EXTENDING THE CORRIDOR.

It's pointless to build additional road capacity in the Southeast, as that will only produce additional lanes to clog.

The existing Passenger Rail service is inadequate.  But help may be on the way.

The Federal Railroad Administration, the State of North Carolina, and the Commonwealth of Virginia announced today that they have signed off on the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Richmond to Raleigh passenger rail line along the Southeast Corridor. The completion of the environmental review is one of the final steps necessary before construction of the project can move forward once funding is secured.

“Without a strong passenger rail system, the Southeast’s growth will be choked by congestion for a very long time,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said. “North Carolina, Virginia and the Department of Transportation have worked together to bring us closer to high-speed rail connecting Richmond and Raleigh, and I urge everyone involved to continue pushing this effort forward. High-speed rail in this region is not a luxury but a necessity.”

The 162-mile route between the two cities would utilize existing and former rail lines for approximately 60 percent of the route and is planned to be free from at-grade crossings of track and roads. This route is part of a larger multi-state planning effort to provide high-speed passenger service between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. In July, Secretary Foxx announced that the Department of Transportation would invest approximately $1 million to develop a regional long-term vision for the corridor and engage states and stakeholders to help the region form a governance organization that can sustain planning efforts and implement the vision.

There are some dormant or abandoned rail corridors that can be put back into use. I hope the track and catenary will be designed in such a way as to handle intermodal trains and autoracks, which will be a relief to automobile traffic on the likes of Interstate 81.  (And use some of the so-called Highway Trust Fund money, if necessary, on the railroad.  Less wear and tear on the interstates is the essence of holding an asset in trust.)

The passenger potential is clearly there.

Columnists Anthony Foxx and Dwight Jones, in Richmond's Times-Dispatch, say, let's get going.

It is true that it took a generation of discussions, planning and designing to get us to where we are today. But it is also true that we do not have another generation to reach the finish line. High-speed rail in this region is not a luxury; it is a necessity, and the clock is ticking. If we cannot figure out how to build this network soon, it is not hyperbole — it is a fact — that the South is going to be stuck in traffic for a very long time.

Back when planning for the Southeast Corridor started, Richmond commuters spent roughly 16 hours a year stuck in traffic. Last year, Richmond commuters lost nearly double that — 34 hours. Granted, this is still below the growing national average. But will it stay this way when there are 18 million more people, as the America 2050 study found, competing for the region’s road and airport spaces as we know them?

They observe, less lost time in traffic than the national average. Why compare yourself with the worst? And yes, lane expansion has not kept up with traffic volume expansion, but adding more lanes does not head off congestion.

Faster trains facilitate commerce, yes, but note that simply providing frequency and connectivity brings riders.

Richmond and the other cities and towns along the corridor are more than just neighbors, so to speak. As the region adds more residents and its economy expands, regional markets will be more tightly linked. Road congestion in the Richmond area is a growing problem, and the average flight delay at airports along the corridor is nearly an hour.

The proposed route from Richmond to Raleigh will in effect pull the cities closer together by cutting 75 minutes off the current train trip, making rail faster than even today’s traffic-free car trip. Further analysis of the Southeast Corridor has found that businesses pay 46 percent less for employees to travel from Richmond to Washington by train than by car.

Citizens are voting for this with their train tickets. Virginia has seen close to a 100 percent increase in ridership on its regional trains in recent years. Businesses and government are primed to make the Southeast Corridor plan a reality.

In Raleigh's News-Observer, Bruce Siceloff is also enthusiastic.

On the freight side, a lot of DOT’s attention is turned to the needs of container shippers in the realm known as “intermodal,” because it breaks down the barriers that separate competing forms of transportation.

“That’s really where the industry is going, as far as moving containers from ship to train to truck,” said Paul Worley, DOT Rail Division director.

Most of the containers that arrive by ship at the Wilmington port leave it on trucks. DOT wants to improve the port’s rail connection so that more of those containers can move out on trains. A container with anything from bulk grains to UPS packages can be shifted from one train to another before completing its journey on the back end of an 18-wheeler.

The Rail Plan envisions new rail routes at both ports – possibly relocating N.C. Railroad tracks in Morehead City, and adding a new Cape Fear River bridge into Brunswick County from Wilmington – to improve rail shipping for port customers. At the same time, DOT wants to find ways to reduce train-related delays for motorists in the port cities.

Note that regional railroads, not the four national systems, are involved.  The national systems continue to make a hash out of moving trains through Chicago, which probably pushes a lot of container traffic onto the highways.  But, again, using tax moneys to improve water-to-rail logistics is consistent with conserving the highways.  On the passenger side, there's an opportunity to implement the Cold Spring Shops Free Rein to 110 campaign.

This interstate line, formerly known as “high-speed,” is envisioned to provide faster train service from Raleigh to Washington, D.C., and the Northeast – and, later, from Charlotte to Atlanta and points south.

Most of the planning work has been completed on the key section – a 35-mile shortcut between Raleigh and Richmond, Va., using the old CSX “S” line. DOT’s aim is to eliminate every at-grade crossing on the road – bridges for some, closings for the rest – for trains that could move as fast as 110 miles per hour.

But that won’t happen without an estimated $3.8 billion to $4 billion in federal funds. Rather than wait forever for this money to materialize, DOT has begun looking at a more incremental approach.

Worley said he will look at what it would it cost to acquire the entire “S” line and put in new tracks and stations – enough to introduce standard-speed train service to Richmond – without all the bridges and other improvements needed for faster trains. Another option might involve starting out with service along just part of the line – from Raleigh to Franklinton or Henderson.

That's the old Seaboard Air Line -- the straightest section, but if memory serves, a bit of a roller coaster. Getting passenger trains up to 110 is straightforward -- if not necessary for regional trains to Henderson -- and there's no reason not to set it up for 90 mph intermodal trains or 80 mph autoracks, which could move overnight.

And with the Federal Reserve not raising interest rates, the capital costs are favorable.

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

Our President thinks it's transgressive to salt the guest list for the Pope's visit to the White House with the identity-politics freak show.

This is an astonishing display of bad manners. It would be one thing to invite a LGBTQ guest who held a position or a place in society that made him or her an obvious pick. In that case, it would be wrong from the standpoint of both etiquette and morals to deny an invitation. It would also be another matter if the White House is doing this with the foreknowledge and support of the Vatican. If Jesus could eat with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, it’s possible Pope Francis would be fine with a few guest with whom he disagrees on some points of personal morality. A joint decision with a Vatican that is fully happy with the guest list would be perfectly acceptable.

But at least one top Vatican official, unnamed by the Journal, issued a critical response to the list. If that official’s views are representative, it would appear that the White House did not run the list by the Vatican and the Obama Administration has gone out of its way to invite people whose presence is intended to imply criticism of the beliefs of his guest of honor. This is sophomoric and disgraceful. If the Catholic Church is so immoral that you feel that all decent people need to be at war with it, then you should treat the Pope’s visit as a private matter and ignore it. But if you want to show respect to the head of a faith that tens of millions of your fellow countrymen think is important, invite him and treat him with honor.

If the White House truly did this without Vatican support, this is behavior you’d expect to see from middle school students rather than the head of state of a serious country.

Is anyone surprised? Democrat cliches are emotional appeals calculated to move sophomores, and their witticisms are at about the same level.  And Our President has been behaving like a petulant teenager whenever he interacts with anyone who objects to his way.

NOBODY'S HAPPY.

While the evangelical and libertarian strains of Republicans simultaneously tangled and made common cause in the TEA Party Caucus, and Donald Trump shook up the presidential race, there's been anything but consensus among the Democrats.

