WATCH THIS SPACE.

The six months of outdoor season have passed.  Between the Chicago Black Hawks making a Stanley Cup run, and a little self-discipline, there's still progress to report on the railroad.

Some of last model railroad season's work involved site preparation, here insulating a crawl space that will be behind the railroad.

Once that's done, the next framing for the staging yard takes shape.

Then comes the sub-roadbed.  This goes faster when it's a sheet of 3/4" plywood rather than spline.

Next, some tracks, and a few train cars to check the alignment.  And some exercise, scrabbling below all to install wires.

Yes, there will be another level above, connecting to the section at the top of the picture.

Meanwhile, the spline continues to the east, here in the northeast corner of the room.

In the rear, there is a track in place (I work on the difficult sections first), then the roadbed for two tracks of the branch line, and a high line for the blast furnace, then two tracks of the main line, and three tracks for the steel mill.

With winter coming, the only outdoor chore to get in the way is the snow shovelling, which may be real soon.

GENERATED AND DIVERTED TRAFFIC.

One of the first things I learned in a transportation policy class was that a road improvement didn't function in isolation.  Ceteris paribus, an improved road would allow the traffic currently using it to move more smoothly (doesn't matter whether its filling potholes or a new surface or more lanes or timed traffic lights).  But a good economist learns to think about consequences beyond the immediate, which, in the transportation community come under the rubric of diverted traffic (travellers who were avoiding the unimproved road who switch) and generated traffic (non-travellers who travel because it's less burdensome.)  Apparently, this Strong Towns post suggests, the infrastructure gurus are still short of enlightenment.  "With a growing body of research showing that building more roads and more lanes just encourages more traffic, officials are starting to pay attention to induced demand."  There's more detail at the post.

The increased awareness of induced demand is a very encouraging sign. This growing acknowledgement is a key component in changing the conversation. Once we admit that building more highway capacity isn’t a real solution to congestion, we can talk about things that can actually work such as congestion pricing or building strong neighborhoods and cities that do not require such a heavy reliance on congested freeways in the first place.

These ideas are so elementary I'm surprised the wizards of smart haven't grasped them.

BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM?

I recall a passage, somewhere in The Communist Manifesto, cautioning scientific socialists not to succumb to the blandishments of all manner of faux-socialisms.  (And that style of political correctness persists to this day, the True Believer must resist all sorts of fine-sounding reforms precisely because those reforms will preserve capitalism, or the wages system, or the existing class society.)

Now comes Senator Bernie Sanders, explaining exactly what he means by "democratic socialism."  Read and understand all of it, although there is not a line in it that refutes an old William F. Buckley quip about the fundamental economic assumptions of liberalism being socialist.

I want to highlight one passage.

Democratic socialism means that, in the year 2015, a college degree is equivalent to what a high school degree was 50 years ago – and that public education must allow every person in this country, who has the ability, the qualifications and the desire, the right to go to a public colleges or university tuition free. This is also not a radical idea. It exists today in many countries around the world. In fact, it used to exist in the United States.

I thought the degradation of the college degree is the bitter fruit of at least 50 years of access-assessment-remediation-retention, and that the right to attend on the taxpayers' dime in other countries is limited to people who screened for college in the sixth grade.  That's how Minding the Campus also understands it.

Back in the 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward into higher education began, the system seemed reasonable. Most of the students who went to college were pretty well prepared and the admission and academic standards at most schools were at least moderately demanding. Expanding “access” to higher education appeared to have only an upside.

The trouble is that Uncle Sam’s increasing “generosity” towards college proved to be very corrosive of those standards over time.

College administrators quickly developed a taste for the additional revenue they could obtain by enrolling more students. To do that, many lowered admission standards and the academic quality of the college-going population began to decline. (That decline was worsened by the fact that academic rigor at many of our high schools was simultaneously falling, as “progressive” educational theories spread.) But to keep the increasingly large number of weak and disengaged students they were luring into their schools happy, it was necessary to water down the curriculum and lower academic expectations.

After decades, those trends have led us to our present, dismal situation – many students who shouldn’t have entered college in the first place are racking up debts for college while learning little and often failing to graduate.

If you think universal health care, something else the senator calls for, and universal higher education are expensive now, just wait ...

SPEAKING OF FREAKAZOID SPAWN.

Here's Adjunctular Noodling, starting with college placement day in South Korea, where there is no such thing as test anxiety, and ending up with the Perpetually Aggrieved who run the hothouses fouling all the nests.

Compare the Korean democracy to the various defiantly separate American sub-cultures. In a few years these South Korean students, if they are kind, will allow the American students to serve them. It’s unclear what service they are equipped to provide. Americans equip themselves mostly for protest. It’s doubtful that will be tolerated by Korean achievers.

Meanwhile those who would lead us by following the polls (Clinton, Rubio and Sanders) would dole out more diplomas at greater cost, fostering fewer marketable skills. The students at Missouri, Yale, Ithaca and Louisville may confound the giveaway plan. The voting public may turn away from public higher education, seeing it as a perfectly poor investment. America may also at last turn away from privileged, brutish, overly commercialized and unremarkable collegiate footballers.

The turning away is already in progress.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Here is Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writer David D. Haynes, summarizing in one sentence the challenges facing the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  "UWM has a dual mission — doing top-flight research while also serving as an entry point to students who might not otherwise consider college — that is both extremely valuable and extremely challenging."  Indeed.  Battled those challenges with part of my brain for 35 years.  Battled as well the destructive impulses of the identity-politics crazies and diversity weenies with another part.  Perhaps if the powers that be at the regional comprehensive universities disavow the antics at the hothouses for the freakazoid spawn of the priviligentsia, they'll have a better case with the legislature.

THE MUGGING BY REALITY CONTINUES.

Onetime Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan saw, back in 2008, the potential of one Barack Obama.  (She may have voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin all the same.)  The scales are falling from her eyes.  Or perhaps the kool-aid wore off.

After the [Paris] attacks Mr. Obama went on TV, apparently to comfort us and remind us it’s OK, he’s in charge. He prattled on about violence being at odds with “universal values.” He proceeded as if unaware that there are no actually universal values, that right now the values of the West and radical Islam are clashing, violently, and we have to face it. The mainstream press saw right through him. At the news conference, CNN’s Jim Acosta referred to the “frustration” of “a lot of Americans,” who wonder: “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” The president sighed and talked down to him—to us. He has a strategy and it’s the right one and it’s sad you can’t see it.

Let him prattle on about climate change as the great threat of our time.

All he can do at this point is troll the GOP with the mischief of his refugee program. If he can’t work up a passion about radical Islamic violence, at least he can tie the Republicans in knots over whether they’re heartless bigots who want to prevent widows and children from taking refuge from the Syrian civil war.

