YES. NEXT QUESTION.

Right Wisconsin: Did Smug Liberals Help Win Wisconsin For Trump?  Politico sends Michael Kruse to Pepin County, where emigrants from the Cities put on airs, alienated people, and failed to make friends.

Pepin County is one of those rural areas, and the resentment isn’t just directed at the coasts. It’s local. Here, the urban elite isn’t a faceless, distant other: It’s the enclave of liberal, mostly Twin Cities newcomers who have moved here over the past few decades—not just an abstract political imposition, but an actual physical presence. It has spawned anger and bitterness, a simmering undercurrent of alienation among many people locally born and raised. It has made “Democrat” mean something it didn’t mean a generation ago. And it was made manifest on November 8.

Pepin County represents not only the most compelling reasons Trump won but also the reasons so many liberals were so surprised. If more people from more places had been talking to the people of Pepin County—and if the people of Pepin County had been talking more to one another—the notion of a Trump victory wouldn’t have seemed farfetched in the least. But my interviews, with Democrats and Republicans alike, started to feel to me like listening to disconnected halves of conversations that had never occurred. And still weren’t.

“We have found a whole community here,” said Pat Carlson, Wally Zick’s wife, “of very like-minded—it’s going to sound elite—but bookish, artsy, I’d say compassionate … organic foodies, the whole nine yards. It’s all transplants. It’s mostly liberals.” As for this election, and the locals, she continued, “I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were. Because we couldn’t believe anybody would vote for Trump.”

Zick described a fault line here between the old and the new, the people who have lived in the county forever and the move-ins from over the Minnesota border, clustered primarily on the southwestern end of the county. “They don’t come here,” Zick said. “We don’t go there.”

The future of Pepin County, however, appears to be bucolic real estate for well-off seniors from the Cities. The young people are headed to the Cities, and Chicago, and where the opportunities are.

[M]any of the smartest, most enterprising youth from Pepin County—as in so many counties like it—have been leaving for college and never coming back. School enrollments are down, and districts have consolidated, leaving behind in smaller communities hurt feelings and ripped-away sources of pride. “The farm families have declined, and so have the school populations,” said [local historian Terry] Mesch, who keeps an office in the cold, old, wood-framed courthouse in Durand, the county seat. “They feel like they’re losing their identity.”

But as Durand declines, the real estate prices decline, and that brings in the fashionable elders, primarily from the Cities.

The withering of old Pepin County has coincided with the influx of the move-ins. Minneapolis and St. Paul are an hour-and-a-half drive and a world away, and the people who have come from “the Cities,” as the people here call them, are typically retirees or close to it, and often well-off enough to restore old houses or build big new ones. The economy around them, geared more toward their wallets and tastes as well as those of tourists, relies on wineries, galleries, bed and breakfasts, seasonal art festivals—and a pie shop run by the husband-and-husband team of Steve Grams and Alan Nugent.

If there is a de facto capital of Pepin County’s politically progressive newcomers, it is the village of Stockholm, winter population 66. And its social hub, just down the hill from the renovated farmhouse where Zick and Carlson live, is the Stockholm Pie & General Store, which sells artisanal cheese, craft beer and pricey slices of a double lemon pie.

But a bit of Wisconsin somewhat off the Interstates isn't likely to become a business incubator, the tensions between traditionalists and aging hippies or not.

“Where’s the richest place to live?” said Gerald Bauer, 74, born and raised on a local dairy farm, who now is the vice chairperson of the county board of supervisors. “The area around Washington, D.C.—that’s wrong.”

And here these city people have come, with their money and their politics, right to Pepin County, which now has its very own liberal left coast. “The ones that move in try to change everything,” said Gary Samuelson, 72, “and the people who’ve been here a long time don’t care too much for change.”

“They don’t share our views on anything,” Vic Komisar, 41, the president of the ATV club, said of the people from Minnesota. “They got this picture that we’re all country bumpkins, the locals are, that we’re not educated. The people who move in talk down to the natives. I don’t know how you want to word that, but that’s the persona given off.”

Yeah, I can see how these Lake Wobegon types might give an ATV rider the stink-eye.  That disdain -- it's one of the oppressions of class, but the gentry left don't worry about it much, is common all over the country.  Thus Victor Hanson, also in City Journal.

