GOING TO A SAFE SPACE TO ORGANIZE A NOISY PROTEST.

I can't make this stuff up.  Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro appears on a forum organized by the Madison chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, and his talk, "Dismantling Safe Spaces: Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings," set off the people who get off being set off.  Ann Althouse filed a dispatch.

It's not enough that the University of Wisconsin has antagonized the legislature with its defense of professorial privileges, now its assembly policies are under scrutiny.  This is Duey Strobel, a state senator, speaking.

As a taxpayer funded university, Madison should make efforts to have more events open to the public. It is important student organizations have the ability to – without cumbersome red tape – host events to include the public. Every time university officials lobby my office for more taxpayer resources, they argue how important the school is to the state. Student organizations should have the freedom – without fear of complaints – to create a larger discussion with the broader public community. The CfLI should dismiss this grievance as baseless. Complaints are not to be used as a weapon against organizations with different viewpoints.

Right Wisconsin, the intellectual home of #NeverTrump #NeverHillary in Wisconsin, has additional coverage, including video of the speech, the protest, (flip to page 2, it's two hours!) and the aftermath.

There's a fundraising request from the University of Wisconsin, and I suspect there will be another "I regret to inform you ..." letter.

Look, I really would rather post cheerful stories about the Green Bay Packers, but they're not cooperating.  More train stories at the weekend.

HOPING THE NEW PRESIDENT FAILS.

Rush Limbaugh got all sorts of grief for hoping that Mr Obama would not be able to implement his less incrementalist agenda, because what would happen next didn't look good.  "I hope he fails" can carry that message, or something else.

Now comes Michael Cohen, in Boston's Globe, hoping Mr Trump will fail, spectacularly.

[S]uccess for Trump would be a disaster for America. If his campaign promises are to be taken at face value, his success would mean that tens of millions of Americans may lose health care insurance. It would mean a step back on fighting climate change that could have a catastrophic, even apocalyptic effect on the planet. It would mean a shredded social safety net and little federal attention to voting restrictions and structural racism in America’s criminal justice system. It would mean global instability and a weakening of American’s leadership role in the world. It would mean acquiescence to an assertive Russia and a weakening of the international institutions that help to maintain global order. It would mean disastrous trade wars and a domestic agenda that would do more to harm the people who voted for Trump than help them. It would mean mass deportation — and a humanitarian catastrophe — for millions of undocumented immigrants.

That's why we have separation of powers. When Republicans in Congress resisted Mr Obama's policy proposals, that's not obstruction, that's attempting to mitigate a disaster.  Should Democrats in Congress resist Mt Trump's policy proposals, that's not obstruction, either.  It will help, though, if Democrats have something more substantive than "mean-spirited" or something ending in "-ist" or "-phobic" to their objections.

YIELDING TO CREATIVE DESTRUCTION.

Last weekend's Wall Street Journal included a full page "Notice to Readers" in the usual corporate style of spinning a degradation of service as an improvement of service.  (Call me cynical.  Cynical me has received enough proxy statements from mutual funds, fee schedules from banks and utilities, and clawbacks of frequent buyer benefits with such spin in them that he's justifiably cynical.)

"Next week we launch a sharper and more focused print newspaper.  This refreshed edition concentrates our unrivaled journalism into two core sections, Monday to Friday, for a smarter, more concise read."

Yes, and you reduce the two ounce candy bar to 1.6 ounces at the same price and call it diet-friendly.

David Warsh -- himself, I note, once in the employ of Boston's Globe -- takes a more charitable view.  (But if you want the whole piece, click now, his site has the annoying property of only showing his latest column.)

Newspapers exist to process and assess the rival claims of experts – politicians, governments, corporations, the professoriate, pollsters, authors, whistleblowers, filmmakers, and denizens of the blogosphere.  When its own claims to authority are misplaced – a spectacular example having been the Monday before the election, when newspapers were still expecting a Clinton victory – the print press and its kith and kin correct themselves (the next day) and investigate the prior beliefs that led them to error.  A free and competitive press resembles the other great self-correcting systems that have evolved over centuries – democracy, markets, and science.

Yes, the mugging by reality going on in the palace-guard media is refreshing.  But emergence is messy, and the downsizing going on in the free and competitive press is going to turn out the same way the downsizing in transportation and higher education and manufacturing has gone.

On the other hand, the new methods of circulating information (including disinformation, speculation, and gossip) are cheaper to produce, and they compete for eyeballs.  Perhaps the management of The Journal are responding to incentives.

That’s why the WSJ decision to cut back to from four to two daily sections is significant: it acknowledges the reduced but still very powerful claim of print on consumers’ ever-more stretched budget of time.

Or maybe the USA Today folks had the right idea thirty years ago: pithy and superficial sells.

For many years, newspaperfolk considered that their businesses were mostly exempt from the laws of supply and demand. Price cuts play a big part in the lore of its past. Today, the future of the industry depends on the recognition that price/performance is everything.

Exempt from the laws of supply and demand? Or was Milwaukee mayor Henry Maier also forty years ahead of his time, when he called the old Journal Company (morning Sentinel, afternoon Journal, WTMJ on AM 620 and Channel Four) a monopoly?

For my part, I have trouble squaring "reduced but still very powerful" with anything other than a reduction of service.  Compare taking the Cleveland to Chicago sleeper off the Empire State Express.

EARNING THEIR LARGE SALARIES.

I'm not sure when faculty or staff at Northern Illinois University last received a pay raise, or when an academic department was last authorized sufficient hires to enlarge its tenure-line faculty.

But there's plenty of money in diversity, and those directors of diversity sure have their work cut out for them.

Administrators stood in the MLK Commons handing chalk to passersby and encouraging them to write messages of happiness and unity.

The initiative, which took place Wednesday, was partially in response to the presidential election, which has struck fear into some members of the NIU community.

“Truly, really and truly, our students are all loved,” said Lisa Miner, director of Institutional Communications. “And we wanted to make sure that, now more than ever, that they know that.”

Miner, who wrote her own chalk messages, was among multiple administrators who participated in the initiative, including Chief Diversity Officer Vernese Edghill-Walden and Thomas Phillips, NIU chief of police.

I'm now retired, and don't pass through the commons that often, which is probably a good thing from the administration's perspective, as my message of happiness and unity would read #MAGA.

What is not so good, from the administration's perspective, is that my response to the annual fund drive (yes, they hit up retired professors, too) will read something like "I regret that I cannot contribute to the operation of a university that asks me for money whilst high-paid administrators have time to organize politically motivated chalkings in the tiny free speech zone."

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE CREW, THE BOAT, THE WIND, THE RACE COMMITTEE ...

Hillary Clinton blames the director of the FBI.

Clinton still thinks the email issue is bogus, even though she also thinks it cost her the election. On Saturday, according to the [New York] Times, Clinton said Comey's second letter, confirming his conclusion that there is no basis to prosecute her, was "even more damaging" than his announcement that the FBI had found more emails to examine, causing a last-minute drop in swing-state poll numbers. In other words, a conclusion that Clinton views as completely exonerating her was not perceived that way by voters. Evidently they did not agree with her that she should not be faulted for her recklessness and lies as long as her actions fell short of a felony.