This is a poor prioritizing of what faces us. The public is appropriately alarmed about exactly who we might be letting in. It would be easy, and commonsensical, to follow their prompting and pause the refugee program, figure out how to screen those seeking entrance more carefully, and let in only the peaceable. If that takes time, it takes time.

Once upon a time, "widows and orphans" was the rhetoric used by robber barons to defend their stock dividend policies.

Unfortunately, in recalling the way things were when Ronald Reagan could call an evil empire an evil empire, Ms Noonan continues to enable the cult of the presidency, which is what Mr Obama had going for him in 2008.

There will be powerful public support now for spending—wisely, discerningly—whatever is needed for the short term, and a possible long term.

Finally, continued travels through the country show me that people continue to miss Ronald Reagan’s strength and certitude. In interviews and question-and-answer sessions, people often refer to Reagan’s “optimism.” That was his power, they say—he was optimistic.

No, I say, that wasn’t his power and isn’t what you miss. Reagan’s power was that he wasconfident. He was confident that whatever the problem—the economy, the Soviets, the million others—he could meet it, the American people could meet it, and our system could meet it. The people saw his confidence, and it allowed them to feel optimistic. And get the job done.

What people hunger for now from their leaders is an air of shown and felt confidence: I can do this. We can do it.

Who will provide that? Where will it come from? Isn’t it part of what we need in the next president?

That, unfortunately, is the mind-set that made Our President's "we are the change we have been waiting for" resonate with disaffected people.  The petulant never-tenured radical emerged later.  I know I'm repeating myself, but as the Gruff Old Yardmaster says, "no matter how many times I explain this some doofus always messes it up."  Thus.  "It may take the failure of one or more of the New Deal or Great Society or Hope and Change constructions to trigger the emergence."  Unfortunately, all the hope and change constructions are tottering at once.

ANTAGONIZE THE CARRIAGE TRADE.

Amtrak's corrupt bargain, in which sleeping car rates on the Silver Star go down in exchange for there no longer being a proper dining car, is not playing well with veteran train riders.

And it might be the most effective way for Amtrak to self-destruct, as it's unlikely we'd even have an Amtrak if the common carrier railroads had managed to get rid of all the dining cars by 1968 or so.

Trains promises a future analysis of the effects of the degradation of service.

THE TIME FOR SUBTLETY IS OVER. BRING THE HAMMER.

Let's start with Victor Davis Hanson's "The University Gone Feral."  As his subtitle puts it, social norms no longer apply.  Does that come as any surprise after thirty or forty years of deconstructing civilization, for whatever reasons seemed appealing at the time?

The strangest campus derangement is the graft of Victorian prurience onto postmodern crudity. Students who are quite sexually active, and routinely use drugs and alcohol, nonetheless revert to virginal preteens who must be shielded from rough language or mere rudeness. They demand Victorian rules of sexual etiquette, but not commensurate 19th-century notions of abstinence, housing segregated by gender, dress codes that discourage randiness, or prohibitions against drug and alcohol use. Pick-and-choose campus feminists do not wish doors opened for them, but insist that sex codes delineate the stages of arousal, from foreplay to postcoital pleasantries. How strange that “adult” students want to dress up in little kids’ costumes on Halloween, and then act like children terrified of scary things in the night.

There is another common denominator to this epidemic of madness. Why are universities free from norms that apply to other American institutions? Is it the implied social contract that their educational mission is so sacred and so dutifully fulfilled that they simply cannot follow the rules or expectations that the rest of us do?

It's been the habit of presidents of public universities to accuse legislatures of breaking that social contract, whilst glossing over the ways in which their institutions have broken the contract themselves, particularly where normal Americans are concerned.

Universities went feral and broke their social contract. If campuses can no longer educate students, then why should they be exempt from the norms that the rest of the population must follow?

Campuses claim they are left-wing, but in fact they are no-wing: just fascist, authoritarian, infantile — and incompetent.

I don't know that "campuses" claim they are left-wing, although there's a lot about the social and cultural preferences that are loosely leftish. Perhaps the best thing to do is light up the grill, pour a beer, and enjoy the slow-motion collapse.

But first, read Jennifer Kabbany. "What you are witnessing has festered and grown like a bacteria in a petri dish until this highly visibly public outbreak of campus lunacy showed itself in full force."  The details are not for the faint of heart.

REVISITING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN TOTALITARIAN AND AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS?

Another history lesson from the Crusty Old Yardmaster first.  My title refers to a public stance Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick took during the 1980s first as a criticism of excessive delicacy during the Carter administration and then as a defense to the Reagan Administration saying nasty things about Communist regimes whilst supporting strongmen whose style of governance wasn't that different from your typical First Commissar.

Now comes Thomas Friedman.  It's not quite "the Eighties called and they want their foreign policy back," and it's not quite The World is Flat, or Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and yet, it's retrospectively an endorsement of "Dictatorships and Double Standards" with a smattering of Institutions Matter.  Then there's something else.

Sixty years ago Asian dictators told their people in effect, “I am going to take away your freedom — but give you the best education, export-led economics and infrastructure that money can buy — and in a half-century you’ll build a middle class that will gradually take your freedom back.” In the Arab world, 60 years ago dictators told their people, in effect, “I am going to take away your freedom and give you the Arab-Israeli conflict, a shiny object to distract you from my corruption and predation.”

I'm not persuaded that any of the strong men of the Asian tiger countries came anywhere near close to offering such a bargain, and that gradual taking back of freedom is nowhere near present in Communist China.

And the deal the Arab dictators offered their people is just that of a ward-heeler politician.  Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson (or was it the sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt?) told the poor, "sit on your ass, light up a Camel, this is the promised land."

To Mr Friedman, the differences in governing methods matter.

That difference, 60 years later, has produced the Asian economic miracle and fueled the Arab civilizational meltdown/disorder in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Here's how it plays out in Detroit, or Chicago, or any of the other precincts where the politicians offer distractions to their corruption and predation.

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

I have to keep fighting it out on this line. Perhaps some of Mr Friedman's readers will see the applicability of his argument in his own city and state.

THE CASE FOR A CONTROL GROUP.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution does a risk analysis of providing asylum for refugees from Asia Minor in Syrian Refugees, Jelly Beans, and Murderers.  His punch line: the incidence of murderers in the currently existing population of the United States exceeds the hypothetical incidence of murderers in the currently waiting population of asylum seekers.

That said, two maps suggest the possibility of some people preferring to remain in the control group, or perhaps preferring to risk dealing with the population they know.

Start with a map that circulated on Insta Pundit last night, turning "states with governors telling Washington NO" into electoral votes.

Apres-Obama, le landslide?  As a commenter points out, Illinois is unlikely to flip, there being sufficent recipients of federal benefits in Chicago.