Poorer, less cosmopolitan, rural people can also experience a sense of inferiority when they venture into the city, unlike smug urbanites visiting red-state America. The rural folk expect to be seen as deplorables, irredeemables, and clingers by city folk. My countryside neighbors do not wish to hear anything about Stanford University, where I work—except if by chance I note that Stanford people tend to be condescending and pompous, confirming my neighbors’ suspicions about city dwellers. And just as the urban poor have always had their tribunes, so, too, have rural residents flocked to an Andrew Jackson or a William Jennings Bryan, politicians who enjoyed getting back at the urban classes for perceived slights. The more Trump drew the hatred of PBS, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, the elite press, the universities, the foundations, and Hollywood, the more he triumphed in red-state America.

Indeed, one irony of the 2016 election is that identity politics became a lethal boomerang for progressives. After years of seeing America reduced to a binary universe, with culpable white Christian males encircled by ascendant noble minorities, gays, feminists, and atheists—usually led by courageous white-male progressive crusaders—red-state America decided that two could play the identity-politics game. In 2016, rural folk did silently in the voting booth what urban America had done to them so publicly in countless sitcoms, movies, and political campaigns.

The tensions may be less evident in the Imperial Valley than in the Black River Valley.  But even in the Black River Valley, trade unites where politics divides.  The gentry shepherdess wants to engage in intercourse with a hay farmer she thinks voted for Mr Trump.  Why?  "It’s beautiful hay,” she said. “It’s dry, and it’s grassy, and it’s got just a little bit of clover in it. It’s beautiful, and it’s perfect."

Did you really think I was using that word to mean rolling in the hay?

OUCH.

We've long noted that Chicago State University is a dropout factory.

It's no surprise that Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds suggests Chicago State "richly deserves dismantling."

But Chicago State still put basketball teams on the court, and that's the last straw for Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan.  "Almost no one attends, or graduates, from CSU. This scandalous drop-out factory continues to cost the taxpayers of Illinois serious money, most of which goes to on-campus fraudsters and off-campus lawyers."  How scandalous?  "A little corner of North Korea in America" scandalous.  Wow.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE YAZIDIS?

We'll return to the School of Tom Clancy for Book Review N^o. 1 in 2017.  This time it's Mark Greaney's True Faith and Allegiance, and it's much more compelling than Grant Blackwood's Duty and Honor, which merited a perfunctory, disappointed review toward the end of 2016.  I'm not the only Clancy enthusiast to note differences in performance among the matriculants of his school, and a number of even more unhappy readers of Duty were looking forward to True Faith.

The question I raise in the title is one that President Jack Ryan raises as part of a truly refreshing b****slap of some CNN reporter.  I hope that there are people on Team Trump studying the fictional President Ryan, both for the national security nuggets and the tools of the trade for dealing with the Democrat operatives with bylines in the Briefing Room.

The book itself?  I've been following CBS's Hunted, which does not feature the Hounds of Zaroff on Ship-Trap Island, but it has a number of comfortable people attempting to hide themselves, for four weeks, from a team of intelligence officers who have full use of open-source intelligence such as Facebook profiles, plus use of traffic cameras, plus the impossible cluelessness of many of the contestants and their friends.  You know you're playing a reality show and you'll get an hour notice to vamoose, and you don't have a rudimentary bug-out bag with you at all times?  Your friends and social media accomplices know you're playing a reality show, and when the intelligence officers come to their house and use all their interrogator tricks and they haven't been briefed to say only, ONLY "You're not real cops.  You don't have a warrant.  You don't need to know?"  (Extra points if the friend threatens to call the real cops, something a nosy neighbor might have had cause to in at least one hunt.)  Sad.  And you've never worked out enough knowledge of the back roads to find ways to get to where you want to go without passing the traffic cameras?

That's not to mention that neighbors who have not been briefed in on the game have shown a disturbing tendency to be too cooperative with these performers.  Back to the book.

Suppose you have a security clearance, and you know all the personal security techniques, But a miscreant has obtained the background check form you filled in to be vetted before you got that Delta Force or CIA posting.  How safe are you, dear reader, when that miscreant cross-references your close friends and family with their current social media activity, and you don't know that bad people with automatic weapons are hunting you?

There are a few more plot twists, plus, possibly, the introduction of additional cast members, but I've disclosed more than enough for today.  Happy reading.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IMPROVING THE SUPER INTERURBAN.

Project managers at the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District have even bigger plans for the South Shore Line.  We update our previous report on the proposed double tracking, Gary to Michigan City, with more ambitious plans onward to South Bend.