The pundit class’s commitment to the conventional wisdom allowed them to miss the conditions on the right that led to the Trump surge over the summer – a dynamism that is evolving into an uprising among a healthy plurality or even a majority of Republican primary voters against professional politicians. The expert political observer is equally committed to subordinating empiricism to their understanding of how things should work when they survey the Democratic race. Clinton should have the nomination locked up. The Democrats should be committed to her campaign. If Clinton were to somehow fail to win both Iowa and New Hampshire’s early contests, her prohibitive organizational strength in the South should prove an insurmountable firewall. Amid all of these shoulds, pundits have ignored or overlooked the 2016 election cycle’s myriad coulds.

A Democratic revolt is well underway. If it snowballs, only those who should know better will have been caught by surprise.

Thirteen more months of this. Let there be more surprises!

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, ENJOY THE INCOHERENCE.

Count on Robert D. Kaplan and Victor Davis Hanson to discover the grim, this time in the mass migration of refugees from Asia Minor into Europe.  Here's Mr Kaplan, pointing out structural flaws in the European project.

Reforming the welfare state does not mean dismantling it -- that would only cause another form of social and political upheaval. Nevertheless, structural economic reform is, at root, the solution to Europe's slow-motion dissolution. If the EU cannot generate more dynamism in the realm of economic and fiscal policy, it will continue to fracture internally, as each state looks out for its own, zero-sum interests, even as external threats multiply and Europe melts into Eurasia. Such a transformation in political geography would leave the United States as the lonely bastion of the West.  Indeed, the EU’s creation and evolution represents the ultimate fruit of the U.S.-led victory in World War II. It should not give way to the dementia of nationalist ideologies.

But political vision requires a strong economic foundation. And only a fiscally vibrant Europe can cope with the threats on its periphery. Geography matters, but human agency matters more.

And, Mr Hanson suggests, the postmodern policy myths do not survive an encounter with revealed preference.

Yet neither the Latin American nor the Islamic world analyzes why millions of their own are fleeing to cultures that are usually criticized -- other than an occasional half-hearted whine about the legacy of imperialism, colonialism and a potpourri of other historical grievances.

Nor does the deer-in-the-headlights American or European host dare to remind newcomers that its uniquely Western menu -- free-market capitalism, private property, a free press, meritocracy, consensual government, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, and individual freedom -- draws in people, while the antitheses repel them.

The mentalities of both the Western hosts and the non-Western migrants have become predictable.

Well, when the Smart People have been deconstructing precisely the institutions that made the West rich and prevented the suckitude from which Latin Americans and Southwest Asians and North Africans are fleeing,  it's kind of hard for them to have a coherent understanding of why the direction of migration is what it is, or for them to emphasize with push-back.

Many ordinary middle-class Westerners oppose massive influxes of immigrants. These citizens do not like seeing laws rendered null and void. They fear that their schools, health facilities, legal systems and social services will be overwhelmed and left unable to effectively serve their own middle classes and poor.

The masses in the West have learned such caution from experience. The sudden appearance of huge numbers of immigrants -- when coupled with poverty, lack of language facility and little education -- for decades afterwards has impeded easy integration, assimilation and intermarriage within Western society.

As a result, a divisive, salad-bowl multicultural separatism often arises.

Given the challenges of facing strange customs, traditions and languages, guests naturally find it difficult to achieve rapid parity with hosts. It is soon forgotten in the first generation that being in the underclass in the West was once thought better than the alternative back home. That paradox is soon forgotten by the often disgruntled -- and less desperate -- children of migrants.

Millions of immigrants to the West soon sense that their own lack of parity and sheer numbers can translate into a powerful political constituency -- all the more so if it stays angry, unassimilated and occasionally replenished by new waves of arrivals.

Western elites in politics, journalism, academia, religion and the arts snipe at their own supposedly illiberal majorities. How dare these cruel hearts question the wisdom of accepting legions of anonymous newcomers!

While, Mr Hanson goes on to argue, the Smart People don't have to live near the new arrivals and their unusual habits.

Valid though that objection is, the challenge is to deconstruct the deconstructionists without fostering a destructive native identity politics.  This is not easily done.  Imagine an internet and a 24 hour news cycle at the time of mass immigration of Middle European Catholics and push-back from an earlier uprising of native identity politics.  There were plenty of cross-burnings early in the twentieth century without social media to propagate more.  Then came the War to End All Wars and getting the new arrivals involved became A Matter of National Urgency.

Perhaps something other than self-despising multiculturalism is in order, as that might be the more effective way to dissuade the second generation from becoming nostalgic for an old country they might never have lived in, and to encourage the third generation to buy into the institutions of the place where they live.  Which will be easier in the United States and perhaps Canada than in Europe, as the North American countries are good at assimilating that which is good from the new arrivals.  Why else the Oktoberfest observations all over the Midwest this time of year, and the Polka Fiesta?

ANDROIDS FIGHTING, BRAD AND JANET.

Among the older posts racked to be gotten at someday, this Ronald Bailey column from Reason (probably postponed as it turned up during a Super Bowl run by The Green Bay Packers) argued, "We haven't heard from space aliens and that might be good news."  One of the hypotheses he turned up suggested the use of exponentiating machines.

In 1980, physicist Frank Tipler proposed a scenario in which alien civilizations would launch fleets of self-replicating machines possessing human-level intelligence to explore the galaxy. The machines would arrive in a new star system and immediately start to populate it with duplicates of themselves and launch the next wave of explorers. Tipler calculated that once launched such machines would inhabit every solar system in the galaxy within 300 million years. Since there is no evidence for such an ever-expanding fleet of self-replicating machines, Tipler concluded, “Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist.”

The conclusion of TNT's mercifully ended Falling Skies suggested that they passed through sometime in the sixth century, being driven off by Peruvians with spears.  Note, though, that in the debate that followed, the risk that an exponentiating machine with intelligence becomes a threat to the machinist is one that cosmologists have long understood.

In 1983, planetary scientists Carl Sagan and William Newman countered Tipler’s “solipsistic” conclusion arguing, among other things, that intelligent aliens might refrain from constructing fleets of self-replicators because such machines might turn on their creators. In addition, Sagan and Newman suggested that advanced aliens might have “much more exciting and fulfilling objectives...than strip-mining or colonizing every planet in sight.” Then Sagan and Newman turned Pollyannaish proposing that aggressive mean-spirited aliens would conveniently kill themselves off leaving only benevolent civilizations “pre-adapted to live with other groups in mutual respect." Moreover, they suggested, “We think it is possible that the Milky Way is teeming with civilizations that are far beyond our level of advance as we are beyond the ants; and paying us about as much attention as we pay to the ants.” Never mind how thoughtlessly we walk over anthills as we go about our daily tasks.

In The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Edward Moore Geist digs into the state of the artificial intelligence art (machines are still a long way from forming strategies, let alone evolutionary stable ones?)  That's not to say the danger isn't present.

Dr Stuart Armstrong, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, has predicted a future where machines run by artificial intelligence become so indispensable in human lives they eventually make us redundant and take over.

And he says his alarming vision could happen as soon as the next few decades.

Dr Armstrong said: "Humans steer the future not because we're the strongest or the fastest, but because we're the smartest.

"When machines become smarter than humans, we'll be handing them the steering wheel."

But he continues with a hypothetical that has already been anticipated by Hollywood.

In attempting to limit the powers of such super AGIs mankind could unwittingly be signing its own death warrant.

Indeed, Dr Armstrong warns that the seemingly benign instruction to an AGI to "prevent human suffering", could logically be interpreted by a super computer as "kill all humans", thereby ending suffering all together.

Furthermore, an instruction such as "keep humans safe and happy", could be translated by the remorseless digital logic of a machine as "entomb everyone in concrete coffins on heroin drips".

While that may sound far fetched, Dr Armstrong says the risk is not so low that it can be ignored.