Then comes J. Christian Adams, providing a map identifying the shall-issue and no permit required states, where playing the Kalashnikov riff is likely to get you shot off the stage.

Which makes for some interesting social science, in case the states (California, Connecticut, New York) where public officials have been going out of their way to be welcoming, get more than their aliquot part of the poisoned jelly beans.  Will researchers blame the type II error of taking the refugees at face value, or will researchers be able to capture the effect of leaving the existing population without easy means of defense?

GOING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE.

Here's the so-called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting contrasting coverage of Russia's response to jihadis sabotaging a plane with coverage of Lebanon's and France's responses to jihadis committing mayhem in Beirut and Paris.

Because Russia’s government is considered to be an enemy of Washington, US media express skepticism about its interest in increasing its powers, suspecting it might have its own self-interest rather than the safety of its citizens foremost in mind. US news outlets depict Russia as living in a world of cause and effect, where Moscow’s own actions have an impact on how other nations and groups respond to it; it is not portrayed as a passive victim of others’ inexplicable violence. The Kremlin’s power is seen as finite, with its ability to achieve its ends not guaranteed by its good intentions and inexhaustible supply of willpower.

In other words, if you want US media to cover your government’s response to a terrorist attack in a way that’s actually useful to you as a citizen, you might get more news you can use if you live under an enemy regime rather than one counted as a friend of the United States.

Saywhaaaat, man?

ASSIMILATION

On travel, I have remarked to primarily Europeans but occasionally people from other continents that we have a secret weapon that transforms Chinese, or Africans, or anyone else, into Americans. Today, Betsy Newmark compares and contrasts European attempts either at assimilation or at cosmopolitanism with the way things are in the Research Triangle.

I would like to think that things are going better for us in the U.S., but we are still seeing radicalized Muslims such as the Boston bombers and all the people who have left or tried to leave to fight with ISIS. I know that I have many Muslim students who are assimilated, but still hold their faith very closely. Some of them have been my very favorite students and I've been impressed with their intellectual curiosity and enjoyment about American government, politics, and history. I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them and having them as students. I don't know what made the difference between their experiences and those of others. Perhaps it all came down to different parents and circumstances, but I really have no idea.

It's possible that a shot at an information technology job or an academic vocation at one of the local basketball schools matters, but, to repeat myself, buying into America is about buying into an idea, something that countries based on tribal boundaries, no matter how welcoming those tribes might claim to be, cannot do.  And that idea is, to repeat myself, one that the boutique multiculturalists have attempted to deconstruct, but it's still an idea that resonates.

WHAT COUNTRY IS HE TALKING ABOUT?

Obama apologist Chris Matthews goes off into Wolkenkuckucksheim with a "compromise" to get normal Americans to stop opposing asylum to Syrian refugees by sending all unattached military-age men back to "fight for their country."  Watch.

"Four million fleeing Assad.  Only four willing to fight for their country."  During the Mariel boatlift, I don't recall anyone advising the Carter administration to convert unattached military-age men into a Free Cuban Army and pay the Castro brothers back for the Bay of Pigs.

It all makes the Reagan administration's outreach to Iranian moderates look reasoned.  Say what you will about "arms for hostages," at least those hostages came back alive.

Mr Matthews, on the other hand, is still wedded to delusions of some sort of state sovereignty.  "We still have to turn Syria over to somebody."  Seems like a lot of it is in the hands of the Sillies, and some of it is likely to emerge as a future Kurdish republic.

WE CAME, WE BOMBED, HE DIED.

Oops.

Presidents make mistakes, even in the Middle East. A little humility, a little acknowledgement of responsibility, a little self-reflection could go a long way.

For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.

From the standpoint of American interests and of the well being of the Syrians, the primary responsibility that the United States has toward the people of Syria is not to offer asylum to something like 0.25 percent of its refugee population. The primary duty of this country was to prevent such a disaster from happening and, failing that, to support in-country safe havens and relief operations. No doubt President Obama and the unthinking press zealots who applaud his every move prefer a conversation about why ordinary Americans are racist xenophobes to one about why President Obama’s Syria policy has created an immense and still expanding disaster.

One more year to run.  We have much to look forward to.

Cheer up, it could be worse.

So I cheered up, and it got worse.

WHAT ASSIMILATION LOOKS LIKE.

Interesting New York Times story about new Americans adapting Hindu immersion rituals to the beach.  Yeah, it's the Times, and you get all the genuflections to the Correct Causes.  And yet.

For the past two years, members of [Sadhana] and other volunteers have gathered once a month at the south end of the Joseph P. Addabbo Memorial Bridge, which links Howard Beach and Broad Channel, to clean the beaches lining Cross Bay Boulevard, popular places for Hindus to perform the rituals. The group’s leaders have also visited Hindu temples to speak with priests and their congregations about adapting ancient traditions to modern environmental regulations.

It's all about being good neighbors.

Sadhana’s members have sought to show how religious practice can be compatible with environmental awareness, and have insisted that while the submersion of objects in water is important, worshipers need not leave them there.

And we're seeing the same pattern at work that has been present with other new arrivals to these shores.

Ms. Ramotar said that until about two years ago, the family would have left everything in the water. Asked whether any one person in the family had pressed for the change, she responded, “As a family, we all thought about it at the same time, that it was a wise thing to do.” But when her father turned away, she lowered her voice and whispered, “It’s always the younger generation that makes the change.”

That's how buying into America happens, dear reader.

TWO FOR THE SEESAW.

A number of governors, primarily Republicans, are having none of Our President's plan to offer up to ten thousand refugees from Asia Minor residency in the United States. Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer sides with the governors. "Obama can’t vet the refugees, and they shouldn’t be allowed into the United States. The governors of the states that have already revolted are right; we can only hope that the other governors will soon join them." Reason's Ed Krayewski suggests, to the contrary, that such fears are overblown.

According to Philly Voice, most of the Syrian refugees so far have been settled in Michigan, Illinois, Texas, and California. The governors of the first three states are among those saying they will refuse more Syrian refugees. Yet none of them pointed to any specific problem, or hint of a problem, they've had with the limited amount of refugees they have taken so far.

The U.S. accepted 70,000 refugees in fiscal year 2013, down from 80,000 in fiscal year 2008. An additional 10,000 is not an overwhelming number. Because of the nature of refugees (people fleeing violence and persecution), they tend to come from countries with a poor security environment and sketchy datasets. Yet the federal government is capable of bringing them in. Of the numerous terrorist plots U.S. law enforcement says it's foiled, none has been used as critics of accepting Syrian refugees an example of refugees "infiltrating" the U.S.

It's an opportunity for the land of opportunity to encourage a new cohort of migrants to buy into America. Unfortunately, that's not what the boutique multiculturalists who make social policy are likely to go along with.  The refugees might be collateral damage to the ongoing culture wars.

VETTING RESEARCH TAKES TIME.