The railroad’s operator, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, wants to make improvements it says would shave up to an hour off the South Bend-to-Chicago trip, taking it from 2½ hours to 90 minutes.

The project, called “Double Tracking NWI,” for northwest Indiana, would include building a second parallel track for a 17-mile stretch between Michigan City and Gary, removing the tracks from streets in Michigan City and eliminating a stop there, and elevating the boarding platform in Michigan City.

With a second parallel track between Michigan City and Gary, the passenger train would no longer need to stop and wait for oncoming freight trains to pass through. Currently, opposing trains must meet at scheduled times to pass one another, and any alterations to these “meets,” whether because of mechanical problems, maintenance or other issues, affects all following trains, said John Parsons, vice president of planning and marketing for the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, which owns and operates the South Shore.

It's the meets of the passenger trains that pose the greatest challenge to timekeeping, as the schedules have historically anticipated both trains reaching the siding nearly simultaneously, otherwise one train has a longer overall running time.  Here's how it works, when all is going properly.

Sheridan siding, Michigan City, Indiana, 13 August 1966.

As I noted in a prior post, "The approaching train is leaving the single track that runs through the middle of Michigan City streets. There are two levels of protection at work here, the red signal and a line in the employee timetable establishing a meet here. Recent South Shore schedules have moved many of the scheduled meets elsewhere, because of heavy passenger loadings affecting the timekeeping, particularly of rush-hour trains."  With two tracks, and direction of traffic running, a late train might delay a follower, but opposing trains proceed on the other track.  Moving the trains out of the streets of Michigan City has been a goal of the South Shore at least since the 1930s.

That 90 minute running time to South Bend also intrigues.  The best scheduled timings are currently the 1 hour 55 minute Sunrise Express, South Bend to Chicago.  The Morning Hot Shot made the same run in 1 hour 52 minutes into the 1950s, making more stops, and adding cars on the head end at Gary to offer local passengers west of Michigan City a faster one-seat ride into Chicago.  Contemporary rules governing inspection of brakes after an add or a cut rule out such schedule cleverness.

The challenge is in the raising of the money, and it appears that local officials have called in enough favors to Make The Interurban Super Again.

It’s been talked about for years but this is the first time the $290 million project seems to have potential support for federal, state and local funding sources. Gov. Eric Holcomb mentioned the project in his recent State of the State speech, and Statehouse Republicans have voiced support for including funding in this year’s biennial budget bill.

Of the $290 million, half would come from the federal government and the other half would be split evenly between the state and equal contributions by the four counties. U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, has been stockpiling the federal authorizations for the project for years, and has finally amassed enough to make state and local matches feasible.

“We’re kind of at the point where we’ve got this perfect storm,” said Mark Catanzarite, St. Joseph County Council member and a member of the 11-member NICTD board of directors since 2003. “Gov. Holcomb and the state legislature are strongly behind us on this.”

Each county would have to pay about $18.2 million for its share of the construction costs. Lake and Porter counties would draw their money from a Regional Development Authority they created 10 years ago, but which St. Joseph County opted not to join.

LaPorte County is looking to obtain its share from property taxes — Michigan City would use tax incremental financing district money, and LaPorte County is considering tapping its major bridge fund, Parsons said.

South Bend is in St. Joseph County, and some of the major improvements there include bringing the electric cars into the airport station by a more direct route. That would mean the end of the funky side-of-the-road running on the current alignment, a former South Shore spur to a gravel pit.  Such connectivity might be of interest to air travelers headed to Greater Chicago who can spend ninety minutes just getting into or out of O'Hare.  The South Bend airport is small but appears to be passenger-friendly.

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, GET PRESIDENT TRUMP.

David Marcus of The Federalist makes the case for respecting norms and conventions.  "The Left let its freak flag fly. We all saw it. No normal is the new normal and there is no clear way back from that."  Yes, that has been my contention when it comes to deconstructing civilization for a long time.  Here's how Mr Marcus continues the argument. "Cultural norms are self-imposed limitations on speech and actions, meant to preserve peace and order in a society. It is like a stream with banks that allow our public discourse to flow responsibly. When that stream is broadened and deepened, dangerous ideas flow in from both sides."

Truly, truly, I say unto you, institutions are civilization.  They've been deconstructed, and to what end?