That's a stretch, particularly for a supposedly experienced politician with the elite of spinners and the palace guard media to crap all over the story.

I had no reason to vote for Mrs Clinton: my reasons for not voting for her are the same as my reasons for not voting for Mr Obama, or Mr Kerry before him, or Mr Gore before him, or Mr Clinton ...

But even if you believe in unicorns, you might have reservations over having as your president someone who will attribute bad motives to those who vote against you.

Clip retrieved from NBC.

You might have reservations about somebody who conducted a joyless campaign.

Or you might have reservations about somebody who seemed more interested in scolding the people who supported her than in being their president.

Or perhaps the Black Swan has landed.

POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM FROM CULTURE.

I'm not sure about the policy implications in two recent essays, but the sentiments strike me as on point.  First, columnist Terry Jeffrey.

The ultimate question is not how a person will vote, but what will give them a fulfilling life. It is not what persons will hold political office in United States of America, but what values will keep us free and prosperous.

The same values that made this nation great can unite this nation again. They are family, faith, hard work and the desire to live a long and good life without government standing in your way.

Put another way, the Trump electoral victory looks a lot like the standard geographic pattern.

Among voters in urban areas, Clinton beat Trump 59 percent to 35 percent. But among voters in the suburbs, Trump beat Clinton 50 percent to 45 percent; and among voters in rural areas, he beat her 62 percent to 34 percent.

When voters move to the suburbs and the country, it hurts the liberal cause.

There are other subtleties, but those are for another post, after more information comes in.

Second, Commentary's Noah Rothman suggests it probably isn't useful for extremists to apply the label "extreme" to everything they disagree with.

America’s exceptionalism is founded, in part, upon its routinized politics. The standard deviation between Democratic and Republican administrations has traditionally been a modest one, and it is that predictability that makes America a safe investment and, thus, a prosperous society. Only when the left decides to stop demonizing those policies with which they disagree as beyond the bounds of acceptable American conduct will we see the true definition of the word “extreme” restored. That alone will not go toward sating the public’s desire to see a radical transformation of the political process regardless of the consequences to American stability, but it’s a start.

Yeah, that privilege-shaming and virtue-signalling has worked so well.

We have much to look forward to.

THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY IS KILLING THE REPUBLIC.

So I suggested, back in September when the conventional wisdom was Voters Had Enough, but somehow Hillary Clinton and a divided Congress was the most likely outcome.

Secular orders are emergent, and sometimes complex adaptive systems yield a black swan.  Or Donald Trump winning Pennsylvania.  Sorry, Tingles.

But Reason's Jacob Sullum asks a rude question that, well, deserves to be asked.  "Will a ridiculous president encourage Americans to take the presidency less seriously?"  He continues.

Trump will not be my president. But neither is Barack Obama, and neither were any of the eight other men who have occupied the White House since I was born.

The phrase "my president" smacks of subservience, as in "my liege," "my lord," or "mein führer." In our constitutional republic, the person selected for the job that Trump will assume on January 20 presides over the executive branch of the U.S. government, not over you or me.

Exactly. The president does not run the country. He does not run the economy. He does not run the government. His powers are checked by a Congress that has Article I powers.  "For those who see the president as a savior with the power to Make America Great Again, Trump's presidency will deliver a salutary lesson: Lower your expectations."  Perhaps what the failures of process-worship warped by Hope and Change could not do to The Cult of The Presidency, Celebrity Apprentice Goes to Washington can.

BE GRATEFUL IT WASN'T A ZAKAZUKHA.

The feel-good picture of Mrs Clinton walking her dog, that is.  "In the context of the media, the word 'pokazukha' is often applied to crude publicity stunts used to dupe or impress viewers of state-controlled TV."  Spot on, that.  The zakazukha is more pernicious.

The term "zakazukha" refers to a practice that became widespread in Russia in the 1990s of paying newspapers to publish tendentious articles. These would either praise the paymaster or his political or business associates, or else smear his opponents. For many Russian newspapers, these articles became a significant source of revenue.

The purely mercenary zakazukha is probably not as common today as it was ten years ago, but the practice of using the media to denigrate your political opponents is very much alive.

I was tempted to say something about the Democrat - Media - Entertainment complex, but in light of the events of last week, where Mr Trump finished his long march through the institutions, first taking down the Bush dynasty, then the Clinton dynasty, with her palace guard media paying for his promotions, maybe our establishment press aren't as good as the Russians.  (Sitting around in the early dark and playing chess might have something to do with that.)

But Charlie Sykes, yes, the Wisconsin-based organizer of the Never Trump movement, hoists a zakazukha warning over the Trumpening.

Rush Limbaugh has this line where he talks about the state-controlled media. We are now going to see what one really looks like in this country, where you are going to have this media network that will act like an echo chamber and an enforcer for somebody in power in the White House. You know that it will be deployed to attack and vilify other conservatives who might want to oppose Trump on initiatives.

It's Breitbart that Mr Sykes is referring to, although there's a Soviet era joke that will help. "Fairy tale used to begin, 'once upon a time.' Now it begins, 'Pravda says.'"

He continues.

All of that would be overwhelming, and it would also be intimidating. A lot of people I know in the media and in politics basically decided they were going to go along with Trump because it's just not worth it. It's just not worth the abuse you're going to get on social media. It's just not worth the kind of vilification you're going to get.

It's going to have a tremendous effect going forward, I think, on conservatives.

Get. A. Grip.  Use your medium to tell the truth about Barack Obama and the palace guard media will spin it in the worst possible way for however much of the viewing audience it still has; their epigones on CNN and MSNBC will find all the Geniuses who will Point Out The Errors; then the evening comedians will dial the ridicule up to Full Condescending Concern Trolling.

Use your medium to remind Donald Trump that Article I gives powers to Congress and Article II enumerates powers of a President and you cower in fear of a twitter-storm?  Mr Trump is not a libertarian conservative, not a constitutional conservative, not a cultural conservative, not a Chamber of Commerce conservative.  He will require support from interested people of those stripes.  But those people ought not rally to the support of, let alone remain silent in the presentation of, policies that they cannot agree with.  Particularly if it's out of fear of social media going crazy.  Social media is all about going crazy.  Consider the source.

DID THE WRITERS KNOW BROWN COUNTY DELIVERED THE DAGGER?

Last week's Saturday Night Live featured a skit with some serious privilege-checking.

[Dave] Chappelle played a guest at an election night party with a group of white people. The sketch perfectly captured the smug confidence that Hillary Clinton supporters in New York City felt, followed by the terror and crushing defeat they felt when Trump won. And, thanks to Chappelle and special guest Chris Rock, it was funny.

Enjoy the show.

"Yeah, the brothers dig the Packers!"

In the sketch above, when the white people are saying that this election loss makes them think America is suddenly racist, or when they say the election loss is the worst thing the country has ever done, Chappelle and Rock just look at each other and roll their eyes and laugh. Comedy is a great tool to gently push the point that melodrama of the past week is not perceived the same by everyone outside of certain echo chambers.

The coastal chin-pullers are discovering that Wisconsin votes matter.