Two years ago, the Next Productivity Bonus for higher education appeared to be evidence from Northwestern that tenured professors produced no measurable improvements in student success.  Or something.  The talking point version of the story was wrong back then.  Faculty who enjoy proper working conditions and a modicum of job security matter.  And there was enough proper analysis of the data to get the findings into The Review of Economics and Statistics.

We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their firstterm courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower “value added” than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s averages and less-qualified students.

In Northwestern-speak, "contingent" doesn't mean "freeway flyer with no office and gigs at six colleges."

Via Newmark's Door, where you can also read about the muggers who come out at night.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

Doris O'Brien, also retired from higher education, sees that the long march through the institutions continues even after the tenured radicals also occupy the administrative suites.

Enter confrontation. And condemnation. And color. All of a sudden, college faculties and administrators aren’t getting the respect they feel they have earned through their warm embrace of political correctness, man-made climate change, and America’s posture of leading from behind. They are being challenged -- sometimes, in fact, attacked -- in ways they find incomprehensible. After all, confrontation has always been something liberals avoid, except with those with unacceptable ideas. But who would expect a wave of chaos on campus over something called “white privilege”? How could they possibly be included in such a category?

After all, what Democrat-voting deans or faculty members would be characterized as intolerant and privileged? If anything, they have bent over backwards to assure that all people of color – and don’t forget (liberal) women! -- feel welcomed and appreciated. Yet, now this! As was the case with the college dean whom I approached those many years ago, the president of the University of Missouri has opted out of personally confronting the stressful situation. He resigned, choosing cowardice over the taunt of continuing criticism.

Richard Epstein pens the epitaph for near-men such as the Missouri and Yale administrators.

The problem at Yale and in the Obama administration is that our national and university leaders refuse to defend their institutions, even when those institutions have worked well. It takes years to build up public and private institutions of excellence. It takes shockingly little time to rip them down.

Indeed.

YOU MEAN A BEAUTIFUL WALL IS HELPFUL?

Common Dreams picks up "A War the West Cannot Win" by Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich.  Put him strongly in the camp of "enough of going abroad for demons to destroy," which might be wise advice, at least until the demons are at the door.  But his policy recommendations include something that's likely to surprise a lot of Common Dreams readers.

Rather than assuming an offensive posture, the West should revert to a defensive one. Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter. Such barriers will necessarily be imperfect, but they will produce greater security at a more affordable cost than is gained by engaging in futile, open-ended armed conflicts. Rather than vainly attempting to police or control, this revised strategy should seek to contain.

The Hungarians and Slovenes might be showing the way already.  Could get interesting, though, when somebody starts drawing comparisons with the early Cold War policy of containing Communism.  It matters, though, how that containment takes shape, as J. Robert Smith warns readers.

Western Europe’s nations have to reject the diversity worldview that diminishes their civilization and invites their enemies in. Unless nations are strong within -- unless they have confidence and faith in themselves as a people and the values and virtues that elevated them -- they cannot long resist the aggressions of enemies from without.

That strength, though, is a strength of character.

Europeans have a history of embracing hard and resolute men when establishment leaders fail in their duties to safeguard their nations. Most of these men weren’t Churchills.

The European task is more difficult than that facing North Americans, as the United States and Canada are ideological nations, no matter how contested the ideology or how puzzling buying into the idea of the nation is. The European countries generally have their kinship ties right in the country names.

RECLAIMING THE PUBLIC SPACES.

Although the concourse building at Chicago Union Station long ago disappeared to make room for an air rights development, part of the ongoing liquidation that was The Pennsylvania Railroad's business model after 1950 or so, the Chicago real estate market was not at the time buoyant enough to fund a replacement of the headhouse.  But over the years, the Fred Harvey dining room burned, the watchmakers and ancillary businesses that supported the railroad moved out, and a number of the auxiliary public spaces were closed off.  But with passenger traffic through the station rising, and possibly exceeding, that during World War II, some of those spaces are being opened and repurposed.  For example, the former women's lounge is being remodeled as a paid respite space for coach passengers (the sleeping car and business class passengers rate the Metropolitan Lounge in the concourse building) to separate themselves from the madding crowds in the waiting room (which is sometimes cordoned off for fundraisers) or in the few seats in the departure lounge.

Chicago Magazine got a tour of some of those off-limits spaces.  You'll recognize similarities in the ceiling treatments of the main waiting room and the ladies lounge and restaurant to those in the old Pennsylvania Station in New York, also a casualty of that slow-motion liquidation.

LOSING THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

The Chronicle of Higher Education uses the sad saga of Georgia State's entry into the college sports derby to make a case that the students are being ripped off.

In the 2013 and 2014 seasons, competing at the highest level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the team recorded just a single victory. Average attendance last year was among the 10 worst in the NCAA’s top level. Yet Georgia State’s 32,000 students are still required to cover much of the cost. Over the past five years, students have paid nearly $90 million in mandatory athletic fees to support football and other intercollegiate athletics — one of the highest contributions in the country.

A river of cash is flowing into college sports, financing a spending spree among elite universities that has sent coaches’ salaries soaring and spurred new discussions about whether athletes should be paid. But most of that revenue is going to a handful of elite sports programs, leaving colleges like Georgia State to rely heavily on students to finance their athletic ambitions.

In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests.

The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.

Student-fee increases have sparked campus protests at some institutions, including the University of New Mexico, and have drawn criticism from lawmakers in some states.

The athletics fees suggest that administrative talk about serving first-generation non-traditional diverse strivers is just so much spin.

The Chronicle/HuffPost analysis found that subsidy rates tend to be highest at colleges where ticket sales and other revenue are the lowest — meaning that students who have the least interest in their college’s sports teams are often required to pay the most to support them.

Many colleges that heavily subsidize their athletic departments also serve poorer populations than colleges that can depend more on outside revenue for sports. The 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies averaged 44 percent more Pell Grant recipients than the 50 institutions with the lowest subsidies during 2012-13, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

That's true at Georgia State, which is not yet part of the football on a school night in order to get ESPN coverage that is working out so well for the Mid-American Conference.

Georgia State is far from an outlier. Last year, sports programs at 47 other public colleges reviewed by The Chronicle and HuffPost were even more dependent on fees and other institutional support as a percentage of their athletic budget.

The growing schism between have and have-not colleges, and the reluctance of universities that rely heavily on subsidies to scale back their spending, has alarmed professors, presidents, and even college coaches, who are raising new questions about the long-term viability of major college athletics.

And Georgia State resisted the temptation to go into big time football, which puts them, as one of the last investors at the top of the bubble, in the worst possible shape.  Even the head football coach, Bill Curry, is skeptical.  But perhaps there is a greater fool elsewhere.