Victor Hanson extends the argument, suggesting that the Noble Lie, one tactic of the Forever Concerned, isn't so noble, its French intellectual pedigree notwithstanding.

Fake news can become a means to advance supposedly noble ends of racial, gender, class, or environmental justice—such as the need for new sexual assault protocols on campuses. Those larger aims supersede bothersome and inconvenient factual details. The larger “truth” of fake news lives on even after its facts have been utterly debunked.

And indeed, the fake news mindset ultimately can be traced back to the campus. Academic postmodernism derides facts and absolutes, and insists that there are only narratives and interpretations that gain credence, depending on the power of the story-teller. In other words, white male establishment reactionaries have set up fictive rules of “absolute” truth and “unimpeachable” facts, and they have further consolidated their privilege by forcing the Other to buy into their biased and capricious notions of discriminating against one narrative over another.

The work of French postmodernists—such as Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida that mesmerized academics in the 1980s with rehashed Nietzschean banalities about the absence of facts and the primacy of interpretation—has now been filtered by the media to a nationwide audience. If the mythical exclamation “hands up, don’t shoot” was useful in advancing a narrative of inordinate police attacks against African Americans, who cares whether he actually said it? And indeed, why privilege a particular set of elite investigatory methodologies to ascertain its veracity?

In sum, fake news is journalism’s popular version of the nihilism of campus postmodernism. To progressive journalists, advancing a leftwing political agenda is important enough to justify the creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public—to justify, in other words, the creation of fake but otherwise useful news.

Yes, and anyone can dissemble.  Or, as David Ernst has it in The Federalist, "Trump Turns Postmodernism On Itself."  It came to this, dear reader, the first time somebody who should have known better started putting truth in airquotes.

Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.

If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable.

That's not necessarily going to end well, but that's where we are.  And thus does President Trump carry enough states to win.

Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a buffoon and scorn for being the next Hitler. Better yet, they figured that his astounding rise confirmed everything they had long assumed about half the country and were now free to say out loud: they are indeed a basket of irredeemable racist, sexist, homophobic deplorables. Mainstream Republicans would surely hop on board the progressive train rather than be associated with these creeps.

None of this happened, of course. But why? Because what Trump’s enemies failed to grasp was that he wasn’t winning because of the crazy things he was saying, but because of the phony outrage and affected condescension it provoked. Many people empathized with Trump for enduring the contempt that he deliberately brought against himself. Trump kept playing the role of the antihero, and Clinton kept playing the role of the pearl-clutching fraud.

So I’m a scoundrel because I don’t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I’m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p—y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I’m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You’re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.

Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I’m authentic, at least I’m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.

Yes, and after the election, a lot of the nastiness on Facebook continues to be outrage and condescension and cliches and censoriousness, and it mostly gives normals stuff to mock.

All the same, Mr Marcus is worried about where the deconstruction of norms and normalcy might lead.

What many on all sides are feeling these days is that we are locked in an ugly struggle with no way out. Those who believe in biology and not a sliding scale of gender are tired of being called bigots. Those who oppose abortion are tired of being called sexists. Those who do not accept their privilege and guilt are tired of being called racists.

On the Left, a terrible fear is emerging, that the outsized and ugly rhetoric that has been their calling card is about to be used against them; and that their concerns about fairness and equality are going to be set back by Trump and his band of deplorables.

It is difficult not to despair of the current state of our political discourse. The President-elect has taken up the “us vs. them” attitude used for so long by the Left. He has embraced their abandonment of cultural norms and thrown it back in their face. On both sides people are digging in. It seems likely that our near political future will consist of snipes on Twitter between the President and Hollywood celebrities.

Sometimes a kind answer might help change a person's mind, or at least induce an Aha! moment.  Sometimes, though, the right and proper response, say, to the instinctive claim of an -ism or a -phobia might be, Yeah, and?

I leave to the reader to work out whether setting back the left on fairness and equality might actually lead to more fairness and more equality.

REDISCOVERING THE VERITIES.

In The New Republic, Mene Ukueberuwa contemplates the wreckage wrought by the administrative culture in higher education.  Much of the article revisits ground we've explored.

This crisis of confidence at colleges—driven by conflict-shy administrators and self-effacing professors—has come to a head in the culture of protest that has developed on American campuses. Once again, political polarization is only one part of the story. Today’s college students are certainly more liberal and more ideologically uniform than their counterparts of the mid-twentieth century. But the focus on the little things that we see in campus protests—as in the movement to suppress insensitive Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015—shows the extent to which the political fervor is being driven by the absence of bigger, richer ideas to seize students’ attention.