[Mrs] Clinton herself never campaigned here during the general election, and [Mr] Trump deluged the airwaves with television advertising, which may have helped him secure the victory margin of less than 30,000 votes, state political analysts said. And, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, Trump made at least five visits to the state in the final three months of the campaign.

You'd think the coastal Smart People and the self-styled progressives would catch on.  For all the talk of a weak state economy, of union busting and recalls, of gutting the University of Wisconsin, of passing on the upgrade to the Hiawatha Service, of the strong economy and the emerging football team in Minnesota, it's Wisconsin that provides the intellectual ammunition for the Never Trump conservatives, plus enough oomph in the national party that Mr Trump has to bring the Wisconsin touch into his White House.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Janesville, is considered one of the party’s brightest young stars, and Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, grew up in Green Bay. Both chambers of the state legislature have Republican majorities, and the governor, Scott Walker, is a Republican.

Mr Priebus will be White House Chief of Staff. Mr Trump will have to make smart deals with Speaker Ryan.

PAPERS, PLEASE.

Kurt Schlichter's People's Republic is speculative fiction in which the Democrat-controlled states part ways with the Republican-leaning states.  Then the Democrat-controlled states collapse, or something.  But the Cause that Impelled the People to their Separation was ... Hillary Clinton becoming president.

That didn't turn out exactly the way anyone planned, did it?  Except California, Oregon, and Washington voted for Mrs Clinton and a lot of Democrats down-ballot, and the secession talk emanating from the people who don't live in Jesusland has resumed, with California, Oregon, and Washington first out.

Which provokes some speculation from Fred Frailey about international commerce on the rails.

Will the Republic of California have free and open borders with neighboring counties, including Mexico and the United States? Or will passengers aboard the California Zephyr and Southwest Chief and Sunset Limited be required to carry passports or, worse than that, be required to go to the California embassies and consulates in the U.S. to acquire visas for their passports? At the international frontiers west of Reno, Nev., and in Needles, Calif., and Yuma, Ariz., will there be gentle knocks on your bedroom door, as someone says, “Your passports, please”? Or will passengers have to disembark from the Amtrak trains and file through security?  I so hate those lines. . .

Freight traffic . . . oh wow! BNSF Railway is running some humongous doublestack trains these days. Will the boxes be carefully searched in both directions, and what impact will this have on the fluidity of both BNSF and Union Pacific train operations? This could consume hours or even days. The yards in Needles and Yuma aren’t much to speak of anymore, so some serious expansion of tracks would seem in order.

We already have overweening Federal officials conducting unreasonable searches on the Zephyr, the Sunset, and the rest.

As far as those stack trains?  With the enlargement of the Panama Canal, Jesusland (or is it The United States?) can resupply through New Orleans, while the hipsters on the west coast will have less congestion at the Ports of Seattle or Oakland or Los Angeles - Long Beach.

Did Mr Frailey have Mr Schlichter's Kindle opus in mind with that reference to People's Republic of California?

THE LUMP OF LABOR FALLACY.

Chicago Boy David Foster contemplates an Attack of the Job-Killing Robots.  Fordist production technologies, including the eNtrance - eXit interlocking machine, which obviated the muscles of the old-time leverman in the signal tower.  "Articles on the job elimination expected as a result of robots and artificial intelligences–and there seem to be dozens of such articles coming out every week—very rarely include any attempts to put current innovations in historical perspective."  There is always more work to be done than there are resources to do it: the challenge, the knowledge problem, if you will, is in discovering ways to do it.

POKAZHUKA.

Thursday last, NBC Nightly News signed off with an attempt at a feel-good story.  Young mom takes her baby outside for fresh air, encounters the former First Couple out walking the dog.  Mr Clinton takes a picture.

Cheer up, Face, the War is Over.

Retrieved from Twitchy on 12 November.

But it may be another Palace Guard Media setup.  Twitchy reports that the mom's social media feed no longer includes the picture, and the closing segment is not available on Nightly's basket of highlights for 10 November.

As if the Democrat - Media - Entertainment Axis hasn't given normal Americans reason enough to hate them already.  From the left, Neal Gabler fears that the media part will cave.  "With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics."  In Mr Gabler's world, the shelling the Phony Press took from Mr Trump came from softening up by the usual suspects.  "Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them."  Yes, and Mr Sykes's show gets a lot of mileage from the failure of the zanies running the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (once part of the same corporate family as his WTheMilwaukeeJournal radio station) to perform as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers.  The heart of the matter, Mr Gabler, is here.  "Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process."

Perhaps it's not too late for people of the left to rediscover the bourgeois conventions their thought leaders have been mocking, deconstructing, interrogating, and otherwise destroying over the past fifty years.  It won't come too soon for Trump Nation.

It figures that another part of the NBC octopus would marinate in the smug.  That set Town Hall's Bryan Crabtree off.

MSNBC was proud to report that Trump won 76% of counties with a Cracker Barrel and 22% of counties with a Whole Foods grocery store. This is code for “the dumb people in America voted for Trump and us smart people get a pass for being wrong.”

To infer [c.q.] that the ‘Cracker Barrel crowd’ is any less relevant to our country is no different than asserting someone has less relevance because of their race, religion or national origin. It's bigoted and it should not be indulged. I’m not offended by it and I’m certainly not angry like many of the petulant children who we've seen rioting and protesting in the streets because they don't like the outcome of our democratic process.

We'll get back to the petulant children in time. (How fitting is it that the symbol of a safe space last week was a safety pin? Conjures up images of diapers, doesn't it? Thought so.)

First, though, Mr Crabtree's connections to Cracker Barrel.

I know the ‘Cracker Barrel crowd.’ It’s called “my family.” I grew up in middle Tennessee working for the company that manufactures all the rocking chairs at the Cracker Barrel's across America. In fact, it was my first job and it was the hardest work I've ever done.

On any given day, many of my close and extended family may eat at Cracker Barrel. They are what we call ‘the silent majority.’ They go to church on Sunday, they save for retirement, they teach their kids morals/values and they give to charity. They don't like confrontation or conflict and they rarely like discussing politics (with outsiders) because they don't want extra strife in their life. They want to live humbly and peacefully in a free nation and enjoy their life without extensive government or outside interference.

They are disgusted by the direction of this nation. They don't hate anyone and they certainly don't feel that they are ‘better’ than anyone else.

He says "silent majority," I say "normal Americans." And those social justice warriors trashing neighborhoods in the remaining Democrat outposts such as Portland, Chicago, Milwaukee?

The advice of Gen^l Sherman to a social justice warrior of his day is something today's social justice warriors ought consider.

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

I hope it does not come to war, but if it should, all the social media presence and all the ability to brew overpriced coffee and quote Marx or Foucault will be for naught.  As will the ability of the Democrat - Media - Entertainment Complex to appeal to the better angels of our nature.

It may only be the forbearance of Normal Americans that is providing the crazies with a safe space.  Back to Mr Crabtree.

The infinite wisdom and patience of the ‘Cracker Barrel crowd’ to endure the Obama presidency, the developing civil unrest in our nation and the degradation of our leadership and economic authority in the world - is staggering.

They are not simple in purpose even if they may appear simple (to some) as people.

