it directly.  And that’s what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth." Indeed.

I wonder, though, whether in striking any reference to truth, the governor's wordsmiths didn't get in a dig at the impostors who insist on referring to "truth".  To wit,  the humanities types only become protective of the ancient traditions when their budgets are at stake.  Otherwise it's business as usual, interrogating hegemonic phrases.

DEMOCRATIC PLAGUE VECTORS?

The Centers for Disease Control are still claiming victory over measles.

In 2000, the United States declared that measles was eliminated from this country. The United States was able to eliminate measles because it has a highly effective measles vaccine, a strong vaccination program that achieves high vaccine coverage in children and a strong public health system for detecting and responding to measles cases and outbreaks.

Further down the page, they note that measles cases still occur within our borders, which the Centers lay off on carriers entering the country from elsewhere, and infecting people who have not received the vaccine.

As early as September, 2013, a Think Progress essay noted that measles makes a comeback, influenced by "pervasive anti-vaccine beliefs".

The most recent measles outbreak appears to have begun at Disneyland, or somewhere in southern California.  And the opposition is laying the blame off on elements of the Democrat coalition.  Ed Driscoll has an animated map asserting a correlation between people requesting an exemption from school vaccinations for their children and voting Democratic.  "Put a pin wherever there's a Whole Foods."  Thus the gentry class protect their children from a nonexistent risk of brain damage whilst turning them into measles carriers.  At the same time, Rush Limbaugh is raising the possibility that it's future Democratic participants in the welfare state bringing the sick.

We conquered that freaking disease, in case anybody's forgotten.  We conquered measles.  But the kids that Obama has let flood the country via the Southern border were not vaccinated against anything, and Obama's demanding that they be populated in schools and communities, neighborhoods all over the country.  They don't have to be vaccinated before coming into the country. They really don't have to be medically checked after getting into the country because they're here as future voters, and anything that gets in the way of that is gonna be shoved aside.

It's not as if the nativists in the Republican coalition have any brief for Our President or the benefits he has failed to deliver for his coalition.  At the margin, though, add measles and Ebola to a non-stimulus stimulus and a foreign policy reset that looks more like TILT and a counter-Islamofascism initiative that isn't working, and there might be sufficient evidence to reject the blandishments of Democrats in the next election.

MAYBE THE MINDSET OF MATRICULANTS MATTERS.

Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker has proposed to reduce University of Wisconsin system appropriations, suggesting that the university reallocate resources by, for instance, asking professors to take on more classes.  Milwaukee radio talker Charlie Profscam Sykes  has been reading excerpts from a public salary database, making invidious comments about the undergraduate classes taught by the highest-paid faculty, who are almost all on the Madison campus.  But then his affiliated Right Wisconsin site performed an analysis of completion patterns at the state's universities.

According to their own data (including in-system transfers between schools) only 31.4 percent of freshman students who began in the Fall 2009 semester received their diplomas by Spring 2013. Of students who started in 2007, 65 percent of them will have degrees at the completion of their sixth year in the system.

Breaking the numbers down even further to the UW System’s five largest schools – Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Stevens Point – and you see an interesting discrepancy. Of those schools, only Madison gets a majority of students (56.4 percent) out in four years.

Three of the other four (La Crosse 39.2 percent, Eau Claire 31.1 percent, and Stevens Point 27.6 percent) are the near the national average. Trailing the pack is UW-Milwaukee, where a paltry 15.9 percent of students get diplomas in four years.

Thus, the highest completion rate is at the flagship campus, where all those high-salaried research professors are hiding from undergraduates. What's going on?

Now, no doubt there are a number of reasons for this. Switching majors, in-semester internships, dropping a class, and any number of personal issues can all delay graduation. But something else is going on here, something that goes well beyond Madison’s status as the flagship school in the UW System.

Perhaps the more logical reason is that Madison has the administrative sense to have enough faculty and course offerings to get students out on time. Search through any semester registration catalog and you’ll notice a number of "Semester-only" classes being offered; particularly in the 300 and 400-level courses taken by upper classmen. The traditional thinking is that a student will take something like "CHEM 311, Microbiology I" which is only offered in the fall, and then use the knowledge learned there to take "CHEM 312, Microbiology II" in the spring.

Wait a minute, isn't the knock on Madison that the faculty aren't teaching enough courses? Perhaps there's something else at work, something like students who are ready at the end of the preceding spring semester to sign up for Microbiology I when the fall semester rolls around?

IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE AN ALL-WEATHER MODE.

In the latest round of climate chaos February to fall on Chicago, Amtrak held up better than it did last year.

Unlike January 2014, when many trains got out of the gate hours late or not at all, only 8 of 28 departures left the Windy City on Monday more than 10 minutes late. None of those were more than 35 minutes tardy except for a breakdown affecting one Hiawatha Service train, which precipitated significant cascading delays on the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor into the evening.

Pre-season modification of P42 locomotive traction motors, winterizing of freeze-prone Horizon cars, revised inspection building procedures for train servicing at Chicago, and reducing the number of instances where engines trail a consist may have helped maintain better reliability.

Superliner coaches selectively pulled from overnight trains through February have been pressed into service on Michigan Wolverines Nos. 350 and 355, Chicago-Quincy, Ill., Nos. 380 and 381, plus a Chicago-Carbondale, Ill. round-trip on Nos. 390-393. Where consists are turned at their destinations, Amtrak has been running locomotives at the front of each train to minimize traction motor snow ingestion.

The Hiawatha set that failed was one of the push-pull sets with a cabbage car on the Chicago end.  It was pushed in by a follower, and Amtrak was able to assemble a replacement train to cover the 5.08 departure from Chicago that returned from Milwaukee behind the pusher and pushee.

The Way of the Zephyrs between Chicago and Galesburg was closed account heavy snow, which led to cancellation of the morning trips for and from Quincy, but the transcontinental trains got through.

ANTICIPATE THE MIXED STRATEGY.

The ultimate First World problem: did the Seattle Seahawks call the worst play ever?  Ask a game theorist.

The key insight of game theory for an N.F.L. coach is that when you think about what choice you should make, you need to also consider the response from the opposing coach, understanding that he is also thinking strategically. This line of thinking suggests that you should not necessarily call a run play, even if you’re blessed with a great running back. Likewise, it’s not clear that you should definitely pass. Rather, your choice should be somewhat random — a choice that game theorists call a “mixed strategy.”

Not somewhat random: your optimal mix is one that makes you indifferent among the pure strategies available to your opponent.  But your opponent knows that, and your opponent may also be mixing.

In the football context, your running back may be a better weapon than your quarterback, and so an optimal strategy does not dictate that you use them both with the same probability. Rather, you choose the probabilities in an optimal mixed strategy so that the payoff from a running play will be the same as that from a pass. This means that even with a great running back, an optimal strategy sometimes involves passing. Otherwise, your star running back, always facing a run defense, may end up less effective than a less great passer.

Yes, and within a game, offenses and defenses interact repeatedly, and teams can demonstrate tendencies.

Whenever I have taught economics students the idea of playing a mixed strategy, they respond incredulously, because it defies common sense to make the biggest decision of your football coaching life randomly. It may defy common sense, but it makes good strategic sense.

Perhaps you are like my students, and your advice is that maybe Carroll should follow a mixed strategy most of the time, but not in the dying seconds of the Super Bowl. But realize that if this were an optimal choice, Belichick would probably figure it out, and he would instruct his players to guard against the run. When most of the defenders focus only on stopping one running back, they usually succeed.

Or perhaps you believe that Lynch’s statistics show that he is so successful at bulldozing through opponents that he would succeed even against a defense set up only to stop the run. I disagree. A key reason that Lynch has been so successful is that his coach has been playing a mixed strategy all season. Lynch has accumulated impressive numbers in part because opposing defenses have had to be concerned about Russell Wilson’s passing. And so Lynch’s history of success when playing as part of a mixed strategy says nothing about how successful he would be if his opponents knew for sure his coach would call a running play.

Game theory points to the possibility that Carroll’s decisive call was actually the result of following the best possible strategy, and that this is a strategy that involves an element of randomness in play-calling. This leads to the intriguing possibility that if that fateful final play were to be run in a dozen parallel universes, with each coach continuing to play the same mixed strategy, the actual plays called would differ, as would their outcomes.

Yes, provided the universes are not parallel when it comes to making the actual choice.  To keep it simpler: mixing keeps the defense honest.  Line up on a short-yardage play as if you are going to smash straight up the middle and run the play-action Bart Starr special.  But sometimes you have to smash straight up the middle to make the bomb fly.  And Bart has to be careful not to tip off the play, something Russell Wilson might have done.  But even so, the Nash equilibrium involves optimal mixing by defense and by offense.

That's a simpler explanation for what happened than the tinfoil-hattery making the rounds in the fever swamps.