What might those bigger richer ideas be? We could do worse than the Canon and the Curriculum.

For colleges to re-adopt intellectual openness would require them to take on a great degree of risk, and they could never succeed without the hard-won cooperation of individual professors and administrators. But with more and more research emerging about the value of a challenging curriculum—and with a hunger for thought-provoking substance still growing on America’s campuses—the incentives may soon begin to align for a renaissance of heterodoxy.

Better to allow students to play with ideas, crazy, conventional, or misleading in university with the hope that they graduate less certain of where they stand but better equipped to handle surprises, rather than be socially promoted out, completely certain of where they stand but vulnerable to a mugging by reality.

TEN YEARS AGO.

What has 100 legs and eats cabbage?

Remember the good old days, when Venezuelan sugar hoarders still had sugar to hoard?

THE ATHLETIC ARMS RACE GETS OUT OF HAND.

Years ago, I attended Milwaukee Hamilton, and from time to time they'd put a basketball team for boys on the court that would get to the state finals.  More recently, with open enrollment in Milwaukee, they've had recruiting scandals.  Seriously.  And now, dear reader, they're regularly participating in out of state tournaments.  Just before Christmas, they won one.  In California.  "For the second straight year, the Wildcats handled themselves well on a trip to California by repeating as champion of the Mel Good Holiday Classic in Yuba City. The three victories improved the team to 6-2 in its final game of the calendar year."  Catch that "repeating as champion?"  I'm not sure whether to indulge in a little Wildcat Pride, or whether to be dismayed with the professionalization of high school basketball.  The out-of-state trip has been a thing for some time, as this story from 2010 about a Myrtle Beach trip illustrates.

Milwaukee was never a wealthy district, who are the angels providing the travel budget for a traveling team?

LET'S AT LEAST UNDERSTAND THE RAILROAD NETWORK.

At the Asia Times, Railways pose biggest challenge in Trump’s infrastructure plan.

The article starts with a misleading picture of passenger railroading.

Arcade Station, Los Angeles, 1891, retrieved from Asia Times.

The slide-valve American Standard is already obsolete, and robust Pacifics, Northerns, and seven-foot-drivered Hudsons are thirty years away.  But to the casual observer, deficiencies in Passenger Rail translate into deficiencies with the railroads.

US railroad infrastructure went into a long decay after World War II as highways overtook trains as the most convenient and cost-effective mode of public and commercial transport.  Many diesel/electric locomotives on US tracks today suffer from parts shortages and maintenance issues.

Really?

Yes, the freight carriers have downsized, but they've also rebuilt.

Passengers waiting at Lewistown, Pennsylvania.  The priority stacks are moving.

Lindsay Lazarski photograph retrieved from Keystone Crossroads.

The empty space in the foreground is where the westbound passenger main was removed.  Double-stacking?  That's been going on for thirty years.

Where there are regional rail operators, the plant and the rolling stock, as at Downers Grove, can be phenomenally productive.

And here's a spectacular new rail bridge in Iowa.  Intermodal trains can fly across the Des Moines River at 70 mph.  The old bridge at right was good for one train at a time, at 30 mph.

Trains weblog photograph.

Perhaps it has been better for the investor-owned railroads that their capital spending plans are approved by boards of directors, rather than appropriated by fractious Congresses.

CONTEMPLATING LIFE AFTER FOOTBALL.

The Green Bay Packers released All-Pro cornerback Sam Shields, who spent most of the just-concluded season on the sideline in concussion protocol.

After spending almost the entire 2016 season in the NFL’s concussion protocol, Shields, 29, revealed Wednesday morning on Instagram that the Packers had released him. That later was confirmed by the league with a "failed physical" designation and the Packers through a news release. He had one year and $9 million left on his contract.

That's disappointing to Mr Shields, and it sounds harsh to say "failed physical."  But the man has taken a beating.  "Shields missed the final 15 regular-season games in 2016 and all of the postseason after sustaining his fifth documented concussion near the end of the Packers’ opener at the Jacksonville Jaguars in September."

The concussion protocol is relatively recent.  It wasn't around when WMAQ's Mike Adamle was winning the Big Ten Player of the Year award -- out of Northwestern, back in the Bo Schembechler, Woody Hayes era.  Mr Adamle has not been at the sports desk for a year, and the concussions he suffered as a Wildcat and later as a Chicago Bear might have caught up with him.