We can learn from them. They have been silent and humble for years in cultural defeat and they have remained silent and humble even in victory.

But even a sleeping bear can be roused to anger.

HOW THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKED OUT.

Not well, suggests V. D. Hanson, whether for the country or for the Democrats who pushed it.

Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with both houses of Congress, two likely Supreme Court picks, and the good will of the nation. By 2010 he had lost the House; by 2012, the Senate. And by 2016, Obama had ensured that his would-be successor could not win by running on his platform.

A failed health care law, non-existent economic growth, serial zero interest rates, near record labor non-participation rates, $20 trillion in national debt, a Middle East in ruins, failed reset and redlines, and the Iran deal were albatrosses around Democratic Party’s neck. Obama divided the country with the apology tour, the Cairo Speech, the beer summit, the rhetoric of disparagement (“you didn’t build that,” “punish our enemies,” etc.), the encouragement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a series of anti-Constitutional executive orders.

In other words, even as Obama left the Democrats with ideological and political detritus, he also had established an electoral calculus built on his own transformative identity that neither had coattails nor was transferrable to other candidates. Indeed, his hard-left positions on redistribution, social issues, sanctuary cities, amnesty, foreign policy, and spending would likely doom candidates other than himself who embraced them.

We'll be taking a closer look at where the remaining Democrats in Congress hail from, and what is in ruins there, in the next few days.  We shall see about Mr Hanson's prognostications.

It is now a municipal party. It has no real power over the federal government or state houses. Its once feared cudgel of race/class/gender invective has become a false wolf call heard one too many times. The Sanders-Warren branch of the party, along with the now discredited Clinton strays, will hover over the party’s carcass. Meanwhile, President Obama will likely ride off into the sunset to a lucrative globe-trotting ex-presidency. His executive orders will systematically be dismantled by Donald Trump, leaving as his legacy a polarizing electoral formula that had a shelf life of just two terms.

I note only that in my lifetime, the Democrats have been written off at least twice before (1968 - 1972 and 2004), as have the Republicans, thrice (1964, 1974 - 1978, 2006 - 2008.) Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

THE CASE FOR VOTING.

Better this way, than with pitchforks, torches, tar, feathers, pikes, tumbrels, and the odd diseased yak lobbed over the city walls.

Let us continue.

RETHINK THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY.

Betsy Newmark's morning roundup includes a lot of the early reactions to Dewey Defeats Truman, er, Clinton Defeats Trump.  She's in about the same place I am.

While I was a #NeverTrumper, I am enjoying the downfall of Hillary Clinton. She is a low, despicable woman and got what she deserved. And how typical that she wouldn't come out last night to thank her supporters and give a gracious concession speech. It just isn't in her make-up.

Yes, the Democrats could have found a symbol with the voice and stage presence of a leading lady from the Golden Age of the Talkies, a first class temperament, and an international reputation for probity at the bar, and that would likely have been enough.  But the whole symbolic politics thing is a distraction.  Does it matter if the sanctimonious technocrat with an excessive faith in Governance by Wise Experts and a willingness to be soft on foreign enemies is named Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or Al Gore or John Kerry or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?  No.  It's the Governing Habit that is in error.  Back to Betsy's Page.

While President Obama will probably blame the loss on Hillary, at some point he and his party need to look at what has happened to them since his Hope and Change victory in 2008. They lost both houses and many legislatures and governorships across the land. And despite all of his and Michelle's frantic campaigning around the country, they couldn't drag Hillary across the finish line even against Donald freakin' Trump! Obama's record of never being able to help elect anyone besides himself continues.

And now all those executive orders that he signed and his bragging about what he could do with his pen and his phone without Congress are at risk of being turned back by a President Trump. Just as the Senate Democrats set future landmines with getting rid of the filibuster so that Republicans will now be able to set about getting their nominees on the courts, he set similar road bombs by how blasted through the checks and balances of our system. I despised what Obama did to the Constitutional order as president. I don't want a President Trump to follow that model. I would prefer for a return to regular order in both Congress and among the branches of government. I have no faith, however, in Donald Trump's understanding or respect for our Constitutional system.

The good news is that in getting to the White House, Mr Trump has given the leaders of his party in Congress reason to check him.  To get the repeal of Hillary Care through the House, he's going to have to work with a Speaker he has referred to as a loser.  Imagine, dear reader, if the appropriation bill for The Great Wall doesn't get out of the Rules Committee because a coalition of the Hispanic Caucus and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans won't vote it out.  In the Senate, he's going to have to make great deals with the just re-elected "Little Marco" Rubio and "Got Captured" John McCain, plus among the senior leadership there's "Lyin' Ted" Cruz and "Crazy Bernie" Sanders.  And politicians, unlike businessmen, are quicker to bruise and slower to heal.

Here's Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review, recognizing that a president's Article II powers are checked by the Article I powers of Congress.

Obama failed. He is a failed president. This is his successor? We knew that Obama couldn’t sell anything but himself, but we didn’t realize how much that was true. Nor did we realize how much the Democrats’ coalition was really a transient Obama coalition; how unpopular Obamacare was; or how bad an idea it was to run a candidate as damaged as Hillary.

I am on the record as being opposed to Donald Trump, and I shall likely stay that way. But I have two hopes. The first is that he proves me wrong. The second: That the disgraceful progressive moment, which has spent years trying to dissolve the Madisonian system of checks and balances, will come finally to its senses. I cannot say I hold out much hope that, culturally, we will go from “opposition is racist” to “opposition is virtuous” in the space of just two months. But perhaps we will. Perhaps now separation of powers will be seen as a good thing. Perhaps now those who advocate it will be cast as something other than revanchists. Perhaps now Chris Hayes will realize — urgently — that “if Congress won’t act, I will” is not remotely acceptable.

Chris Hayes is young. Old bull Lawrence O'Donnell apparently is catching on.  "The Founding Fathers anticipated Donald Trump. They feared tyrants, they were overthrowing the rule of a king, and they designed a separation-of-powers government in which all of the true powers belonged to Congress, those can then be reviewed by the courts..."

As far as "opposition is virtuous," we'll likely see a reprise of "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."  Which it is, and if the Donks had listened to the dissent on the health insurance reforms and the stimulus, they might not be in the place they find themselves today.

IT DIDN'T START WITH DONALD TRUMP.

Count David Brooks among the shell-shocked.

We like to think of democracy as a battle of ideas and a process of individual deliberation, but this year demography has been destiny. The campaigns have pushed us back into our tribal bunkers. Americans now seem more clannish, and more incomprehensible to one another.

Politics is downstream from culture. Celebrate a trashy, splintery culture long enough, all will be trash and splinters.

While you were admiring the crease of Mr Obama's trousers, Mr Brooks, signs of unraveling were there if you'd but open your eyes.

The moral health of the polity is in even scarier shape. Any decent society rests on codes of etiquette and a shared moral ecology to make cooperation possible, to prevent economic and political life from descending into a savage war of all against all.

Codes of etiquette and a shared moral ecology?  Otherwise known as stifling bourgeois norms, or as narratives to be interrogated and deconstructed?  Have fun navigating the wreckage.

It wasn't Mr Trump who put sneer quotes around words like truth and fact.