"There is a risk of this kind of pernicious behaviour by a AI," he said, pointing out that the nuances of human language make it all too easily liable to misinterpretation by a computer. "You can give AI controls, and it will be under the controls it was given. But these may not be the controls that were meant."

Particularly if, as in the Star Trek episode, the machines exchange algorithms.

I've always found Nomad's origin and characteristics somewhat contradictory and confusing. Nomad was supposedly the result of a collision between an Earth probe tasked with searching out new life, and an alien robot tasked with sterilizing soil samples. How did it acquire the power to wipe out four billion lives? And how did it get around? How could Nomad have warp capability? It was the size of a Chatty Cathy doll.

Anything can happen in a cartoon. But complex adaptive systems, even algorithmically based artificial intelligences, tend to do whatever they d**n well please.

JUST DON'T SET YOUR HAIR ON FIRE.

With the coming of a new academic year comes the usual fretting about liberating tolerance, or progressive intolerance, or, incivility, or, to use my preferred locution, sheer stupidity.  The editorial board of USA Today suggests it's time for the Guardians of Academic Morals to recommit to free speech.  There's even a useful piece of public health advice.

Just as children raised in overly clean houses devoid of bacteria become more vulnerable to allergies and asthma, many of today's college students — protected by "helicopter parents" — have become fearful of anything that could make them or their friends uncomfortable.

Indeed.

Not only that, letting your kids play with other kids helps develop the immune system and reduce the incidence of allergies. Instead, helicopter parents give way to bubble-wrapping school officials, and the victimization culture is residually inhabited by morons, in the old clinical sense of the term.

But, in the spirit of point-counterpoint and equal time and with complete lack of the irony that the act of providing a platform to differing points of view is repressive per se, the editorial board gives two University of Chicago students the opportunity to argue that free speech frees hate speech.  Well, yes, we have norms, and rules, and sanctions ranging from shunning to execution, because free and self-activated people will sometimes trespass against others.  But the examples they suggest to support their point suggest something more is at work.

Unlike in the past, a First Amendment defense for speech is less likely to be used by student activists or minority groups on campus, and more likely to be invoked, for example, by students defending an event such as Conquistadors and Aztec Hoes,” a fraternity party planned on our campus in 2012, then swiftly canceled after Latino students and their allies protested.

These kinds of views and actions are blatantly racist and are meant to target and stereotype an entire group of people. Such views and actions are also the kind defended by the report and statement the university issued in January that unequivocally favors freedom of speech.

By failing to put limits on — or even mention — this type of behavior, the university’s report fails to protect freedom of expression for all members of its campus. Hate speech restricts freedom of expression by creating an environment so hostile to the targeted group that its members fear speaking out.

I have trouble squaring "Latino students and their allies protested" with "members fear speaking out."  Consider, though, why fraternities and sororities might be scheduling in-your-face themed parties.

We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

That's toward the end of Animal House, when the Deltas plot to sabotage the homecoming parade, but the earlier toga party had a similar genesis.  As the Greek-letter organizations understand the contempt the academic establishment and Student Affairs and particularly the grievance lobbies hold them in, why not do something futile and stupid and in their face?

Particularly because they know that the Perpetually Aggrieved will react as if somebody offered incontrovertible evidence that Karl Marx got the dialectic wrong, or if The Bell Curve is right.

To continue, I have in common with the grievance lobby a short fuse.  All my life I have struggled with the temptation to go off on someone who is baiting me to go off.  What seems different is that the Perpetually Aggrieved on campus will go off in response to a provocation, even a futile and stupid one calculated to set them off.  And while the representatives of the offending organization go through the obligatory "if any of you I've offended" (I'm waiting for someone to add, "stick your head in a bucket of shaving cream") some of the organizers might be congratulating each other over having set the radical ruffians off.  The better response to a themed party with stupid stereotypes accordingly might be, Delta again, consider the source.

But no, the Perpetually aggrieved will go off.  Even if it's performance art that sets them off.

Students at the University at Buffalo were outraged about the sudden appearance of “White Only” and “Black Only” signs above certain bathroom doors in the College of Arts and Sciences building. But outrage was largely the point, since the signs were part of a black student’s visual arts project.

Many did not appreciate the signs, even with the knowledge that they had been deployed as deliberate social commentary. One student tweeted, “Not only is this a hate crime, but it is also an act of terrorism.” Others called the police.

O tempora! O mores! The job of the performance artist is to get the bourgeoisie to set their hair on fire.  (Consider the source.  Don't spend any money at the galleries that sell their works, and work to defund the national endowments.  Buy the stuff that you like, or build a railroad in your basement.)  As a colleague explained to me once, art is context.

But when the Perpetually Aggrieved get set off by avant-garde art, you can be sure that somewhere on Greek Row there are bros looking for a way to push back against the indoctrination that passes as "affirming diversity" and recognizing that it doesn't take a really futile and stupid gesture to set the Perpetually Aggrieved off.

WHY BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION IS NOT APPLIED ECONOMICS.

A prominent businessman recently lamented the balance of trade between the United States and Japan.

Trump, the only one of the 15 candidates in Wednesday’s debates to appear publicly Tuesday in Southern California, assailed Obama on trade with Japan, China and Mexico, saying the leaders of all three countries were smarter and more cunning, a favorite comparison of his.

Japan’s “massive ships float right here and they drop off the cars, right?” he said, gesturing to the giant container vessels floating nearby. “They drop off thousands and thousands and thousands of cars. Millions of cars. And we sell them beef.”

The crowd erupted in laughter.

Yes, that's a standard feature of Donald J. Trump's campaign speech.

It's also a misconception shared by more than a few politicians, precisely because it appeals on some primitive level to constituents.

But the real cunning is being demonstrated by other entrepreneurs in the United States, who are able to produce cars by hiring immigrant labor to feed, slaughter, and pack the beef, and marshalling sufficient refrigerated containers to safely deliver the beef dockside.

It's called specialization and gains from trade, and the metaphor of producing cars on the range is in common use in economics classes, perhaps, though, in not yet enough economics classes to change voters' thinking about trade.

Nor does the concept of comparative advantage have enough purchase with the political press, who continue to chase Mr Trump's lesser gaffes.

HELPING THE ENGINEER CONTROL THE SPEED OF THE TRAIN.

David Foster of Chicago Boyz picked up my coverage of the possible railroad shutdown account no positive train control by year's end, as Congress wishes.  He expressed the hope that I might explain why this is so difficult, and one of his readers wondered if something couldn't be purchased off the shelf from Germany or some other place that runs really fast trains.

The short answer is that monitoring the speed, separation, and performance of trains on a railroad network is a tougher engineering challenge than either the Manhattan Project or a moon shot.

Outrageous enough for you?  Stay with me.

The Manhattan Project demonstrated that a critical mass of radioactive material could be brought together in such a way as either to produce a controlled chain reaction or an explosion.

Project Apollo demonstrated that a launch vehicle could be built capable of carrying sufficient payload to land a manned spacecraft on the Moon with sufficient life support for the crew and fuel to permit a takeoff from the Moon and a transearth injection.

Positive Train Control is the latest attempt to solve a much older problem, namely preventing two trains from occupying the same piece of track at the same time, as well as a corollary problem, allowing as many trains as practicable to occupy different parts of the track.

When two trains attempt to occupy the same piece of track, bad things happen.

Unattributed 20minuten photograph

It's relatively simple to keep only a few trains separated.  Issue a timetable.  Note, in railroading, that a timetable does not REQUIRE a train to be at a station at the specified time.  Rather, it means that the train will not be BEYOND that station BEFORE that time.