The conspiracy theory lies in the fact that Seahawks coach Pete Carroll believed that the last yard the Seahawks needed for that Super Bowl victory was a gimme and, all things being equal, much better to have the iconic Super Bowl moment go to Russell Wilson than to Marshawn Lynch. Coaches setting certain favored players up for glory is as old as football itself. In addition, the politics of race, respectability, public relations and what’s in the best interest of a $2 billion corporation all played into this.

Even a writer for The Nation isn't ready to buy it, noting that power running in short yardage situations doesn't always work.  Even so, "But in a locker room like Seattle’s where they truly do feel like it’s them against a world and an NFL power structure that wants to put them down, this is one theory that we can expect to find purchase in the months ahead." I have memories of the Randy Moss, Daunte Culpepper era Minnesota Vikings.  So it's time to step away from football during prime model railroading season, give the Seattle fans time to turn the page, and, once the draft arrives, start thinking about the next division title.

THINK SYSTEMATICALLY.

A Destination: Freedom essay questions Amtrak allocating money to improve the Waterloo, Indiana station.

We should all be pleased that the people of Waterloo (and its neighbor Fort Wayne) are going to have such a pleasant environment in which to wait for their trains or their arriving relatives, but at what cost? Amtrak is spending more than $66,000 per passenger to improve Waterloo. If it were to invest in Chicago Union Station at the same rate the spend would be nearly $80 million (which still would be only about 10 per cent of what this obsolete and mis-engineered station needs in order to function).

Neither the commentary nor the local newspaper grasp the significance of this improvement.

The project will replace an existing bus stop-style shelter at the Amtrak stop in Waterloo – which currently consists of metal and Plexiglas – by moving the town’s historic train depot closer to the station. The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the town of Waterloo a $1.8 million grant in 2010 to put toward building the new station, and in 2012, the town was awarded an additional $4.4 million from Amtrak.

That funding would have helped accommodate a request from Norfolk Southern – which shares the line with Amtrak – to include two passenger boarding platforms west of Center Street.

A proper waiting room, rather than a bus shelter, is a good thing. An electronic status board (something that German city bus riders expect at the Haltestelle) to keep passengers advised of the latest delays to the Capitol and Lake Shore is also a good thing.

But that money is going to benefit passengers throughout the Amtrak network, as platforms on both tracks will help Norfolk Southern maintain a current of traffic along the old Lake Shore and Michigan Southern.  If the carriers can cooperate, there may not have to be protracted litigation to keep the trains moving.  On my October trip east, I was asleep from east of South Bend to Beaver Falls, and thus couldn't observe what dispatchers had to do to properly platform the trains.  The east coast trains are all on the Elkhart to Cleveland trackage simultaneously (barring late running for any number of reasons).  But there's only one platform at Elkhart and Waterloo, and east of Toledo the Sandusky platform is on the north track and the Elyria platform on the south track.  Thus, the passenger trains must cross, repeatedly, the paths of the opposing passenger trains, and be threaded through the stream of freight trains.  Additional directional running would be desirable.  Platform tracks off the main line, more so, but that might be asking too much.

JUST DO YOUR JOB.

The Seattle Seahawks get yet another miracle catch and are in a position to win the Super Bowl just before the game ends.  They even had a usually successful pick play set up against a goal line defense.

Cornerback Malcolm Butler. Super Bowl hero.

Making one of the two or three greatest defensive plays in the history of America's biggest game, Butler literally stole Super Bowl XLIX Sunday night at University of Phoenix Stadium.

Butler, a little-used rookie free agent from obscure West Alabama, reacted beautifully on a slant pass in traffic as the fate of his New England Patriots hung in the balance with about 20 seconds left.

Russell Wilson's dart for Ricardo Lockette at the 1 was right on target. Then Butler, demonstrating amazing reactions, cut in front of the wide receiver and made an interception for the ages.

Time stood still. No one moved. Was the game really over?

The interception held, the Seattle Seahawks' bid for a repeat was dead and the Patriots owned their fourth Lombardi Trophy in the last 14 years, 28-24, in an all-time game over the tremendous defensive team from the Pacific Northwest.

"That's a play that's supposed to work against the two guys covering one-on-one," Seattle coach Pete Carroll said. "And the guy jumped underneath and made the play."

In other interviews, Mr Butler remarked on his prior study of game tapes, and noted Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson look toward his receivers out of the corner of his eye.  Do tell.  And second-guessers everywhere have a new object of second-guessing.