With his constant, flagrant and unapologetic lying, he has shredded the standards of intellectual virtue — the normal respect for facts and truth that makes conversation possible. With his penchant for cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, selfishness and even his primitive primate dominance displays, he has shredded the accepted understandings of personal morality that prevent the strong from preying on the weak.

If Mr Trump isn't an Old White Guy, might his "primitive primate dominance displays" be hailed as authentic?  Mr Brooks, without the proper moral foundations for a common culture, a third political party for alienated Democrats and Republicans -- there are plenty of both types today -- is just more "whatever, dude."

Last week Thursday, Chris Matthews brought on Andrew Sullivan, who, when he's not obsessing over Trig Palin's parentage, can come up with insightful stuff.  He ... almost alone, among the usual suspects on MSNBC, anticipated a Trump win, and here's his take on the identity politics that midwived it.

SULLIVAN: And the left is partly responsible. The left has promoted identity politics for a generation. They`ve said all that matters is what you are, whether you`re a Latino, whether you`re black. And now, white people are saying, well, we can play that game, too. And that`s what`s fueling Trump –

More precisely, the identity politics left has been making the simple complicated, dragging in the multiple oppressions of race, class, gender, there may be more these days.  Too often, though, it's not to make an intellectual argument, rather it's to enable difference and call it authenticity or transgressivity or something.  But when white folks dealing with the oppressions of class or gender get upset, that's a temper tantrum.  Or deplorable.  (To Mr Matthews's credit, he's been digging for root causes.)

THE PERFECT EPITAPH FOR THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY.

Canada’s Immigration Site Crashes as Liberals Panic.

Fitting, since the first of the many failures of Obama Care (which used to be Hillary Care) involved a website.  Perhaps, somewhere in the exit polling, there are correlations of "received a bill from the state exchange" or "got the details of my employer's latest plan" with "voted Republican."

TWEAKING THE SELF-SELECTION CONSTRAINTS.

In the course of a meditation on the Viewliner dining cars, Travel and Trains's Jim Loomis diverts into the arcana of pricing to encourage self-selection.

Amtrak marketing people may indeed have been right—at least in one context—to take the diner off of the Silver Star and having passengers pay for their food in the café car on that train.

I was toying with the idea of taking the train from Washington to Jacksonville following NARP’s April meeting and compared fares for the Meteor and the Silver Star on the day I would be traveling. If I chose the Meteor, a dinner and a breakfast would be included in my fare . . . but the cost differential was $156.

That was a moment-of-truth for me, at least as far as this specific issue is concerned. I would be in a Viewliner sleeping car on either train. And so it all boiled down to this: Was I willing to pay $156 in additional fare for one dinner and one breakfast in an Amtrak dining car?

I thoroughly enjoy the dining car experience and I look forward to every meal when I’m traveling on one of Amtrak’s long-distance trains. So much so that, yes, I would be willing to pay more for that experience. But $156 more? I’m afraid not.

It’s a unique situation with the Silver Service, of course, because there are two overnight trains running on almost the same route. But give the marketing guys their due: the no-diner option does seem to be working.

To succeed, a second-degree price discrimination must make the bundle of service offered attractive to the segment of the market the management intends to serve, and unattractive to other segments.  (Here's a long-winded elaboration.) With two bundles, it's relatively simple: price the more attractive bundle high enough that some consumers will forgo it, and make the less attractive bundle sufficiently unattractive that other consumers will pay the higher price to use the more attractive bundle.  That's a problem older than railroading: stagecoach passengers paid more to ride inside than outside, and the way the early passenger railroads extracted premium fares was to offer seating in gondola cars at a low price and seating in enclosed cars with windows at a higher price.  The people making do on /6d a day would not pay the high fare, and the carriage trade (see where that term came from, kiddies) would not ride outdoors simply because all the seats got to the station at the same time.   That's how incentive compatibility works.  It may be the famous Walter Bagehot himself reflecting on the pricing and the quality of service, and the necessity of an Act of Parliament stipulating conditions of carriage in Third Class.  (Jules Dupuit also got in on the action, are there any historians of economic thought lurking?)

But tweaking the bundles and the fares is complicated: so much in the UK that eventually Second Class disappeared, and Third became Standard.

But Amtrak now run sleeping cars and Business Class on the tri-weekly Cardinal, a reversion to the old forms?  Larger airplanes may have a Deluxe section, a Business section, and a Steerage section.    One of the British train operating companies proposed to offer three classes of service, and look at this bit of angry consumer advocacy.

If we have first class for the better off in society, anything below that should surely be second class, reserved for society’s riff-raff, unless there’s no room for first class passengers. Theoretically, this could cause a problem because if second class passengers had to move, where would they go? To my mind, it’s simple: re-introduce third class travel.

This might actually encourage more ordinary working class people to use trains. The new coaches could be “low cost”. No need to bother with seats, or even a roof. There must be hundreds of old coal trucks which are no longer in use. Why don’t First give them a quick power wash and attach them to the back of their geriatric fleet of HSTs?

Each time I travel by train, after taking out the necessary overdraft, I am reminded of the class divide that still exists. Not long ago, I travelled on the London to Paddington line and had to stand for much of the way. This was not exactly what I had hoped for given the amount of money I was handing over to First’s gleeful shareholders, but needs must. Having squeezed my way from one end of the train to the other, I found two first class coaches, populated between them by around six people. The number soon became around five people as the guard made his ticket check and found someone who had tired of standing all the way and rested his weary body on one of the many empty seats. The guard was not amused, first demanding that the man move immediately and then threatening to throw him off the train and even be arrested.

Amidst the griping, there's one missed opportunity ... the guard (conductor) didn't use the occasion of the empty space in First to sell upgrades.  Pullman conductors and porters made an art of that, keeping track of who was off where, who was going to the dining car, and could get upwards of forty people into a 28 seat parlor car, with The Pullman Company pleased with the revenue, and the satisfied passengers bestowing generous tips on the railroad men.

CHANGE YOUR FOCUS, CHRIS.

Last week, I alluded to a Chris Matthews coda to Hardball that took seriously the discontent driving the Donald Trump insurgency.  Go to Cleveland, conclude some terms with a couple of train firms, stoke up on Hungarian Hot Dogs, come home, and check the archives.  Paydirt.

Six days to go to the election, I find it important how close this election is drawing. Not close enough for Donald Trump to win, I remain convinced, but enough for the ruling class to pay attention. By that I mean the people who think they have it all together and think the regular people out there should leave them to run the show, letting them continue to alternate Democrats and Republicans, one party replacing the other in the revolving door of routine establishment politics.

You have a platform, Mr Matthews. Why not, once the votes are counted and the electors' reports certified, be a prototype of paying attention?  For instance, identify some interesting local developments and some up-and-coming young reporters and give the issues and the reporters a platform.  James Fallows has been out on the road, and the good news is that not all the news is bad.  Maybe there's something involving school choice in Rockford or Section Eight housing in Dubuque or economic development on the reservations that doesn't rely on casinos and the attendant hotels and eateries or mass transit in Phoenix and Salt Lake City ... any of which, Mr Matthews, is likely something you might not know, and that more than a few of your viewers don't know.  That would be a refreshing change of pace from the usual suspects beginning their handicapping of the 2020 race.