Would he go back and play football if he got a do-over?  "'I would do it again,' he said. 'I would tell you what, though, I would work harder in the offseason to find out about things that protect you when you play.'"

The concussion protocol, perhaps one such protection.  It's written in Mr Adamle's blood, and its implementation might give Mr Shields a better life years from now.

All the good wishes, and stay healthy, gentlemen.

THINK ABOUT THE TRADEOFFS.

Here is the title of an opinion piece that, as far as I can tell, is not a parody.  "California’s New Bar Exam Format in Conjunction with ABA’s Proposed Bar Pass Standard Will Adversely Impact Diversity, Women and Access to the Profession." Paul "Tax Prof" Caron posted the story, and Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg has regular correspondent Rocket J. Squirrel of Frostbite Falls drawing the obvious inference.

Implied message: women and minorities are not as smart as white men

When your best argument against raising standards is that dumb people won’t be able to become bad lawyers, you should sit down and shut up.

His diagnosis is probably not in any Approved Medical Manual. "I sometimes think that liberalism is a byproduct of damage to the brain’s logic center."

Just spell out your indifference curve: at what rate are you willing to substitute diversity for competence?

A DISSENTING VIEW ON THE TRUMP CABINET.

I'm in general agreement with Oregon columnist Dan Lucas.

I have been very pleased — and at times pleasantly surprised — by Trump’s Cabinet picks and key appointments so far; notably Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, Gen. Mattis for Secretary of Defense, Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Gov. Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy and Gov. Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Keep in mind the passage that follows before we turn to the dissent.

There was one aspect of Trump’s supporters that I completely missed. I was humbled and chagrined to see how we as a county had been letting down a large, unrepresented segment of our fellow Americans. The people living in the Rust Belt whose jobs had left, and all of the other Americans who were suffering silently with no spokesperson, no lobbyists and no one advocating on their behalf. A year ago Peggy Noonan called them “the unprotected.” They found an advocate in Donald Trump. For his supporters, Trump may be a flawed messenger, but at least he was carrying the message, and he was the only one who was.

I am cautiously optimistic. For me, the big victory was the Supreme Court nominees being selected by someone other than Clinton. The rest is gravy. I’m still concerned by some of the same things regarding Trump’s temperament and character, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by many of his conservative appointments and actions so far.

The dissenting view, from Angry Bear Linda Beale, appears to honor the unprotected as well, if from the traditional New Deal, Great Society frame.

We Americans share many values. Among them has always been a view that those who are better off should help those who are less well off. We’ve done that in many ways, beginning with private charity (supported by our tax code) but going much beyond the soup kitchens and church support for a sick parishioner to include a progressive income tax, taxation of the estates of the wealthiest among us upon their deaths (since they were generally almost tax free in life), and the provision of many necessary services through public institutions.

We could stop with a "provided by whom?" Blank-out.  Among those things?

1. A public right to decent health care.  Yeah, that worked out so well for Venezuela.
2. Public education from kindergarten through college.  Yeah, that's working so well in Chicago.
3. Protection of the environment.  Mitigating a flooded mine ought not pollute the Animas River.
4. Regulation of hours and terms of labor service.  On paper, appealing, in practice, often protects established large employers.
5. Regulation of financial enterprises.  Also appealing on paper, in practice, generates rents.
6. Regulation of food and drug quality.  Consider the case for private warranties and performance bonds.

The gripe, though, might simplify to "Mr Trump is bringing the rent-seekers in directly." "Trump’s appointees for many of the important Cabinet positions seem to be primarily wealthy crony capitalists with radical ideologies that are in direct conflict with the agency missions."  And Ms Beale's preferred political economy might actually be one in which more market-tested betterments are useful.

I believe that every American wants our society to move towards a sustainable economy with decent livelihoods for all, good health care for everyone, education that provides opportunities and knowledge that bridges the gap between those born with wealth and the majority of us who are not.

Specifically, finding remunerative work opportunities for people of varying skills is the epitome of an entrepreneurial challenge, with fixes such as Whitney's interchangeable parts, Ford's assembly line, and contemporary smart cash registers and coffee machines augmenting the talents of people with modest skills.  In health care, do government policies that allow Lasik surgery and tummy tucks to go down in price, while insulin and orthotics must be shielded from price competition, make sense?  In education, how long and how frequently must I gripe about people rendered unemployable by government schools and the minimum wage?  In sum, the Canonical Ways of Doing Things is not turning out well for the unprotected.