In the past two decades, 32 universities have made the leap to Division I. Like Georgia State, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Texas at San Antonio, among others, have added football — the sport with the most potential to lead to big paydays. College leaders say such investments help attract prospective students and build connections with donors and other supporters.

Or perhaps something that can't go on, won't.

“Students are our biggest donors,” says Matthew J. Streb, a political-science professor and the faculty athletics representative at Northern Illinois University, where subsidies account for more than two-thirds of the athletic department’s revenue. (About one-third of the department’s revenue comes from student fees specifically.) Without that money, he says, universities couldn’t offer as many sports or scholarships as they do.

David Hughes is a Rutgers anthropology professor who has sparred with his administration over ballooning subsidies. His university has spent $172 million in the past five years to underwrite intercollegiate sports, more than any other college in the country during that time.

The two major forms of subsidies, he says, undermine universities in separate ways. Increases in student fees make college more expensive, while rising institutional support of athletics threatens the academic mission. “Add these things together,” he says, “and you have students paying more for a lower-quality education.”

Research published in January in the Journal of Sport found that students themselves are often unaware of athletic fees or what they are used to support. A study of 3,500 students in the Mid-American Conference found that more than 40 percent of respondents either didn’t know, or were highly uncertain about, whether they paid athletics fees. Many said they were willing to pay fees for student centers or health care, but in general did not support fees for athletics.

Brea Woods, a 20-year-old junior at Georgia State, said she didn’t know she paid an athletics fee, which costs full-time students $554 a year. “That makes me mad because I'm not an athlete,” says Ms. Woods, who has taken out $19,000 to finance her education.

Ms Woods's situation is representative of the burdens borne by full-time students in the Mid-American Conference universities, as I have been documenting for years.  And there's something about that additional expense that doesn't square with administrators and publicists blowing smoke about being student-centered.  But somebody has to recognize that funding sports programs is orders of magnitude less fraught than funding fighter jets.

Georgia State's president has not yet recognized that.  And there is rain in the forecast for Wednesday night, when Western Michigan kicks off at Northern Illinois.

THE MOVEMENT SAYS IT'S TIME TO STOP TALKING.

We don't yet have a truck bomb in a research center, but I have to reinforce last night's warning. "Yes, understanding the other fellow's point of view is a good thing, but when you indulge the other fellow's anger because you think his circumstances are less favorable, you're tilting the balance of power away from an environment of reasoned discourse, comity, and some sort of coexistence." Sure, but when you think you have all the answers, that doesn't matter.  Take Vanderbilt economics major Nicholas Goldbach.  Please.  He's distressed that Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain argues against the politically correct position in her web journal.  "I suggest that any articles you have cited, or claims you have made, against LGBT individuals, the Islamic and/or Muslim communities, and any other minority group, should be redacted or edited at your earliest convenience.  If my peers and I do not see some serious changes in messaging from your page, we will be sending a campus-wide signed petition to the Chancellor, requesting your release of employment from our school."  Cooler heads appear to be prevailing, although the thought of the lavender lobby and the jihadis working together on a truck bomb when they get tired of asking that inconvenient people shut up boggles.

STOP ENABLING THE CRYBULLIES.

It's been instructive observing the foodie and arts communities twisting themselves into theoretical pretzels attempting to condemn the Paris terrorism spree whilst preserving the case for safe spaces.  Let's start with the statement SITE Intelligence Group attributes to the Sillies Ministry of Propaganda.  "Hundreds of pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice."  Put another way, just another Friday night at a rock concert or avant-garde play.  Here's Andrew McCarthy on the challenge that sort of assault on free expression poses to the self-despising multiculturalist.

Intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic rationalized that, while we of course (ahem) champion free expression — “Je suis Charlie!” and all that — columnists and cartoonists who dare lampoon a totalitarian ideology are bringing the jihad on themselves.

It was a familiar story. In 2012, jihadists attacked an American compound in Benghazi, killing our ambassador and three other officials. The president responded by . . . condemning an anti-Muslim video that had nothing to do with the attack, and by proclaiming that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

(Hillary told Chelsea it was a terrorist attack, the video story was for the sheeple, but I digress.)  And a Salon writer, Sonia Saraiya, suggests that the People of Privilege just lower their voices.

[Comedian Bill] Maher confuses compassion with idiocy. Compassion is a quality that has nothing to do with how smart or how right you are. It’s a quality that is at the root of not wanting to make generalizations, and at the root of wanting to say things that do not horrifically offend other systematically oppressed people. I fully believe that Maher doesn’t understand those well-meaning liberals, those politically correct assholes. I would just rather be one of them, I think, than to merely be right; I would like to be able to understand another point of view, from time to time. And especially on a day like yesterday, I would like to be able to feel compassion.

That's the logic of safe spaces and trigger warnings. So I suppose the Sillies could claim that drinking wine and enjoying amplified music was sufficiently problematic (which is PC for haram) that its offensive presence made it a target for whatever grievances they had against French policy in Syria.

That seems a long way removed from a few aggravated students giving the house-mother grief about Hallowe'en costume advice.  But in all vanguards, whether we're talking about the jihad or the rainbow coalition or the Vietnam protests, there comes a time when "Finally, some members of this movement decided to stop talking, to stop asking that the place be shut down, and so they blew the place up."  Coming soon to a fraternity house or an Oktoberfest near you?  Perhaps.  But that's an editorial comment in the University of Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal, shortly after the August 1970 truck bombing of Sterling Hall.  Here's a recollection, 45 years on, from economist Barkley Rosser, whose father, mathematician Barkley Rosser, directed the (Army) Mathematics Research Center, the institution that triggered the antiwar protesters.

Army Math had become a focal point for anti-war efforts on campus. Its removal was demanded by SDS under the slogan “Bring the war home.”

And in the summer of 1970, the New Year’s Gang, which now included 24-year-old Karl Armstrong, 19-year-old Dwight Armstrong, 18-year-old David Fine and 22-year-old Leo Burt, turned its sights on Army Math’s destruction.

“They believed things had reached such a horrid state in terms of what the Nixon government was doing … that it was the obligation of students to become part of a resistance that waged war against the war machine,” [war protester and subsequent alderman and Madison mayor for life Paul] Soglin said.

Yes, understanding the other fellow's point of view is a good thing, but when you indulge the other fellow's anger because you think his circumstances are less favorable, you're tilting the balance of power away from an environment of reasoned discourse, comity, and some sort of coexistence.

LOSING CONFIDENCE IN THE EXPERTS.

The old wizards of smart have lost their mojo.  The public understands that.  Slowly, so too do the public intellectuals.  It's not just about the in-group within the Establishment, or the out-group, alone.  Start with longtime Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan, noting that much has gone wrong, and credentials that once conferred authority fail to confer performance.