If this election is close, if Donald Trump carries big states like Ohio and Florida, if he comes within a couple of states of winning the presidency, if someone carrying his trainload of baggage is able to seriously challenge someone with Hillary Clinton`s resume, it`s an election for the record books. The people of this country will have spoken very loudly, so loudly even a deeply flawed candidate like Trump gets hoisted up all the way to 40 percent, that means he could have won this thing without all that baggage he`s accumulated year by year.

If he could manage in one year of campaigning to get close to winning after all those years of behaving like he did, it tells you something about the power of his message. I believe he was on to something in this race. I believe that half the people in this country maybe more have had it with establishment elite politics. They`re tired the of the same best and brightest who took us into Vietnam, went for broke there and then come back to take us into Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and God knows what next desert war.

They`re tired of watching whole wastelands of this country where manufacturing once was king or the government to establish an honest immigration policy all Americans would be proud to see work. They`re tired of the elite making decisions or failing to make them and dump everything on the working people. The ill-conceived wars, the global economics that destroys so many local economies, an immigration flow that affects where working people live, leaves the elite to live where it has the least possible impact.

The first paragraph invokes Mrs Clinton's resume. The second paragraph lists the action items on her resume. The third paragraph gets to the heart of Mr Trump's appeal.  If you agree with the wall and a different approach to waging war and a more protectionist trade policy, the locker room talk is irrelevant.

And Chris, there is so much more to add to that recitation of government failures.  Urban renewal.  Conrail.  The so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Its undoing is in progress.  You've been in the political punditry business for a long time.  Set an example.  Pay attention to that discontent.  Call out the elites.  Stop sitting around under pictures of Washington landmarks participating in the Cult of the Presidency.  I repeat: focus on something else for the next three years.

If Trump comes close, if he gets a popular vote in the mid-40 percent, the ruling class ought to note the percent he got, not the percent he came short because that 40 percent could soon be looking angrier and for a leader, even stronger.

Perhaps, Chris, more diverse as well.  The Chicago Cubs just celebrated a World Series win.  The despair, and the carnage, elsewhere in Chicago continues.  The elite live east of Wrigleyville or along the lake or near the Magnificent Mile or the Loop, including, for whatever it's worth, in Chicago's Trump Tower.  Go south from Wrigleyville to Printers Row in the South Loop, and east to the lake, you have what, fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World.  How long can the Democratic part of that bicoastal, bipartisan elite sustain that coalition?

We still transfer power with ballots and ceremonies.  The militias await.  Or the pitchforks, torches, tar, feathers, pikes, tumbrels, and the odd diseased yak lobbed over the city walls.

ABOLISH CHIVALRY, ABOLISH GENTLEMEN.

How bizarre is the idea that chivalry is the othering of women?  So bizarre that when metrofexual soccer players at Harvard start down the path to emulating the entitled gladiators of the SEC, the best Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan can do is toss off some puns and move on.  But there's substance among the puns.  "[T]he eyes of the nation must as one swivel to Cambridge, and everyone must feign astonishment that a country whose incoming president compulsively grabs pussy also contains high-SAT men who consider women animated vaggies."  Astonishment?  Not here.  Create a culture with no norms, don't be surprised when you get rating schemes, perhaps as a prelude to compulsive grabbing.

Friday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment to the Harvard "on a scale of one to ten" story.  His focus is on the more recent developments in education, wherein the "toxic masculinity" has to be cast out of the boys.  Thus in Mr Limbaugh's take, the lads' rating scheme is simply an upraised middle finger to the Powers that Be.

Boys have been raised to believe that in their natural state, they're unacceptable. They are predators; they are potential rapists; they are rough, insensitive, selfish, all of these things, as defined by women.  So the chickfication of the education system -- and there's no other word for it. All it means is that women now dominate positions of power in education, and they have done their best to redefine masculinity.

Those women, whether they hold such positions or not, are dealing with the consequences of an earlier effort to redefine masculinity.  Yeah, I'm still fighting the culture wars of the early 1970s, when bourgeois was a dirty word, but that, ultimately, is the ground to be taken.

National Review's David French gets it.

I’m one of those crazy, dangerous, religious nutjobs who believes that sexual activity should be reserved for a lifelong covenant marriage between husband and wife. Moreover, my clearly insane and oppressive beliefs are grounded within a cohesive worldview that asks its adherents to flee from temptation, treat each and every person as a child of God created in His image, and refrain from actions such as drunkenness that impair moral judgment.

Harvard and its morally bankrupt secular peers encourage the polar-opposite worldview. From the moment their young, hormonal students set foot on campus, they’re encouraged to obsess about sex. Free condoms are available by the armload. From Thursday to Sunday, thousands of students drink themselves into literal stupors. And all the while they seek hookups and one-night-stands by, yes, rating appearance on apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr. Students are encouraged to question and defy virtually every element of traditional, religious moral teaching. Indeed, they’re taught that such teachings are oppressive and malicious.

In other words, these colleges intentionally replace Judeo-Christian morality with a bizarre form of quasi-puritanical libertinism that defies everything we know about human nature. The libertinism is obvious. You see it all around you on campus. The puritanism comes later, dropping like a hammer on those people who transgress the shifting, arbitrary moral codes that purport to place boundaries around the bacchanal. These schools beg students to play with fire, then come flying in with fire extinguishers only after someone gets thoroughly burned.

Borrowing again from an old New York Times editorial, "We want and deserve trashy relationships in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."  Also at National Review, Mene Ukueberuwa concurs in part with Mr Limbaugh while suggesting that deconstructing chivalry is a bad idea.  Main message: "The problems emerging from today’s stripped-down sense of masculinity are grave."  The outlines of the old evolutionary stable strategy are still there.

An alternative approach to this one has managed to endure — at least through its continuing practice in millions of American households (if not in the words of gender-studies professors and magazine think pieces). In this approach, it is presumed that most attitudes that we associate with maleness emerge from the essence of the men who possess them, and as such, should be nurtured and trimmed to grow into habits that are deeply decent . . . and yet still distinctly male.

Dissident feminist Christina Hoff-Sommers extends.  Because it's a Vox interview, the presidency intrudes, but focus, dear reader, on the structure.

I don’t think he conforms to conventional masculinity. Trump is a reminder of what masculinity can be like outside of conventions. He exhibits what might be called amoral masculinity.

He lacks a moral compass. He ridicules, bullies, and threatens anyone who crosses him. He insults war heroes and disparages entire ethnic groups. He preys on women. All of this without any apparent remorse.

This is very different from the honorable style of manliness shown by say, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, or Barack Obama. These were and are highly assertive men, and aggressive when circumstances warranted, but who were also decorous and honorable; in a word, gentlemen. History teaches us that masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and that masculinity without ethics is dangerous.

Put another way, Messrs. Roosevelt, Reagan, and Obama understood what being a gentleman entailed.  It's precisely the absence of convention that lets the lechers redefine what a male leader looks like.

CHECK OUT THOSE PRESIDENTIAL BUNS.

Behave yourselves.  It's become a tradition for aspirants to the Oval Office to sign a weenie bun at Tony Packo's Cafe in Toledo.