Wilson had worked this scenario before was to throw to the bunch formation where Kearse and Ricardo Lockett were lined up. Wilson threw to Lockette, but little-known cornerback Malcolm Butler jumped the route and picked off the pass.

It was an irony of huge proportions for Packers fans, who blasted coach Mike McCarthy for two weeks over being too conservative at the goal line. The Seahawks were ultra-aggressive and they paid the ultimate price for it.

Luck is the residue of design. And give Patriot quarterback Tom Brady props for drawing the Seahawks off-side on the ensuing play. (It was so noisy in the stadium, it's unlikely that he called "New York Joker" or "T'ree - tvenny-t'ree-yumpin-yiminy.")  But the Seahawks lost their minds.

The Seahawks lost their composure after the final play. A fight broke out after the Patriots took a knee and it made the Seahawks look like poor losers.

Their destiny took a hike on them.

To the eternal anger of Seattle fans, who now speak of the worst call in Super Bowl history.  The Seahawks, however, may have demonstrated the worst manners in Super Bowl history.

The Seahawks scored on four straight possessions in the second and third quarters to take a 24-14 lead. Doug Baldwin pretended to go potty after scoring a touchdown. Richard Sherman made a “24” gesture to the television cameras, likely taunting rival New England cornerback Darrelle Revis for giving up a score.

I have to wonder, though, how it is that tossing the football on the ground in the end zone in such a way that it spins is unsportsmanlike conduct, while tossing the football to an official and Lambeau Leaping is not ...  All the same, a loss of composure in the Seattle locker room afterward might be a sign of troubles to come.

“We just looked at each other trying to realize the gravity of what we just witnessed,’’ Carroll said.

This will be a critical repair job by Carroll that will test all his famous skills of motivation and morale-building. Losses like this have the potential to take on an afterlife. Though most players refrained from criticizing the play call at the end, some second-guessing leaked out.

Yes, but the same indiscipline manifested itself on the field.

On top of all that, the Seahawks didn’t exactly comport themselves with poise at times. Doug Baldwin’s touchdown display of defecating the football was crass and vulgar. After that Baldwin score, which made it 24-14 Seahawks, Richard Sherman signaled “two-four” into a television camera, apparently mocking Patriots cornerback Darrelle Revis, beaten on the play.

But it was a little early for gloating, as they found out. And the brawl at the end, no matter who instigated it, made the Seahawks look like a team that had completely lost its cool.

Still, the overriding memory of this game will be one play, as Carroll himself noted in the opening statement of his postgame remarks: “Let me just tell you what happened because, as you know, the game comes right down and all the things that happened before are meaningless to you now.”

Seattle will play Detroit, a team that has a tendency to goad its opponents, in the upcoming season. That should be interesting.

A PRUDENT GROUNDHOG STAYS UNDERGROUND.

There's a vacant lot next door, and I've seen a groundhog (this one's a woodchuck) popping out of a burrow there, usually during the summer.

The best thing for one to do today is just stay in the burrow, human interest in shadows or not.

Overnight, the seasonal snow total has doubled.  Groundhog Day becomes a snow day, and a dig-out day.  Welcome to my frozen tundra.  Weather service reports nearly 18 inches of snow.  Around here, the wind played with it, piling it three feet deep in some places, and leaving the ground nearly bare in others.

This is getting to be a tradition.  A year ago, digging out on Groundhog Day was just another day in a sequence of clipper systems riding the polar vortex.  And four years ago, the heavy snow was still coming down on the morning of Groundhog Day.

WHEN YOUR CITY IS RESIDUALLY INHABITED BY ...

It's been a theme here for years to call out ward-heeler politicians "whose continuing tenure depends on desperate voters who keep voting for those politicians, despite the total failure of such politicians to do anything that improves the condition of those voters."  Ralph Nader, Insta Pundit, and a street artist with a sense of humour have done likewise, in more visible outlets.  Now comes Via Media, on what happens when Detroit is residually inhabited by ... no longer Rosie the Riveter.

Since the 1960s, Democrats have supported a model that, at its worst, is characterized by corrupt political machines that rule in de facto single-party urban enclaves. They are propped up by state and federal subsidies and show little to no interest in effective management, economically sustainable development policies, anti-corruption efforts, or school performance.

It's not limited to the cities ... look at this list of the states that are losing population.

MAYBE THEY WILL DO THE RIGHT THING.