This is the section of Time Table No. 54 of the Boston and Maine Railroad, effective at 12.01 A. M. on April 27, 1952, governing the movement of trains on the Portsmouth Branch.  Under the instructions, inward trains are superior to outward trains.  Thus an outward train is obligated to clear the time of an inward train, unless the fine print (3600 superior to 3601, Portsmouth to Rockingham) stipulates otherwise.  An inward train has right to the railroad for up to twelve hours.

As long as everything runs according to schedule, nothing breaks down, no snowdrifts or leaves on the track or a broken-down one-hoss-shay at the road crossing, that's all that's required to keep trains from running into each other.  But if the superior train breaks down, absent some other means of control the inferior train has a long, avoidable wait.  And the trains on the schedule are passenger trains, doesn't the navy base require a delivery of fuel, and don't the New Hampshire farmers want their milk picked up? Thus, you have to have provision for running the freight trains.  Not much of a problem, simply issue train orders authorizing an extra train.  The passenger trains don't have to know about the freight extra, because the freight's crew have timetables, and conductor and engineer know where the passenger trains will not yet be, and plan their movements accordingly.  And unless advised otherwise, the crew of the passenger train will be protecting against extras in the event of an emergency.

But that's labor intensive and if the dispatcher intends to run a lot of freight extras, cumbersome.  Here's where it helps to have signals, to give train crews additional information about the status of tracks ahead.  Thus, most busy railroads have signals, dividing the track between stations into shorter segments, known as blocks.  Timetable plus dispatcher plus signals can make for a productive railroad, in fact the western end of Britain's old Great Western is still kept safe using tools and methods codified during Queen Victoria's reign.  (Also true of some key junctions in Chicago.)

St. Erth for St. Ives in the summer of 2007.  The signalman, whose 'box is the brick-and-siding structure in centre background, will soon raise the angled signal blade to horizontal, which any of you who have seen Thomas the Tank Engine knows means "Danger" and in the British rules means STOP.  DO NOT PASS.  There are serious consequences for the train driver who commits a "Signal Passed at Danger."

We're still dealing with a labor-intensive way of spacing trains, and it's still subject to human error.  The signalman can fail to observe the passage of a train, or to re-set the signal, or the driver (there, engineer here) can run past the signal.  It's also up to the engineer to control the speed of the train in order to make a safe stop before passing the signal.

Thus railroads replaced the dispatcher and station agents and tower operators with a train director capable of controlling long sections of track from a central office.  Hence, centralized traffic control -- in North America, the train director often takes the traditional title of dispatcher.

On the Burlington Racetrack, those signals are responding to directions issued by a dispatcher in Fort Worth.  That distant train is on the left-most (north) track, and the signals are properly showing red, advising any train heading away from me on the north track to STOP.  IMMEDIATELY.  The dispatcher's control station in Fort Worth, perhaps assisted by computers, will prevent him from clearing that signal in the case he has a lapse of attention.  The signals governing the center and right tracks display a clear signal, meaning at least two blocks in advance of an approaching train are clear.  Note: at least two blocks clear, that's a potential hazard the designer of positive train control has to address.  Note also: blocks are fixed section of track, if there is a train in the third block, is it just past the signal at the entrance to the block, or further along? The designer of positive train control has to keep track of the exact position of all parts of the train at all times.  Note finally: the train approaching the green signal might be a mile-long unit oil train running at 40 mph that you don't want to make a quick stop with, or it might be a suburban train running at 60 mph that can be stopped relatively quickly, or it might be a container train also running at 60 mph, but with very different handling characteristics.  The designer of a positive train control system thus cannot design a one-brake-application-fits-all-conditions for the trains on the network.

Railroads have grappled with both the stopping distance and the signal-passed-at-danger problems with a number of mechanical or electronic devices that backstop the inattentive engineer.  We've had inattentive engineers, or napping engineers, long before smart 'phones became another impetus for enhancing safety appliances on the railroads.  To stop a train at a red signal, the Chicago Transit Authority installed a tripper between the rails at the location of the signal.  When the signal was red, the tripper popped up, and a train that didn't stop short of the tripper hit the tripper, which tripped a valve under the lead car, leading to an emergency brake application, a quick stop, spilled coffee, and flat wheels.  For years, automatic train stop has been available as a more subtle way of keeping the rails safe whilst spilling less coffee.  The engineer gets a warning and has a few seconds to make a service brake application, before the machinery takes over and spills the coffee and flattens the wheels.  But, unlike what the designers of positive train control hope for, this device reinforces the obligation to stop short of entering the next block, it doesn't kick in whenever a train in motion is getting too close to another train in motion.

And railroads have also dealt with the problem of trains closing in on other trains, a problem that even good engineers can get lulled into.  Because one block is often too short a stopping distance for either a fast train or a heavy train, the simplest solution is to distinguish a "clear" signal aspect (two blocks clear) from an "approach" aspect (next block clear.)  Conventionally, clear is a green light, approach a yellow light.  Want to talk about the variations?  Come over and help me build my railroad.  The railroad can also make the blocks longer (in the 1930s, The Milwaukee Road removed alternating signals to convert a 50 mph railroad into a 100 mph railroad) or provide additional signal aspects (too wonky for today's post.)

Now put yourself in the seat of a train engineer who sees a yellow signal ahead.  Comply with the rules, reduce speed, signal turns green ... do you thus increase speed?  Pass the green, next signal is yellow, do you reduce speed again?  Comply with the rules, reduce speed, signal turns green ... do you get lulled into expecting the yellow to change to green before you get there.  And can you get away with it for days? weeks? months? until one day the leader is a little slow to get off the main track or breaks down and there you are, running the yellows until the yellow doesn't clear up and you now have less than the normal stopping distance to get your train under control, and it's just your luck that the leader broke down a short distance beyond that red signal you're coming up on pretty fast.

With positive train control, the designer is effectively establishing a moving bubble of protection, always large enough to provide that safe stopping distance.  But that's a significant advance over existing train control systems, which (as is true with the European Train Control System and Germany's Linienzugbeeinflussung)  divide the railway into blocks.  Those methods are more subtle than, for example, Chicago and North Western's Automatic Train Control, which advised the engineer either that there wasn't a train close by, or that a train was close enough to warrant a speed restriction.

Timetable authority to leave Nürnberg just past noon.  Casey Jones would understand that.  Dispatcher will know what section the train is in.  Bedwell and Dellinger wrote about that.  Engineer will know approximately how much clear track is ahead.  But only slightly more precisely than the engineer of the Kate Shelley departing DeKalb for Clinton did.

Signals, centralized traffic control, automatic train stop, automatic train control, all permit more productive use and closer spacing of trains than a railroad could achieve using a timetable and a dispatcher issuing train orders to deal with unusual circumstances.  And each method provides additional safeguards against human exhaustion or inattention.  But no method yet permits simultaneous knowledge of the position, direction, and mass of all trains at all times.  A working positive train control system must eliminate all three uncertainties.

THAT EVOLUTIONARY DEAD END.

I'm not impressed by the grievance mongers dressing up sloppy social science with fancy terminology like "intersectionality" and "hegemonic biases."  The good news is that the serious social scientists are coming to grips with the emergence of norms and the damage done by deconstructing them.  There's a taxonomy of norms that is useful.  Loosely, an honor culture is one in with well-defined norms, perhaps well-defined status hierarchies, with individuals achieving redress for dishonor.   Dignity culture has well-defined norms, but procedurally all individuals hold equal status, and legal institutions provide redress.   Victimization cultures, Reason's Ronald Bailey argues, overwork the legal institutions to provide redress for minor slights.  Micro-aggression, thus, is the quintessential first-world problem, in which the most egregious slights are infrequent and severely punished, thus oppression manifests itself in the small things.