What is going on, and not only with Republicans, is that American voters are surveying the past 15 years. At home they see an economic near-collapse followed by a feeble recovery, a culture that grows every day grosser and more bizarre, falling educational results, a bigger, more demanding and more corrupt federal government. In the world: two unwon wars, ISIS, a refugee crisis greater than any since the end of World War II, Putin on the move, American clout and prestige on the decline.

They think: Who gave us this world? Who led us the past 15 years? They realize: It was the most credentialed, acclaimed and experienced political professionals in both parties. The pros gave us this world—the people who knew what they were doing! Who had a lifetime of political attainment!

They conclude: Maybe we have to expand our idea of “credentials.” Maybe we need another kind of “experience.” Maybe individuals with “attainments” outside the political world are the ones who can get us out of this mess.

She's still thinking conventionally, about how the factions within the Republican party leave it at a presidential disadvantage relative to the Democrats, lousy slate of hopefuls notwithstanding.  Victor Davis Hanson suggests that the continuing agglomeration of people into urban areas, and the technical progress that allows fewer people to feed the country, and more people to have stuff on call at the swipe of a screen, means that there are risks to the political institutions potentially worse than the risk to the breakdown of the rules of trading that make such a division of labor possible.

The 21st century may at last see the end of a venerable consensus that rural citizens prizing liberty and freedom provide a necessary audit on the dependent urbanites. We have left for good the world of Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower and entered the age of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — and likely with worse to come.

That's not the only hazard, some Democrats, a New York Times analysis suggests, worry about losing a demographic that will continue to be a plurality in future.

Democrats face a major challenge in cultivating a new generation of politicians able to reach beyond the Democratic base and speak to white voters, especially white men, in states around the country. Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011, said he was very worried by the absence of successful Democratic candidates positioned to move up, especially in the South, as well as in swing states like Ohio.

“We are losing the white male vote in droves, and we’ve got to appeal to the white male with stronger economic themes, inequality themes,” he said. “We have to find a way to do that, but what is key is recruiting more white male, and women, candidates. We can’t just become the minority advocate party.”

For all the talk of Democratic strength on kitchen table issues (I dare you to find a clip from a Sunday show that doesn't have a Democrat saying, "at the end of the day, it's about the issues the American people care about") the facts on the ground are less favorable to the party of Four of Five Experts Agree.

Here in Kentucky, [defeated state auditor Adam] Edelen called the debate over Mr. Obama “yesterday’s conversation.” The problem for Democrats in Middle America, he said, is that the party is “perceived to be elite” — a perception he said the president had helped foster — and is “not speaking to blue-collar, middle-class aspirations.”

Elite alone is not the problem.

Elite and less than effective is.

IT TAKES MORE THAN POWDERMILK BISCUITS.

Those, supposedly, gave shy persons the strength to do what needed to be done.  Or something like that.  Garrison Keillor got boring about thirty years ago.  In asserting "The Defective Mentality of Safe Spaces" Jeffrey T. Brown reminds readers of the folly of running to a safe space.

Serious people get up each morning, worried about how they are going to meet their obligations, pay their bills, and do all that needs to be done. They see the trajectory of our culture, controlled by lunatics and mental patients, as it plunges off the cliff because it is not driven by serious people who live in the real world of cause-and-effect.

Thus, Mr Brown suggests, since the academic left has broken faith with mainstream America, it is best that mainstream America break the academic left.

Before we can defend ourselves from external threats, we must first defeat the Americans who have worked so hard to destroy what they hate: the freedom to reject them and their world of make-believe. As the most unserious people ever to show themselves on history’s stage, they fight to destroy the culture that permits them to believe whatever defective thing they wish. If we do not fight and defeat them first, there won’t be anything left of America to defend when the wars come, internal or external, as Obama has ensured they will.

America is at its best when it is led by serious and determined realists. The world is an unforgiving place, and the childishness of the left, politically and culturally, has sown the seeds of a future of hardship, sacrifice and loss. Eventually the piper must be paid. We have no time for whiners and babies, demanding as delusional adults that we listen to their foolishness and pretend it’s serious. It is better that we re-enter the world of cause-and-effect on our own terms because we must, rather than to have that time chosen for us by serious people who have never indulged fantasy and the tender feelings of malformed adults masquerading as children. The world does not recognize safe spaces. The more we pretend, the less safe we get.

Indeed.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

A year ago, the University of Missouri's football program epitomized indulged players and rape culture.

Following the second major report this year about the failure of the Missouri football team and the athletic department to properly respond to a series of sexual assault allegations, perhaps someone should ask: Why does Mike Alden, athletic director at Missouri since 1998, still have a job?

Because he's good at shaking the money tree.

He has raised a substantial amount of money to renovate the football stadium, which the site assures us "will make the home of Tiger Football one of the finest in America."

What Alden's bio fails to mention is he has also overseen a series of failures when it comes to how his department has handled off-field issues with players, specifically from the basketball and football teams when it involves violence against women.

And the article puts head football coach Gary Pinkel squarely in the Feldwebel Hans Schultz field manual for handling adverse news.

Pinkel said, "if [the police] don't charge him, how am I supposed to, unless there's other circumstances or things I know, that's happened before." Alden, for his part, said he was simply ignorant of Title IX regulations: "But back in 2008, I was not aware of those types of procedures and how they took place on campus."

For a lower-tier bowl bid, I vill do an-y-tink!  That was not good enough for Vice Sports's Jessica Luther, a year ago.

Let me suggest an idea in the case of Missouri: firing Mike Alden. They should fire him and make it clear that they are doing so because of how poorly he has handled this exact same issue over many years, and how his poor handling of it has led to a culture where women are harmed, but many don't want to say anything.

Today, though, it's not the eligibility-studies courses or the comfort women or the coarse behavior. No, the scholarship athletes are enshrined in the Civil Rights Pantheon, right there with the Greensboro lunch counter men and the Vietnam War mobilization.

According to The Columbia Missourian, just 7 percent of the overall student body is black, but nearly half of the football team is (60 of 124 players). This likely contributes to a distance between black athletes and “regular” students. What’s more, this disparity can result in a sort of cognitive dissonance for black athletes, who possibly have experienced discrimination directly or have friends who have, and whose talents generate millions of dollars for an institution that ignores those problems.

“In the past, the ability of mostly white head coaches and administrators to get their mostly black athletes to see themselves as separate from the larger university community often kept wider issues that affect black Americans from disrupting the system,” wrote William Rhoden, a reporter for The New York Times.

Thus, when some football players threatened not to play until university president Tim Wolfe left, the risk of having to make good on guarantees to upcoming opponents concentrated his mind, and he left.  (The right side of social media lights up with comments to the effect that he told the loonies, OK, take it.)  Here's Philip Bump in the Washington Post, on why the dissidents on the team finally pushed the president out.