It's going to be up to Mr Trump, with friendly majorities in the House and Senate, to clear the clutter of regulations in order that market-tested betterments get a fighting chance.

NO, YOU CAN'T ASSUME A UNICORN.

The Trenchant Observation for this week, from a new economist.

Good economists accept that we are limited in what we can achieve. We have to try and do the best we can, given all the constraints we face. We look at the goals of policymakers and others, and analyze if and how well particular actions achieve these goals. Unconstrained thinking, which dominates the political and social landscape, ignores that there are many things that, given the circumstances we face, are not possible, or will not work the way people wish they would. In many instances, the economist often plays the role of constant inquisitor, much to the chagrin of those in earshot.

(Via Cafe Hayek.)

KEEPING A CLEAN HOUSE OF LEARNING.

The building that houses the College of Business at Northern Illinois University is not a state facility, which means the College can implement its own terms of use.

On Jan. 14, the building began locking at 10 p.m. for non-business majors and 1 a.m. for business majors, said Patricia Myers, Barsema Hall Dean’s Office manager. Non-business majors will not have access after 10 p.m. The building was unlocked 24 hours a day before this semester.

Because Barsema Hall is not a state building, business students are able to remain in the building after 1 a.m., although re-entry is not permitted, said Luke Finnan, Barsema Hall facility manager. Rather than being built with state funding, Barsema Hall was presented as a gift to NIU by Trustee Dennis Barsema and his wife Stacey in 2002.

Apparently people passing through -- not necessarily people with concentrations other than business -- were treating the public spaces like they'd treat a dorm lounge, or any other common property.  There's something instructive in the reason the College started locking the doors.

Issues involving moved furniture and damaged property have become evident since the building opened, which led to the newly enforced hours, Finnan said.

These problems began to interfere with incoming company representatives who wished to interact with students in the College of Business, DeJean said.

“Tables, chairs and bench seating [were] being moved overnight into the hallways and walk areas on the atrium level, creating a safety concern,” DeJean said.

I suppose the advocates of sloppy transgressivity will complain about the continued corporatization and vocationalization (see, I can sling business jargon too) of the university in this insistence on having a tidy working space.  (And yes, the prohibition of cartoons and other items on faculty office doors is a bit much.)

But then, mannerly behavior eases commercial interaction, so perhaps I should not carp too much.

IN PLACE OF SOVIET UNION TANK CAR LINE?

A Russian company turns out a fleet of higher-capacity methanol tank cars.

United Wagon Co’s TikhvinChemMash plant has begun series production of Type 15-6880-01 tank wagons for methanol producer Metafrax.

This is the second model of UWC tank wagon to use modern design techniques to increase capacity while complying with the GOST Tpr loading gauge, with the capacity of 71·7 tonnes or 94 m³ being 4·5 tonnes or 8·5 m³ more than typical older designs.

Alexey Sokolov, First Deputy CEO for Strategy & Product at UWC, said increasing payloads within the limits imposed by existing rail infrastructure offered a ‘logical and effective’ way to increase rail freight volumes, and Russian Railways had confirmed that the Tpr stock could operate ‘practically without restrictions’.

‘These are wagons of the future, to which there are no counterparts in Russia or in the entire post-Soviet space’, said Igor Chukreev, Head of Metafrax’s transport department. ‘We will be the first company to load, dispatch and evaluate them, and this work is of great interest to us.’

UWC estimates that around 1 400 methanol tank wagons will reach the end of their lives over the next five years, about a third of the national fleet.

The cars appear to be shorter but perhaps higher than North American tank cars.  I hope conditions have improved enough in Russia that people aren't risking their lives stealing a nip of industrial alcohol from a stopped train.

THE RIGHT TO RIDE ANYWHERE ON THE BUS ...

I forget where I first saw the lament that the Civil Rights era desegregated the buses just when Fordism plus lots of public money for roads rendered the bus the mode of transportation almost exclusively for the poor.  In the cities, the buses became property of municipal transportation authorities, all too often the unglamorous stable-mates of the shiny streetcars.  Deregulation led to lower fares for the intercity bus services, but that also meant the withdrawal of Greyhound, Trailways, and the rest of the cross-country network as we once knew it, and today's cut-rate intercity services handle ticketing and itineraries online, not exactly convenient for the down-on-your-luck drifter who has a few bucks and wants to go to someplace more promising sometime today.