A victimhood culture combines an honor culture's quickness to take offense with an overdependence on the coercive institutions that serve as a dignity culture's last resort. If Campbell, Manning, and Horwitz are right about the direction American society is taking, that's really terrible news. A victimhood culture will spawn social conflict, which in turn will produce an ever larger and more coercive government tasked with trying to suppress it.

That refers to two separate works, both being offered for peer review and comments, clarifications, or refutations in the scholarly journals.

INCOME ACCOUNTING IS INCOMPLETE.

A #ThrowbackThursday on the challenges of doing macroeconomics, and the federal budget, with inadequate information.  Let's start at Voluntary Xchange, explaining that without a balance sheet there's no way to pontificate about, for example, the effects of an economic stimulus, or the hazards of borrowing several trillion dollars.

The reason people get to this point is that they are only thinking about flow variables (current work) not stock variables (past work embodied in current capital). Accountants are very careful about this: that’s why they use balance sheets and income statements. Public policymakers … not so much.

Think about it: we run our macroeconomies based on GDP. This is a flow variable. Where’s the stock variable? We simply don’t think about it much in macroeconomics. Mostly we do this because national wealth is difficult to measure. That’s a reason for being careful, not a reason for ignoring stock variables.

Indeed not.

What's victory in World War II worth? There's no analogue to "going concern value" for a state.

What are new coaches, dining cars, and sleepers on Amtrak worth?  The money gets borrowed in one year, the rolling stock produces passenger value for multiple years.

What is a pork-barrel highway widening worth?  Photo op for the politician that gets the earmark into the continuing resolution, but what comes next?

There's an intriguing elaboration of why having a balance sheet matters in this architect's takedown of the gold standard and tight money. Yes, there is plenty for the serious economist to quibble about, starting with whether an aircraft carrier or a super-railroad is the better public investment, or whether some of those things might better be provided privately (but credit expansion, one of his points, is still important.)

Missing: the miracles of exchange and innovation, but that gets complicated in a hurry.  Go, read it, enjoy it in the spirit in which it's offered.

Missing: the microfoundations.

Frank and Ernest, via Greg Mankiw.

Make sure you read and understand EconLib's Robert P. Murphy on the essential law of conservation inherent in MV = PQ.  Thus, be careful about dealing with underconsumption by printing money.  Facilitating investment by lending money is something else.

DRÜCKEN SIE ZWEI FÜR DEUTSCH.

It's Oktoberfest season, with pre-gaming for the candidates' debate last night.

Bratwurst, Kartoffelsalat, Stiefel charged with a particularly strong stout.

That's all perfectly mainstream, particularly in Greater Wisconsin, but there was once a time when the German in North America was the Other.  Consider when the official language of the Texas Republic was Spanish, with a substantial population of German speakers, dealing, back in the day of Santa Ana and Davy Crockett, with the challenges of interacting with Germans from other parts of Germany in Texas.

Everyday Germans spoke in distinct dialects: if a folk troupe in Munich had traveled to northern Germany, the audience would have been clueless.

However inconvenient it may have been for Texas Germans to work out dialect differences, the adjustment was still more practical than learning a whole new language, and for some time a Texas German speaker could get by without knowing English. When Ernst arrived, just before the Texas Revolution, the official language was Spanish, but there were no non-German speakers living close enough to care what he and his compatriots spoke. Within a few years, the Germans proved themselves to be such a resourceful and productive group that, in 1843, the Republic of Texas required that all laws be published in German along with English. Later, following the annexation of Texas into the United States, the official language became English, but even after that, schools in these communities continued to hire German-speaking teachers.

Unlike Canadian French, which is preserved-as-if-in-amber compared to French French, all the works of the grammar gendarmes notwithstanding, the Texas German dialect evolved, presumably without the intrusion of a vanguard looking to get beyond Er, Sie, Es. (Think gendered pronouns are a puzzle in English? At least tables and books and motors and shoes are all "it." But I digress.)

In Texas German, technological advances that postdated the immigrants’ arrival, for example, were referred to by their English names. They had no idea what the proper German term would be for, say, a helicopter. Lacking Hubschrauber, they called it der Helicopter. [Thus a chopper is a "he" -- ed.] This was a common tendency. A car was called die Car [a "she" -- contrast Das Auto] instead of der Wagen. Die Exhaustpipe, der Flyball, das Popcorn, and das Sodapop entered the lexicon. (Similarly, English words have made their way into border Spanish, speakers of which frequently refer to eating lonche or parking their troca.)

Beyond terminology, probably the greatest differences between standard German and Texas German—the ones a German will parody, if he’s so inclined—are the vernacular’s sound and structure. Some of the words are pronounced differently from standard German, with atypical vowel sounds and r’s that erupt from the bottom of the throat. Some of the grammatical rules are different too, such as use of the familiar “you” pronouns instead of the polite forms, an inclination that might offend a standard German speaker who felt he deserved a more formal address. And Texas Germans often use intensifying adverbs, so that a phrase such as “That is stupid” becomes “That is indeed stupid” and “I know that” becomes “I know that all right.” Texas German tends to double down.

"Indeed stupid" rather than "wicked stupid."  Gotta love it.

But this isn't just a feel-good story.  The Mexicans weren't crazy about  Fremdsprache in their midst, neither were the Anglos who came later.  Suppression at work, plus assimilation.

In 1909 the Legislature passed harsh English-only laws; students who didn’t speak English could face corporal punishment, shaming, suspension, or expulsion. Several years later, America entered World War I, accelerating the decline of Texas German. Some parents stopped speaking it altogether, and even if they didn’t, the message to children was clear: any American child with a German accent risked teasing, maybe even a pummeling, from the non-German kids. Some counties went so far as to forbid German in public. (In one case, a Lutheran pastor was whipped when he didn’t adhere to the ban.) Naturally, there were some communities that were slower to convert and continued to use German for newspapers and record-keeping, but in time even this tradition faded. In 1957 the 105-year-old Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung became one of the last Texas papers to switch from German to English.

Because [Schulenburg rancher Mildred] Schulze married another Texas German, she never lost her fluency. When she had children, she wanted them to learn both English and German. She got her wish in part. Her son took standard German classes in high school, and he retains fluency to this day. But her daughter grew increasingly self-conscious about speaking the language, and if a class might have boosted her confidence, she was out of luck: by the time she entered high school, the German classes had been replaced by Spanish.

Lyndon Johnson had a working knowledge of Texas German, because that's what his boyhood neighbors spoke.  But there's now a Texas German Dialect Project to conserve that which is being assimilated away, or dying off.

With immigration becoming a flash point in politics both North American and European, might I recommend that the best response is to be neighborly.  Do not deliberately give offense, but be firm in adhering to your customs, whether that involves observing the Sabbath in the Puritan fashion, or going to the beer garden after church in the Bavarian fashion.  The grandchildren of the migrants will buy into the common culture, given the proper inducements.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

There's sufficient play value in pretending to be general manager of a sports team that fantasy sports leagues have become big business.  Big enough that Congress, unable to pass appropriations for each Cabinet department or reconsider the positive train control deadline,  has to make a determination on whether fantasy sports are gambling.

Most people that I discuss the fantasy sports industry with believe that there is little-to-no difference between entry fee style fantasy game play and betting; however, they enjoy partaking in fantasy sports and do not want to see the pay-for-prize version disappear.

There is a federal gambling statute, with a badly worded (the logic of collective action) exemption for fantasy leagues, including the play-by-the-week version that's recently emerged.  And the operators of those games argue that there's more skill involved in setting up a fantasy team than there is in folding your hand in poker, or playing the numbers.

FanDuel and DraftKings responded in a joint statement Saturday affirming their belief that they don't offer "gambling."

"We are speaking with gaming industry representatives to educate them on the fantasy sports industry as our products are games of skill; fundamentally separate from, and not competitive with casinos and gaming businesses," the statement said.