Doesn't hurt the bun-signing tradition that Ohio has been a contested state for some time.

I stopped there to satisfy the inner man en route from a successful train-buying excursion to Cleveland.  (Yeah, went from near the biggest urban celebration in recorded history to a city where the biggest event of the weekend was a hip-hop concert and an afterset from Shrieking Hillary Clinton.)

MAKE THE WATER LEVEL ROUTE GREAT AGAIN.

A Passenger Rail advocate takes the occasion of a Chicago and Cleveland World Series to meditate on the shrunken Midwestern passenger service.

Thousands of Cubs fans are making their way from Chicago to Cleveland for Game 7 of the World Series tonight. Throughout the series fans from both teams have been making the journey between Chicago and Cleveland either by plane, train or automobile. This is a great time to highlight how the Lakeshore corridor could provide a more viable option between these two great midwestern cities.

Just this past week I was reminded of the incredible potential that exists along the Lakeshore corridor. I took a very enjoyable train ride from Chicago to Toledo to see a presentation on All Aboard Florida. The track was in great shape the whole way out and the trip time was comparable to driving but there is room for growth.

The track is in great shape to expedite the movement of stack trains, automobiles, and other priority cargo. But the passenger train service, such as it is, reflects the success of the New York Central Railroad in trimming its cross-Ohio service, fifty years ago.

Here's the westward service as of 24 April 1966, the beginning of Daylight Saving Time.

The New England States and Twentieth Century Limited disdained Cleveland, changing crews at Collinwood east of downtown and bypassing the Union Terminal on the Lakefront Line, which is now the route Amtrak's service uses.  The overnight extension of the Empire State Express was coach only, without food service, west of Cleveland.  Sleeping cars and food service cars came off The Chicagoan at Cleveland.  Train 201, as its number and profusion of stops would suggest, was an accommodation train, probably hemorrhaging the mail and express that once justified its operation.

The eastbound workings were no better.  The Cleveland sleepers returned to New York on Six, and the New England States deigned to stop at Cleveland to add a St. Louis to New York sleeping car -- perhaps New York Central, anticipating its merger with The Pennsylvania Railroad, was saddling its future partner with the St. Louis service.

There wasn't much for Amtrak to build on, and when Chicago to Cleveland service offered multiple frequencies, as it did for a short while, one of the promised frequencies, predicated on retrieving the mail and express once carried by 201 and 222, never ran.

Amtrak Form W23/65M effective May 21, 2000.

We're not looking at a corridor service, with the Lake Shore filling in for the Century and New England States, and 45 and 46, the mail and express trains, never running.

But speeding up the service, the Midwest High Speed Rail Association notes, doesn't call for massive investments in track and electrification.

We think that some simple improvements such as level boarding, high performance trains and better amenities would make the service more attractive. A Chicago-Cleveland trip time of less than five and a half hours could be accomplished by increasing average speeds throughout the route by just 5 mph and increasing the top speed between 47th street and east Gary to 79 mph.

A Cold Spring Shops "Free Rein to 110" campaign might be in order. That, plus additional frequencies. Perhaps we can take up the issue of an Ohio network, bringing Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton into the mix, another day.

POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM FROM CULTURE.

And the culture is polluted.  They're beginning to catch on on the left.  Here's a Vox interview of J. D. (Hillbilly Elegy) Vance, with Sean Illing.  It covers a lot of ground.  Let's focus on this excerpt.

In some ways I feel like people on the left are so unwilling to place moral blame on the poor for some of their decisions that they completely ignore the way that poor people actually grow up and the way that they actually conduct their lives.

You don’t have to think that a poor kid who grew up in dirt poverty in rural Appalachia is to blame for their circumstances to recognize that a lot of the habits that that kid picked up along the way are going to be very destructive in terms of raising a family or going to college or being successful in the workplace.

There’s this sort of weird detachment from the actual lives that people live, and I just think liberals have to get a little bit more comfortable talking about what it is that’s different about that poor kid, not just his material circumstances but also the attitudes and the expectations that he developed in the first 15 to 20 years of his life growing up in poverty, and how can we counteract it.

That has to be part of the conversation on the left.

That conversation is starting. In The Guardian, here's a lengthy reflection by Lynsey Hanley that might be discovering a Hillbilly Elegy in the Midlands.  Again, I'll focus on an excerpt.

This is how privilege becomes truly concentrated – through the systematic denial of the way economic, social and cultural capital works, by the very people who are hogging it. Such blanket denial serves to convince members of the middle class that, generation after generation, they have to tighten their grip on the advantages they have, because they are always at risk of losing them.

When I was growing up, in the 1980s and 90s in Solihull, no one ever used the term “working class”. Instead it was “people like us”, or “the likes of us”, by which I took to mean a discrete group bound by occupation and geography who could expect certain things out of life but not others. Casual violence – symbolic, domestic and public – was endemic. Casual racism was part of daily conversation. Casual cynicism pervaded: a consequence of casual exploitation and casual displacement, which fed into people’s souls and manifested in them treating everything like one great frigging joke, because that was how they felt they had been treated their entire lives. To be casual about horrific things was a cover for fear.

He's going to get into the coping strategies of the lads, but it's that "people who are hogging it" (whether it's forting up in Santa Monica or Central Park West or enrolling toddlers in Harvard Prep Day Care) that's going to get the traction.  Meanwhile, the people who are hard done by are the recipients of Anti-Social Behavior Orders rather than affirmative action or Model Cities.

I never sat in the front row at school. I was always at the back: in the same row as the lads, but never with them. I thought they were throwing their lives away. They knew they were throwing their lives away, and yet they refused to acknowledge that that was what they were doing. The cost of one of them saying, “Come on lads, we can have a laff outside of school, we’re here to learn so we don’t have to do jobs we hate later on,” would have been too much for any one of them to stand. In any case,[sociologist Paul] Willis argued, working-class males are trusted so little within the wider social structure, that even if “the lads” had changed their minds and decided to work hard, there was no guarantee that it would have got them better jobs.

Willis wasn’t exactly saying that resistance, in the form of mild yet persistent insubordination, was futile – more that it was the boys’ own habits of playing up, as much as the unfairness of “the system”, that led them to become trapped in low-paid and unfulfilling jobs. He concluded: “There is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in western capitalism … however, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance.” Solidarity made sense to the lads because they understood that they were all headed for the same destiny and would need mates when they got there. In this way a survival strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two countries, two school systems, two social structures, and yet the rough lads are being left behind. And angry.

Last night, Chris Matthews signed off his Hardball with a recommendation that, Hillary Clinton winning narrowly or bigly, the Political Establishment take seriously the Donald Trump challenge.  The segment is not yet available in their archives.  When it is, I'll likely link to it, as he's recognizing something the Pajamas Media people have been saying for some time, that the next manifestation of political populism is likely to make Donald Trump look like a gentleman.  Overly hyped, perhaps, but worth considering.

CIVIL LIBERTIES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE.