But only after having tried all the wrong things.  I have for a long time been skeptical of attempts by institutions of higher education to achieve what Historiann and Roxie's World refer to as excellence without money, and what I view as mindless management faddishness. "When the management fad was downsizing, somebody envisioned a 19,000 student university with an economics faculty of sixteen; enrollments currently exceed 24,000 with an economics faculty of nine, give me one reason to be cooperative."  That was in the fall of 2010.  The fall semester of 2014 is behind us, and enrollments at Northern Illinois look more like that nineteen than the twenty-four, or the hoped-for thirty thousand.

Retention between the fall and spring has decreased 1.2 percent to 87 percent, a number that slightly shocked NIU President Doug Baker, who said there are a lot of good things underway.

Headquarters will be doing the usual management thing.

[New director of admissions Dani] Rollins will communicate and schedule meetings directly with Lipman Hearne, a Chicago-based company that specializes in marketing and communication, which was hired in the fall to assist NIU in improving enrollment and retention efforts.

[Vice president of student affairs and enrollment management Eric] Weldy, along with his staff and Harlan Teller, Marketing and Communications interim vice president, met with Lipman Hearne prior to winter break, Weldy said.

NIU will pay about $150,000 to the group in fees for consultation, which would include creating an enrollment growth playbook and would cover the cost of Lipman Hearne personnel. An estimated $664,000 would be set for deliverables at NIU’s discretion, adding up to $814,000.

The consulting company advised Weldy to contact individuals who had inquired about applying, applied or left after a semester in good academic standing since 2008, but were no longer attending or graduating from NIU or any other university. Roughly 90,000 of those people were found to not be current students, Weldy said. An email blast asking the individuals to consider NIU with an application was sent to the 90,000 during winter break, Weldy said, which resulted in 44 applicants for the spring semester and 24 students enrolling for this semester.

Lipman Hearne will consult with Enrollment Management until the end of June.

For my colleagues' sake, I hope those 800 grand buy something smarter than "follow up with electronic mail" with a less than 1/1000 response rate.  A Nigerian spammer might view that yield favorably.  Their reality, however, is a decade of downsizing followed by another decade of downsizing.

Every program, from football to forensics, will face evaluation based on university priorities, [provost Lisa] Freeman said. NIU President Doug Baker and Freeman will use town hall meetings today to explain the goals of this process and how it will be conducted.

The program prioritization process will revolve around bringing programs in line with NIU’s mission and vision while honoring employees’ contracts and guaranteeing students can finish their academic programs, Freeman said.

“... This effort is to look at all of our programs ... and see are there places where we need to invest or are there places where we can shift resources to other things,” Baker said. “This is just a prioritization process to look at all that and see if our budget is in alignment with the work that we need to do to fulfill our mission.”

The process, which began with an exploration period in the fall, is set to last until spring 2016, when funding will be allocated for Fiscal Year 2017 based on program prioritization recommendations.

If this sounds like the old railroad dodge of pretending to discontinue the local train and preserve the name train, by requiring the name train to make the stops formerly made by the local, that's because it is.

The criteria programs will be reviewed with has not been chosen, but input from the campus community will be used to determine them.

The program prioritization process will help NIU save money by creating efficiencies when programs merge, showing NIU growing programs that will benefit from more resources and helping NIU find targets that can be used for fundraising, Freeman said.

Some programs may be merged, shuttered, diminished in size or granted more resources after the prioritization process.

In the future, a program prioritization process will take place once every three to four years and last 12 months, Freeman said.

Yes, there are now two more coaches and a snack bar car on the Limited, to handle the short business the local once carried.  But the dining car has been taken off, and the next hearing in three years will be to take off the parlor or sleeping cars that are now running empty because the Limited takes so long to get there.  Headquarters will also determine that the cab signals can be removed, as the Limited never gets much above seventy between stops.

On the railroads, the machinations with the Interstate Commerce Commission simply lead to lowered morale among the operating crews.  At a university, the remaining faculty members will no doubt be called upon to serve as participants in these prioritization committees, or to write plans for how to boost enrollment, or otherwise be diverted from their core duties.  And it's all pointless.

The Northern Illinois student who applied to Urbana or Wisconsin has the potential to do as well out of Northern Illinois as out of the others. The responsibility of being a "premier regional public" is to provide an environment, and a critical mass of peers, in which that student realizes that potential.

If that points in the direction of a student body of fifteen to seventeen thousand, and course offerings structured under the premise that students arrive college-ready, so be it.  It's all so simple, but headquarters will probably try everything but that for another five or ten years.