I never chewed out an underachieving student with "If you'd spend half the time on incentives and arbitrage that you do on your fantasy team you'd be in great shape for the exam" but I bet I could have used that line more than once.

And I could nitpick the statement, in that people who hang out in the casino tavern or sports bar to watch the games rather than deal cards or play video poker, suggesting some interchangeability among traditional gambling and fantasy sports.

But none of that matters, if news out of Florida, where a state legislature is also investigating fantasy leagues, is a harbinger of what will come in Washington.

Two rival fantasy sports companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, have joined forces to hire one of Tallahassee's most prominent lobbying firms led by a well-known GOP fundraiser.

It doesn't matter what the legislature, or Congress, do.  K Street, and the Florida analogue, get to dip their beaks, and provide resources for campaign contributions.  It's all so much more civilized than "Nice place you got there.  Be a pity if something happened to it."  But it's a protection racket all the same.

THE HAZARDS OF FISHING OFF THE COMPANY PIER.

Male professor, apparently not on tenure track, has marital troubles.  Wife, also on faculty, separates from professor, rebounds to the dean.

The plot of an academic novel?  Perhaps, but it's playing out in real life, in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, no less.

Garth Saloner, who has led the nation’s most selective business school for six years, will step down next summer. He is accused in the lawsuit by James Phills of creating a hostile working environment for the professor.

Phills was on the business school faculty for 12 years until losing the job this year and is divorcing Deborah Gruenfeld, a tenured member of the business school faculty. Saloner, a widower, began a relationship with Phills’ wife after the couple separated in 2012, the university said Monday, noting that “the dean informed Stanford leadership at the very beginning of the relationship.”

Professor Saloner has a solid research record in industrial economics, a field of economics that offers practitioners opportunities to hire out at business schools. But fishing off the company pier is a good way to get into trouble.

In the lawsuit Phills filed last year in Santa Clara County Superior Court, he accuses Stanford of permitting Saloner to carry on an affair with a subordinate — Gruenfeld, a professor who was the business school’s sexual harassment advisor from 2010 to 2012 — while allowing the dean to “participate in and/or make decisions about” the employment of Phills, also a subordinate of Saloner.

Phills also claims that Saloner used access to Phills’ confidential employment records to help Gruenfeld in the couple’s divorce case, among other allegations.

According to Stanford, “others in the university” made the final decisions about matters involving Phills and Gruenfeld, a reference to such disputes as their shared university housing and Phills’ employment. He was fired this year.

Professor Phills had, and continues to hold, an appointment with Apple's in-house university, the article doesn't detail whether time conflicts might have led to his termination at Stanford.

Make what you will of Professor Gruenfeld being the sexual harassment advisor.  Are she and the dean companionable by the book, or are rules for the little people?

DON'T BE AN IGNORANT JERK.

Joanne Jacobs reads and comments on a great deal of the foolishness going on in higher education, rooting out so-called micro-aggressions.  There's a mathematical formulation at work, something like "politically correct insanity increases in proportion to the cost of attending the institution."

It's all based on crappy or nonexistent social science.

I will have more to say about that in the near future.

WAITING FOR THE CANDIDATES' DEBATE.

Former president Dwight Eisenhower offered aspiring governor Ronald Reagan talking points.  A president must be president for all the people, and creating coalitions, whether of the aggrieved or of the comfortable is an error.  Here's one of President Eisenhower's suggested texts.

“In this campaign I’ve been presenting to the public some of the things I want to do for California – meaning for all the people of our State. I do not exclude any citizen from my concern and I make no distinctions among them on such invalid bases as color or creed.”

That's 1966, before, as the article's authors note, the long march through the institutions.

At the time of the Eisenhower-Reagan exchange, today’s noxious mix of identity politics, adversarial multiculturalism, and political correctness was only in its infancy. It was just then coming into fashion on campuses and in the circles of the New Left run by cultural Marxists like Herbert Marcuse.

Building on the theories of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, the New Left argued that─even more than class─America was divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines into a dominant group (white males) and “marginalized” groups (ethnic, racial, linguistic, and sexual minorities). The goal of politics should be first to “de-legitimize” the ideas of the American system and second, to transfer power from the dominant group to the “oppressed” groups, they argued.

Today, this perverse form of Balkanization, which places Americans into various identity group boxes in employment, education, law, and culture pervades the academy, government, media, and political life. It is even codified in the official U.S. Census.

Lyndon Johnson's failed wars, in Vietnam and on Poverty, had not yet given the Perpetually Aggrieved purchase. But the subsequent fifty years have not turned out so well, have they?

Yet almost 50 years ago, Eisenhower and Reagan immediately and instinctively knew that this embryonic identity politics was a direct challenge to the universalism that America stands for. Beneath their smiles and Midwestern amiability, Ike and the Gipper revealed a deep understanding and sophistication of what political philosophers would call “regime maintenance.” That is, the ideas and values are necessary to sustain the American way of life.

Without using sociological terminology, Eisenhower and Reagan knew that an emphasis on one’s race, ethnicity, and gender group highlighted his “ascribed status,” i.e. what a person was born into, rather than the “achieved status” that an American earns as an individual. They knew that there was something “old world” and frankly un-American about emphasizing birth status and dividing our citizens into competing ethnic, racial, and gender groups.

In other words, five decades ago, they understood identity politics for it was: an attempt to de-legitimize American constitutional democracy.

This may be the case, and yet we're either going to get more substance-free rhetoric and policy wonkery, or both, tonight.  That's not what an Eisenhower or a Reagan would have wanted.

We have taken no surveys, but we suspect there is a deep unease in our country with the identity politics/political correctness regime. There is a profound hunger for a presidential candidate to face this issue explicitly; to speak for Americans as a whole, and renounce group-based appeals. It would be wonderful to hear either a Republican presidential candidate at the Reagan Library, or a Democratic presidential candidate at another event, present the arguments of Eisenhower and Reagan, or paraphrase the language of George Washington in his Farewell Address when told his fellow countrymen that—before any other political identity─ they should consider themselves first and foremost as Americans.

Perhaps we have not yet suffered enough.  Would Abraham Lincoln observe that "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous?"  Or is Jon Gabriel right?

"These are serious times.  We are not a serious people."

No, we'll go to Hell watching people get voted off the island.

ADVICE TO THE MAN (OR WOMAN) OF SYSTEM.

In the course of a deconstruction of the wishful thinking called "making a difference," Don Boudreaux calls out the social engineering vice.

Studying how law emerges in society and what its details are at any moment in time is worthwhile.  But too much of what goes on in modern American law schools is akin to too much of what goes on in modern American graduate programs of economics: society is portrayed as a sick patient in need of caring intervention by social physicians who’ll cure this or that ailment, or who will perform reconstructive surgery on the patient to make it better and more vigorous than ever.

To switch metaphors: far too many law students – even more, I suspect, than economics students – think of themselves as learning how to use the tools of the state to mold the inert clay of society into forms more appealing to their own aesthetic sense of ‘right.’  Each such student is an example of Adam Smith’s “man of system” who remains oblivious to the reality that there is always underway a natural, spontaneous, unplanned, and highly complex on-going process of social activity – a process that, if interfered with by social engineers, is quite likely to react in unexpected ways that make matters worse.

The law student sees words in statute and case books and thinks he sees ‘the law.’  He sees robed judges, camera-followed politicians, and titled bureaucrats and thinks he sees the principal sources of society’s momentum and direction.  He sees the police prevent domestic disputes and thinks he sees the means for preventing all social disputes.  In fact, he sees mirages.  He is blind to what what really matters.

People respond to incentives. Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please.

That is all.