The football team was already embarrassing the university, but threatened economic damage as well. The operating budget for the school in 2014-2015 anticipates $1.19 billion in revenue and $1.16 billion in costs. The $84 million generated by all of the schools' sports programs is 7 percent of that revenue total — and it's safe to say that football is a lot of that $84 million.

The "embarrassment" Mr Bump refers to is this year's won-loss record, not the previous years of sexual assault investigations.  And Missouri's sports program is, according to a USA Today analysis, generating an operating surplus.  (There's not enough detail in that article, or here, for me to identify unspecified institutional support, such as financing athletic facilities with tax-preferred state bonds.)  Thus, Mr Bump goes on to observe, disaffected football players have the kind of power to withdraw their labor power that Karl Marx or John L. Lewis would envy.  Let the ruling classes tremble!

The fight at the University of Missouri reveals that the football team even at a less-lucrative school can exert significant political power. Which should make the administrations at those more-lucrative schools awfully nervous.

But there is the opportunity Mr Wolfe missed. Ben Shapiro argues, "Time to Cut College Football."

The university could have revoked athletic scholarships or fired the coach. Their only job, after all, is to play football. But then we wouldn’t get to see the big BYU game on Saturday.

College athletics were never meant to override the central purpose of the universities: education.

Thus, a Missouri, or a Brigham Young, wallflowers at the Big Dance and yet in the building, would be an excellent Patient Zero for using the protest as a reason to opt out of the positional arms race in football.  No more eligibility studies courses.  Less reason to have probation officers and publicists around to deal with the "off the field issues."  No reason to procure young women to entice recruits.  That would be a house-cleaning far more disruptive than simply dismissing the coach for a poor record and the players for conduct unbecoming.

And it might buck up presidents, provosts, and treasurers all over the Mid-American Conference, where the explicit subsidies from students make the football possible, despite student discontent with the mandatory fees to support teams that only rarely get in the building, and where a bowl invitation is a way of losing even more money.

Yes, Missouri would take stick for seizing the opportunity to leave the football arms race, but that would be a different order of suffering than the beating it's taking for letting the most aggravated in the professional protest constituencies push it around.

THE SAECULUM SIDE OF HISTORY.

In The Nation, John Feffer's Splinterlands 2050 might be a way of advising thinkers of the left that the Hegelian dialectic is one working hypothesis. But working hypotheses have to pass some kind of falsifiability tests, and here comes the surprise.

The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.

The leaders of these movements—Donald Trump in the United States, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French National Front Party leader Marine Le Pen, Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to name just a few—were not members of a single party. They did not consider themselves part of a single movement. Indeed, they were quite skeptical of anything that smacked of transnational cooperation. Personally, they were cosmopolitans, comfortable in a variety of cultural environments, but their politics were parochial. As a group, they heralded a change in world politics still working itself out 35 years later.

Gee, you think years and years of the vanguard's experiments against reality wouldn't have provoked somebody to ask questions?  That, and years of mau-mauing people for being xenophobic fails to have much force, when actually existing people have to interact with actually existing Moslems?  The generalization to campus "diversity" measures leading to more friction is left as an exercise.  And does it come as a surprise that social solidarity works better within a family than without?

Let us also look forward to the day when social science carefully compares and contrasts market-based and kinship-based rules of allocation. I strongly suspect that the same ties that lead to kinship-based sharing also lead to what the identity politics crowd calls "othering" (presumably one of the lines of attack for deconstructing bourgeois norms.)

Advantage, Cold Spring Shops. But at least the self-styled progressives are thinking about it.

What no one anticipated was the impact climate change would have on nationalism. But how else would people divvy up increasingly precious natural resources? National sentiment proved to be the go-to principle for determining what “our” people deserved and those “others” didn’t. As a result, instead of becoming an atavistic remnant of another age, nationalism has proved to be this century’s most potent ideology. On an increasingly desperate planet, we face not the benevolence or tyranny of one world, but the multiple confusions of many worlds.

Duh. Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please, and you don't go far wrong starting with the premise that people will act in what they perceive to be their best interests. To the vanguard, though, there's still the illusion of the Power of Collective Action.

We have been fragmenting at precisely the time when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets acting alone.

Yeah, that collective action worked so well in the Great Power Saeculum, didn't it?

THAT IS WHY YOU FAIL.

Novelist John Atcheson begins a recent column like he's channelling "The Gods of the Copybook Headings."

The whole political scene looks like it came straight from the cult film, Idiocracy.

For those who aren’t familiar with Idiocracy, the movie depicts a society five centuries from now in which the average IQ has plummeted due to the breeding habits of the bright (very few kids, late in life), and the not-so-bright (many kids starting in their teens).  Combined with rampant commercialism, a dysfunctional government, and extreme anti-intellectualism, the world is crumpling, and people are facing starvation because one of the major corporations – Brawndo, the thirst annihilator – has convinced people to use it instead of water to irrigate crops.

Two average people from the early 21^st Century are marooned in this future dystopia when an experimental device built by – who else – the Defense Department – is lost in crimes and bureaucracy.

That gives him the chance to call for a plague on the establishments of the two major political parties.   His fix?  Straight "cult of the Presidency" with yet another Messiah.

What this country has desperately needed is a candidate who wouldn’t run a Brawndo election.  Who had a strong moral and ethical center, who has a long and consistent track record as a progressive, and who was willing and able to confront the idiocy that has taken over both Parties.  One who would call out Republicans on their failed policies, and the press on their reluctance to report the failures.  One who would challenge the Democratic Party to do more than mumble progressive sound-bites every 4 years and play corporate lackey in between.  One who would take on the moneyed interests not take money fromthem.

Incredibly, we have such a candidate in Bernie Sanders.  Just as incredibly, the Democratic Party is spending more time explaining why he can’t be elected than they are trying to get him elected.

And the oceans will stop rising, and the planet will begin to heal itself. Oh, wait.

Sheldon Richman points out that Senator Sanders is no socialist, not in the sense of public ownership and collective management, anyway, but that doesn't make him able to confront idiocies.

Sanders cannot or will not see that expanding the welfare/regulatory bureaucracy would not help those outside the ruling elite. Beefing up the state won't liberate us. Despite his intentions, Sanders is an unwitting defender of the status quo.

Where is the radical who will make the case for individual liberation and purely voluntary social cooperation through freed markets?

That, too, is the error of placing confidence in the presidency, because there are so many temptations to the man of politics to enjoy the bossing around of other people more than the freeing of them from the political masters.

Just under a year to run.

HAS IT BEEN FORTY YEARS?

Edmund Fitzgerald foundered with the loss of all hands on 10 November 1975.

Paul Michaels photograph.

Here is the Cold Spring Shops thirtieth anniversary post.  With the candidates' debate in Edmund Fitzgerald's home port of Milwaukee this evening, here is a list of the crew, perhaps I will be able to drink a toast to each crew member by hoisting one each time somebody says "at the end of the day."