Sometimes, the American Civil Liberties Union lives up to its reputation as the American Criminal Liberties Union.  I don't have to make this up. Cops Criticizing Colin Kaepernick Sent 'Ominous' Message At NJ High School Football Game.  Those cops are not commenting on Mr Kaepernick's recent play.  Rather, local police helped unfold a large flag before a high school football game.  Panic ensues.

"The police have a duty to defend the rights of protesters, not to use such a large-scale display of force that effectively silences people with differing viewpoints," said ACLU-NJ Policy Counsel Dianna Houenou in a statement.

"The statements made by the deputy police chief and the event's ostentatious show of power send an ominous, frightening message," added ACLU organizer Jasmine Crenshaw. "That, as an official stance, law enforcement will not tolerate expressions acknowledging our nation’s history of unequal treatment and systematic oppression."

There's more from Mx Crenshaw in a separate article.

"Entrance to one of the biggest sporting events in the area should not require that someone accept an atmosphere that suppresses political protest," Crenshaw said in a statement. "The magnitude of this event chills the belief that police should be held accountable when they abuse their power or discriminate against people of color, and pressures student athletes to act as props of the police."

Good grief.  But completely predictable for the so-called Civil Liberties Union.  On occasion I buy a video from Public Broadcasting, and that's probably why on occasion I get an issue survey from the Civil Liberties Union, which really ought to register as a political action committee for the freakazoids.  What did the survey focus on?  Religious freedom -- as in freedom to discriminate, freedom to get abortions, the rest of the BLTGQUINOA stuff.  Issue priorities -- preventing voter fraud, abortions, BLTGQUINOA stuff.  But the mask comes off in the strategies section.  "The ACLU is standing up to extremists in Congress and state legislatures who are conducting an all-out assault on reproductive rights, religious liberty, and LGBT equality."  And they beg for money.  But in the fine print, at the bottom of the page:  Contributions to the ACLU are not tax deductible for charitable purposes.  Well, it's indistinguishable from a Bernie Sanders Super-PAC.  That's a relief.

The survey came with a prepaid envelope, so I sent it back, with a few nasty remarks.  Maybe they'll go away.  (I was tempted to say b****r off, but they might take that as a proposition.)

WE KNEW THIS.

Hospital competition and patient choice can improve healthcare quality.  Nice to see research consistent with the testable implications of price theory.

In contrast to the fears that choice is only for the rich and healthy, this study suggests that relaxing the constraints on where patients can go for hospital treatment can benefit the sickest of patients, including those needing extensive surgical intervention. Hospital competition and patient choice can play a useful role in improving healthcare, even in heavily regulated and centralized systems.

People who work in economics get that decisions at the margin affect inframarginal producers and consumers as well. That's a difficult concept to get across to everyone else. Although it might be the case that "the rich and the healthy" (the marginal consumers) are exercising more choices the actions taken by the clinics to respect those choices lead to improvements for "the sickest of patients" (the inframarginal consumers.)

CUB FANS ARE MORE CHEERFUL WHEN THE BASEBALL EXTRA FLIES WHITE FLAGS.

Yes, white flags by day, and white lights by night, are the traditional marker of an extra train.  With centralized traffic control, the necessity of identifying extra trains for the benefit of tower operators and other train crews isn't so urgent.  But there's an older tradition also involving flying a flag: at Chicago's Wrigley Field, there are flag hoists indicating the standings, division by division, and (it probably began in the era of day baseball) the outcome of the day's game is revealed to all passing by with a blue W rampant on a white flag, or a white L rampant on a blue flag.

Last night, the Cubs got to #FlyTheW on the last game of the season.  And commuters on the South Shore Line, in case they're not taking the day off with a hangover, get the word.

Northern Indiana Commuter Transit District photo retrieved from Trains Magazine.

As George Carlin noted, in baseball, you don't know when it will end, and sometimes you go to extra innings.  You have to figure that a World Series featuring the two most frustrated teams in Organized Baseball would go to seven games, and the seventh game would go to extra innings.  With a rain delay.

But in Cleveland and Toronto, and unlike Washington, D.C., the rapid transit would be available after the games ended.  So, too, with the South Shore Line.

To do its part, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District's South Shore began running a single extra train after Cubs home games during the playoffs departing Chicago one hour after the games ended. For Major League Baseball's World Series, which moves to Chicago on Friday, the trains will depart 90 minutes after the last out.

When the Cubs win at home or on the road, W flags adorn the South Shore trains through the next day.

The extras are called, despite the interurban tradition of the owl car living on on the South Shore.

The idea for the extra trains sprang from regular-season night games when South Shore riders complained they left Wrigley early rather than wait for the 12:45 a.m. homeward train.

From Millennium Station, five miles and a short walk from Wrigley by the Chicago Transit Authority Red Line, the Cubs Extra runs express to Hegewisch on the Illinois-Indiana line making regular stops from there to the Carrol Avenue station in Michigan City. [South Shore marketing vice-president] Parsons says the W flags are a first for the line, and they are considering something similar for other Chicago pro teams.

As of this writing, Chicago authorities appear to be scheduling the celebratory parade for Monday. Expect to see interurbans displaying signals and running as extras.

To this day, a blue flag on rolling stock is a warning that the car is not to be moved.

SECOND SECTION:  The parade will be Friday.  Details to follow.

NOT OUR CLASS, DEARIE.

A Washington Post reporter goes into the Republican-leaning suburbs of Milwaukee to discover that Donald Trump is still not playing well with the voters.

Most of the well-kept lawns here are dotted with signs for Sen. Ron Johnson (R) and for other down-ballot candidates, but support for Trump is less evident.

“You’re in a town that’s about going to college and raising a family. People are polished and hard-working. He’s not one of us,” said Andy Schwichtenberg, a 28-year-old stockbroker.

“I did try,” Schwichtenberg added with a sigh. “I went to a rally.” But he was not swayed and he was turned off by the crowd, which he noted was packed with men and women “who came there on Harleys.”

Where are the social justice warriors fretting about the class snobbery, the stereotyping, the Othering?Oh, wait, Mr Schwichtenberg is referring to the people Mrs Clinton consigned to the basket of deplorables.  The appletini set will not tut-tut.  It's Prussian Wisconsin Nice on display, but bear in mind that burgher and bourgeois share a common etymology.

And perhaps the Prussian Wisconsin Nice will emerge as an Ivanka Voter.

She doesn’t have a Trump sign in her yard, either because it would get egged or she doesn’t want to fight with the neighbors. She knows all about Ivanka’s clothing line and brand, and thinks she would be great in the White House, because she’s classy and sophisticated, polished and well-spoken, all the things her father is not. She’s very clear that there are things that Trump says that she doesn’t agree with. She does not think of herself as racist. She describes herself as “socially moderate.”

But she’s voting for him.

We'll find out next week.

PARSING THE MEANING OF IS.

Yes, I'm alluding to the notorious deposition by impeached, disbarred, President Clinton.  But in Slate, Timothy Noah got to the heart of the matter.

Bill Clinton really is a guy who's willing to think carefully about "what the meaning of the word 'is' is." This is way beyond slick. Perhaps we should start calling him, "Existential Willie."

The ability to parse words carefully is useful in the practice of law.  You don't want to craft a document that gives away the store you're selling.  But it's Mr Noah's allusion to philosophy that matters here.