CHINESE-AMERICAN FREIGHT RAILROADS.

In Argentina.

Minister of the Interior & Transport Florencio Randazzo announced on September 8 that China Machinery Engineering Corp had signed a letter of intent to double the amount of funding it is providing to revive Argentina’s rail freight network.

‘It is a second tranche of US$2⋅4bn which we will entirely invest in renewing track and rail freight infrastructure through Argentinian companies’, said Randazzo, speaking during an official visit to China.

The minister pointed out that the first tranche of CMEC funding was already being used to ‘improve 3 000 km of track, repair wagons and acquire new locomotives and wagons which are now being built in China’. Deliveries of the 100 diesel locos being supplied by CRRC were expected to be completed within 90 days.

During his visit, Randazzo also agreed heads of terms for CRRC to establish a manufacturing and maintenance presence in Argentina. Chinese companies are to undertake ‘at no cost to Argentina’ a feasibility study for electrifying the San Martín commuter route in Buenos Aires, he announced following a meeting with China Railway Construction Corp.

Over the years, North American rolling stock has migrated to Argentina.  China's railroads have the loading gauge and the track structure to handle North American style freight cars.  I'm not sure whether we're seeing an export subsidy, or foreign aid.

NEW ORLEANS IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

It's been ten years since the levees failed in New Orleans, and the blame game goes on.

I was there late last fall.  The French Quarter is still home to tourists.

Downriver, though, much land near the Industrial Canal, and the waterfront, remains vacant.

Policy wonks and pundits are still laying blame, or deflecting it.  Controversial Federal Emergency Management Administration head Michael (Heckuva job, Brownie) Brown recently took to Politico to state his case.

Could FEMA have ordered the evacuation of New Orleans? Yes, had it waived posse comitatus and invoked the Insurrection Act, which Congress ultimately amended in 2006 to permit deployment of troops in response to natural disasters. That unprecedented action was actually contemplated days after landfall aboard Air Force One—and I advocated for it. After I advised the president to federalize the response, he sat with Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Air Force One and outlined his plan. We immediately started drafting the federalization documents for the president’s signature, but Governor Blanco requested time to think it over and the president acquiesced. While the governor considered her options, the city became more and more dysfunctional. Blanco ultimately rejected the president’s plan, and political considerations eventually pushed the idea aside.

New Orleans is what Democrats do.

Prior to Katrina making landfall, I asked then-National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield to forcefully explain on a secure video conference call with Blanco and Nagin the catastrophe they were potentially facing if they failed to evacuate at least two or three days prior to landfall. When that didn’t work, I called President Bush at the ranch and implored him to call Mayor Nagin and encourage him to evacuate his city. The president called; the mayor dallied.

Nagin finally asked people to evacuate on Sunday morning for a storm that hit his city sometime after midnight that night. By that point, Amtrak had left the city with rail cars sans passengers. Airlines had evacuated Louis Armstrong International Airport with planes sans travelers. And school buses sat in their lots, soon to be flooded and ruined. The mayor’s incompetence cost lives.

While I was urging people to leave New Orleans, Mayor Nagin announced a “shelter of last resort,” the New Orleans Superdome. In other words, despite calls to evacuate, if you choose not to evacuate, or are now unable to evacuate because you lack transportation, run to the Superdome.

I was livid.

That's the same mayor "Schoolbus" Nagin whose constituents, meaning the people who returned after the flood, re-elected him.

The blame game was primed.

Had the mayor and governor fulfilled their responsibilities as elected leaders of their city and state, most if not all of the people crying for help in front of national television cameras would not have been there. They would have been in other locales, safe and secure.

But the blame was not placed on those responsible. The blame was placed on me—the one person who had no authority to do anything at that point except get out the checkbook and start paying the Department of Defense to evacuate people from that hellhole to a place of safety. And that is exactly what I did.

And that "heckuva job, Brownie" remark?  Arose in connection with efforts in Alabama and Mississippi, where state officials had their act together and federal aid could be effectively deployed.  New Orleans?  Not even preparation could help them.

I asked Congress for funding to study several catastrophic scenarios, including the possibility of a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans. The tabletop exercise, which we dubbed “Hurricane Pam,” was held in July 2005, one month before Katrina hit. The results struck fear in everyone involved. Hurricane Pam taught us too late that Louisiana and New Orleans were ill prepared. The state’s emergency manager was under federal indictment, its emergency operations in disarray.

New Orleans is what Democrats do.  But the way forward for Democrats is to ... elect Bernie Sanders.

We need a substantive, radical change in the center of gravity of American political life, and we believe that New Orleans’s experience in particular underscores that Bernie Sanders is the only candidate running who understands that fact of political life, and he is the only candidate who has lived in accordance with that understanding during the course of his political career.

Sanders is the only candidate running for President who has consistently fought for the kinds of policies that New Orleans so desperately required prior to and during Katrina, and that it needs now more than ever.

Now that you're done laughing, pray consider the possibility that one way to change the center of gravity of political life might be to break up concentrations of poverty and dysfunctional behavior.  (That's a hard task, something for another post another day.)  There's a long Malcom (Tipping Point) Gladwell essay in The New Yorker raising that possibility.

The neighborhoods that offer the best opportunities for those at the bottom are racially integrated. They have low levels of income inequality, good schools, strong families, and high levels of social capital (for instance, strong civic participation). That’s why moving matters: going to a neighborhood that scores high on those characteristics from one that does not can make a big difference to a family’s prospects.

I deliberately started with a description of conditions that might be unstable, leading to the tipping of a neighborhood. (Read Professor Gladwell's essay, he, too, acknowledges that possibility.) To repeat, breaking up concentrations of poverty and dysfunction is difficult.  The life of the man of system is not easy.  But a destructive hurricane is a powerful inducement to move.

One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville [North Carolina, a notorious poverty pocket]? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black. By virtually every measure, their new neighborhoods were better than the ones they had left behind in New Orleans. Median family income was forty-four hundred dollars higher. Ethnic diversity was greater. More people had jobs. Their exposure to “concentrated disadvantage”—an index that factors in several measures of poverty—fell by half a standard deviation.

And thus their exposure to the life-management skills of the middle class increases? That's why social scientists do research, dear reader, there's no end of interesting questions.  Publishable answers are another matter.  As are interpretations.  Robert Doar of The American Enterprise Institute offers his.  Yes, the life-management skills matter.

EMPTY INTERSECTIONALITY.

Carter County, Kentucky, county clerk Kim Davis has been getting her fifteen minutes of fame refusing to issue marriage licenses, which makes her a cause for civil disobedience to some people, and the personification of bad policy to others.  But there are intellectually honest ways of supporting or objecting to her behavior, and there are intellectually dishonest ways.  Take Abby Zimet.  Please.

Oh Lord, save us. The wingnut circus - cue crosses waving in the delirious air - came to town to welcome Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk and aspiring martyr to the cause of telling other people who they can and can't love by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, as she was released from five days in a heathen jail. In a seriously bizarre spectacle worthy of "Life of Brian," Davis sobbed her way to the podium as the 1980s hit "Eye of the Tiger" erupted from loudspeakers - illegally, as it turned out, given that the song's creators never gave permission for its use. Said an outraged Frankie Sullivan of Survivor, “I would not grant her the rights to use Charmin." Whatever. Davis was in jail for already breaking the law by refusing to do her job, so what's a little copyright infringement? Once up there in her moment of shining glory, Davis stood with her lawyer, her fabulously hillbilly fourth husband, and a grinning Mike Hucksterbee, who had reportedly shoved Ted Cruz out of the photo-op so he could proclaim “God showed up" in the form of Davis. Then God sobbed some more, giggled, raised her arms Rocky-style in triumph, and told the cheering if bigoted crowd, “I just want to give God the glory...Keep on pressing. Don’t let down because He is here.” More crosses insanely waving.