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel column meditates on why the story continues to resonate with people, sometimes far beyond the Lakes.

Part of the persistence of the Edmund Fitzgerald in North American memory is that the wreck occurred in a period of relative shipping tranquillity on the Great Lakes. Maritime safety has come a long way since the installation of the first steam whistle on a ship in 1844 and Martha Coston's 1871 patent for maritime flares. Indeed, only 20 ships went down in the period between 1948 and 1975, and there hasn't been a major wreck since the Fitz.

With an early-November cyclone forming in the Rockies and heading this way (here's one from nine years ago), pray the iron boats continue to homeport safely.

Gordon Lightfoot's song probably contributes to the persistence of the story.

As he wrote the song, Lightfoot said, he "tried to be as accurate as possible." He took some license to make the song work. The ship didn't "head fully loaded for Cleveland;" it was bound for a steel mill near Detroit. The "old cook" in the song is actually 43-year-old Allen Kalmon of Wisconsin, the second cook, who filled in for the first cook, who was sick. And the Maritime Sailor's Cathedral is actually the Mariners' Church of Detroit.

Still, the song is remarkably detailed and on target, even to the point that five years ago Lightfoot changed the line about "a main hatchway caved in." After the wreck, a U.S. Coast Guard report concluded that ineffective hatch closures likely caused the sinking, but that has long been in dispute, and the singer decided to remove the implication that human error played a role.

Over the years, Lightfoot has gotten to know some of the loved ones of those who died, and has attended memorial services with them. It reinforced to him that while he had written a memorable song, it was about real grief and loss.

"There is a responsibility," he said.

Here's a subtitled version of the original setting.

This morning, the sexton did ring the bells in Detroit's Mariner's Church, as is the tradition.

PATHETIC

Michigan State's Elizabeth H. Simmons, currently a dean there, files her application for a similar post at Missouri or Yale by deansplaining the grievance lobby's assault on Hallowe'en.  Let's start here.

[I]t is incumbent on each of us to consider how our free speech may impact another’s life; so-called transgressive actions that attack other members of the community do not create a "safe space" for intellectual maturation; and a university should help all students recognize when a situation raises issues worthy of reflection and debate.

Fine, let's raise those questions when the transgressivity is of the approved kind, say, a confused young man using the ladies' bathroom, or the cutting edge artist mocking a religious icon.  Perhaps that sort of behavior is part of the sifting and winnowing by which knowledge advances.  Or perhaps it's somebody making a grab for attention.

Mightn't it be simpler to recognize in the first clause of the preceding run-on sentence the value of behaving like ladies and gentlemen?

And give the dean credit for at least recalling the role of academic inquiry.

Indeed, it reminds us of the university faculty’s unique role in supporting free intellectual inquiry and teaching students how to take part.

The essential responsibility of a university educator is to teach students to gather information, analyze it critically, reflect upon its larger meaning and use it to make a difference in the world. Our special role is to help students consider how they will navigate society as adults and to help them acquire the intellectual tools needed for that journey. This involves teaching students how to have tough conversations about sensitive issues in a spirit of respectful inquiry -- including discussions with those whose views they neither understand nor share.

To this end, we must show our students how to discern when a situation raises challenging intellectual or societal questions worthy of their consideration. While it is not our job to tell them what conclusions to draw about a particular Halloween costume, it is precisely our job to help them understand that they should give the matter serious thought.

Moreover, to prepare our students to take up the mantle of free speech and engage in vigorous public discourse on the issues of the day (including the impact of racist Halloween costumes on a community), we must teach them how do so in a manner that respects the right of others to join the debate.

But then comes the derailment.  Here comes the progressive intolerance, by which some views are not worthy of sharing or understanding, because privilege.

Similarly, faculty members who are accorded privilege by their race, gender, ability or other personal characteristics should make an effort to model inclusive principles for students, rather than relying on our colleagues from underrepresented groups to do so. We should show publicly that we are open to becoming more aware of the unearned benefits our majority status confers and to better understanding the ramifications for other community members. We can do this, for example, by reading some of the many books and blogs on these topics and by listening attentively when members of marginalized communities raise concerns -- even when the subject matter is painful to face.

"Unearned benefits" is the current sneer term that stands in for civilizing institutions, because any reference to civilizing institutions is micro-aggressive.  Or something.  Probably problematic.  Got news for you, Dean Wormer Simmons: your status as an academic officer at a highly-regarded state university is an inheritance from a civil society that established institutions of higher learning to gather, analyze, reflect, and use.  And the current crop of thought leaders in higher education are squandering that inheritance, and losing the goodwill of normal Americans.

Think "unearned benefits" are a burden?  Wait until higher education squanders all the goodwill, and future professors and deans have to earn it all back, ab intio.

Fortunately, there's plenty of pushback from readers, along the above lines, and other lines, in the comments.

NOTHING IS SACRED.

Trains and Travel report that Amtrak's breakfast menu has dropped the French Toast.  In favor of buttermilk pancakes.

Railroad French Toast has been a dining car tradition since who-knows-when and it is jolting to realize that someone in a position of authority at Amtrak actually thinks this is a good idea. Or, many times worse, could this possibly be another of the senseless and counter-productive cost-cutting measures undertaken in an effort to mollify the anti-Amtrak elements in Congress?

Yes, Railroad French Toast predates Amtrak, and there used to be regional variations in the railroads' recipes (yes, each dining department had its own recipes, and regional food items).  And cutting costs by antagonizing passengers doesn't seem like a sensible business strategy.

PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS.

What Thomas Sowell described as The Vision of the Anointed now becomes #liberalprivilege.  What both concepts share is self-congratulation as a flimsy foundation for policy.  Props to Kennesaw State sociologist Melvyn Fein, for fighting the good fight in the belly of the beast.

Liberals can destroy the economy, but hey, no one could have done better. They can undermine the national security, but at least they were showing the appropriate humility. They can drive their country into bankruptcy, but this only confirms their compassion.

Give Professor Fein props for privilege-checking the anointed.

Is this not privilege? Is it not a form of protection others do not obtain? Yet liberals consider it their due. They become huffy if their motives are questioned. Then they drive up truckloads of excuses they expect to be accepted without dissent. If this still doesn’t work, they attack their critics as playing politics (which, of course, they do not).

Nowadays, when publicly queried, liberals trot out focus group tested talking points. After this, they stonewall their questioner by changing the subject. But the full depth of their privilege is revealed when the public subsequently refuses to be outraged.

College Fix and College Insurrection picked up the column without further commentary. Perhaps in the past few days, though, as first Yale and then Missouri beclown themselves, there's a groundswell of public outrage against the privileges defenders of the dominant ethos in the academy have enjoyed.