It's better, apparently, for a red diaper baby to make her fellow-travelers comfortable with their prejudices, rather than deal with the substance, or not, of the clerk's protest.  (I don't consider it a mitigating circumstance for a leftie to endorse property rights.)

But there's this culture-studies notion called intersectionality that appears to apply here.  What sort of behavior might you expect of people who grew up in an agrarian, religiously fundamentalist, honor culture with strict sex roles?  Why does that not merit consideration as a root cause of the clerk's behavior, or the endorsement her supporters -- constituents -- appear to be providing her?  Why, in her case, is subverting the dominant paradigm or being transgressive not an understandable response to the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender (blue-collar white people, in this instance)?  Graffiti vandals get more respect from the Perpetually Aggrieved.

Perhaps it's because intersectionality is not serious social science with rigorous intellectual foundations.  It's simply a pose within which advocates-masquerading-as-intellectuals can sneer at behavior they disapprove of and sugar-coat-with-wordnoise behaviors they encourage.  Put another way, it's nothing more than an aesthetic pose, claims to be on the right or wrong side of history notwithstanding.

The serious social science?  Are religiously fundamentalist honor cultures with strict sex roles evolutionary stable, or an evolutionary dead end?  Discuss.

But that's not what the Perpetually Aggrieved are all about.  No, there are some, like EisenBolan, SJW, who like to compare the Christian Right with the Sillies.

Like members of ISIS who see their form of Islam as the correct one and Shiite and those who do not see eye to eye with them as not true Muslims. Well Christian right has followed them down the same path. With now Marriage Equality now the law of the land the religious right is now targetting progressive Christians for being for marriage equality.

You can just see the hatred the religious has for those not agreeing with them. Clerks refusing to do their jobs.

As if there is any chance of the Sillies and the fundies ever making common cause against the secular progressives.  There was a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, in part about whether to genuflect with two fingers extended or three.  That was not the only doctrinal dispute, but if truth-praisers (the Russian word pravoslavie, which we render in English as orthodoxy) can differ over relatively small things, and Barnstead can spin off Centre Barnstead and Barnstead Hills, all of these illustrating minor differences among New England Puritans or Congregationalists, is there really any chance that religiously fundamentalist people who profess Jesus Christ as the Word of God Incarnate can ever make common cause with religiously fundamentalist people who acknowledge Jesus as a prophet useful to Allah's Messenger?  There are nontrivial differences in their eschatology to boot.  Please.

None of which deters some boutique multiculturalists from cutting fundamentalist Moslems slack whilst mocking fundamentalist Christians.

HAZARDOUS IN ANY NEIGHBORHOOD.

Saia Trucking want to build a new terminal in Grayslake,  The location is a former farm in what would otherwise be a suburban neighborhood.  Some locals don't want it.  But because they live in another town, they're even more screwed than they might be if it's their own municipal government chasing jobs.

Mundelein residents who live near the truck terminal proposed by SAIA Motor Freight Line LLC, have been encouraged by Mayor Steve Lentz to attend a meeting of the Grayslake plan commission/zoning board of appeals at 7 p.m. Monday at the village hall, 10 S. Seymour Ave., Grayslake.

The public hearing is a reboot of the zoning process "in light of a lawsuit alleging defects in the original notice for rezoning" the 33-acre property, according to a legal notice of the hearing published May 23.

The Grayslake village board last August approved the annexation and zoning for what is known as the Roppelt farm. In October, Mundelein and several residents sued the village and SAIA questioning the validity of the annexation and zoning.

In this border dispute, the truck terminal will be in Grayslake, but the traffic congestion and noise will affect homeowners in Mundelein, across the street, which makes the border dispute more complicated than one in which a zoning board reclassifies farmland as industrial, after it has previously reclassified adjoining farmland under its jurisdiction as residential, and people have moved into new tract houses there.  Here, Mundelein residents bear some of the burden, while Grayslake officials hope to harvest some tax revenue.

Increased property tax revenue for two school districts and job creation are among the benefits of a controversial truck terminal rising in Grayslake near a Mundelein residential neighborhood, according to village officials.

A truck terminal generates relatively little employment or tax revenue, compared to other potential commercial or industrial uses.

Mundelein Mayor Steve Lentz, who spoke at public comment time Tuesday, questioned whether Saia's new jobs will do much for the area. Citing noise and diesel emissions, Lentz and other opponents contend it's inappropriate the trucking facility is being built close to a Mundelein residential neighborhood.

"It's one thing if you guys had solicited a developer who came in and built a corporate headquarters or something, providing hundreds of jobs, something that we could all rejoice in," Lentz said. "We could go to lunch, Mr. Mayor, and I could tip my hat (to Grayslake)."

Taylor responded to air pollution concerns expressed by opponents Tuesday and at previous village meetings. He stressed Saia will meet all federal and state standards regarding vehicle emissions.

"The trucks will be running only when going in and out of the facility," Taylor said.

Documents show Saia's planned 100-door freight terminal meets criteria for new job creation and financial investment established for state tax credits. Saia plans to move 30 employees from Burr Ridge to Grayslake, according to the most recent 2014 annual report from the Illinois Economic Development for a Growing Economy Tax Credit Program.

We have a situation in which the property rights and liability are not well defined, thus there's no way for Saia or Grayslake to compensate Mundelein residents for lowered property values, or for the hazardous environment on their roads.

And a 100 bay terminal is a hazardous environment.  A plant that large is only useful if trucks are constantly coming and going, and whether the local roads are posted for 30 mph or 40 mph or 50 mph, there will be a lot of commuters hitting the brakes when one of those 53 foot trailers comes out of the terminal, even half a mile or 3/4 mile ahead of the nearest traffic, because those elephants are slow to get up to speed.  Note, though, that it is the 53 foot trailers -- anything longer than 28 feet ought to require a special movement permit anywhere, any time -- that will make Saia anything but a good neighbor.

The project will go through, despite objections from Mundelein.

Concerns included the dangers and noise of abundant truck traffic, the safety of people using an adjoining bike path, health impacts from diesel emissions.

Mundelein Mayor Steve Lentz was among the speakers at public comment time Tuesday. He criticized Grayslake for allowing a project that won't benefit the area.

"You are harming my community," Lentz told Grayslake's elected officials. "You're harming us. And if it goes through and it's used (as a trucking terminal), the harm could be irreparable and permanent, unless trucks just simply stop existing or Saia gets rid of it and stops."

Perhaps Mundelein's government can get on board with special movement permits for long trailers. But making a federal case out of Grayslake's zoning decision is likely to be difficult.

CALLING BULLSHIT.

Vermont's Bernie Sanders is a guest at Liberty University's weekly convocation.  (A small enough university can schedule what are effectively high school assemblies without disrupting class schedules.)  He gives a version of his usual stump speech, leavened with the Social Gospel.  John Hinderaker's reaction?  Bullshit.  Go, read, understand, and enjoy.

JUST IN TIME FOR OKTOBERFEST.

The world's biggest bratwurst, grilled on the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill.

Johnsonville and Delaware North teamed up to set an unofficial record Sunday: They grilled the world's longest brat.

Using a 360-foot grill, 225 pounds of meat, 225 bags of charcoal and a host of volunteers, they grilled a bratwurst that was 120 yards long, long enough to stretch from goalpost to goalpost in [Lambeau Field].

Delaware North run the food service at Lambeau Field.  The event could take place in Green Bay because the Packers were in Chicago, taking care of business.

Johnsonville's travelling grill is apparently an object of amusement for University Diaries.  It's also a useful tool for fundraising events in Rockford.

And Oktoberfest, for the uninitiated, is generally a September event.  Prosit!