But the in-migration of upscale types into the big cities might also be leading to yet another fracture in that urban Democrat coalition of the trendy and the downtrodden.

Business leaders: I know you really want a transit system that a more diverse group of people will use, but you can’t promote transit while insulting the people who use it now.  It doesn’t make sense.  Nobody will choose to join a category of people, “transit riders,” that you’re marking as unimportant or even despised.

In the course of my transit planning work in several US cities, I’ve been quietly taken aside by a downtown business leader and told that of course those ugly buses have to be gotten off of the main street, and put out on some back street where the loading docks are.  And sadly, I have sometimes been told the same by advocates of public space, often credentialed New Urbanists, who insist that their aesthetic disapproval of the bus should outweigh people’s need for useful, reliable transit service.  Most of these latter group don’t really understand the impact of those comments, but I see the effects: remote, unsafe and/or inoperable bus facilities hidden from the public eye.

Now and then someone makes the class-segregation narrative explicit.  For example, in one US city where I worked years ago, a downtown business leader explained to me that “those people” waiting for buses on the main street were deterring customers from visiting businesses, and “making people feel unsafe.”  The candor was refreshing: the problem isn’t the buses. The problem is unwanted people who do not deserve to be respected by the design of the city — including, of course, many of the business community’s own employees.

Some of what the essayist mentions is a variation on the canard that extensions of the transit authority's network, whether with additional busses, or with the shiny full size Lionel toys, simply facilitate the mobility of burglars and muggers.  But that "aesthetic disapproval?"  The Fatal Conceit of Credentialed Experts (and their public radio, and their wine, and their tax-subsidized galleries) in a nutshell.  Run the busses in the alleys!  Put the bus stops at the employee entrances!  Keep the pedestrian malls neat and pretty!  (That's the same logic by which some cruise line operators maintain fenced compounds with the resorts and the beaches on otherwise impoverished Caribbean islands ... only contact with vetted employees in proper uniform.)

Market tests matter.

Welcome the buses and their passengers.  Not every business will thrive, but that’s capitalism.  In the long run, you’ll have a city where people want to be.

That might not be what the Chamber of Commerce types want to hear, but how often does an advocate of competition in the abstract want protection for his line of business codified?

A MUGGING BY REALITY.

Sarah Hoyt picks up a reminiscence by Brad Torgersen that coins, or circulates, the felicitous phrase ctrl-left.

I can’t be with the authoritarian control freaks — people who fight the so-called alt-Right, by inventing an even more problematic ctrl-Left. Not even if the ctrl-Left are the heirs to history, like they always claim they are.

The claim is incorrect. Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

My personal suspicion — as someone who recognizes that history is not a straight-line ramp of destiny, but rather a variable waveform of deliberate action twined with chance — is that nobody owns the future. The more hotly and adamantly somebody claims to own the future, like Khrushchev slamming his shoe at the United Nations, the more sure I am this person (or this movement) is writing its own epitaph. Authoritarians always fail. Always. If not sooner, then later. Because human beings are unruly. We seldom do as we’re told. Not even when it’s the cuddly cudgel of compassionate dictatorship banging down across our skulls.

Read and understand.

There's also this, which the people doubling down on invalidating Mr Trump's presidency (ah, the irony, because of the authoritarian undertones to it) ought to pay close attention to.

So the Left can shame and shun and label people all day every day, but when those people pull the curtain and prepare to punch their card at election time, what does all the shunning, shaming, and labeling accomplish? In Tom Walker’s words, you get President Trump! (Trust a Brit to see it clearly, just as my buddy in the Joint Task Force did.) But the Left seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from Trump’s win. Instead of pushing the PAUSE button and doing a wholesale review of both tactics and rhetoric, the Left have doubled down. The name-calling is even louder. Even more people are being thrown into the “basket of deplorables.” At this point, the Left are doing so much angry eviction — kicking people out of the auditorium — they’re liable to wind up shouting at empty seats. The Left are so high on their own supply of smug self-righteousness, they cannot be bothered to come down from their ivory tower, eat some humble pie, and talk to the rest of us like we’re decent people.

That's likely to make the cold civil war hotter.

THE EVOLUTIONARY STABILITY OF OTHERING.

I've frequently hinted at this possibility, here's a peer-reviewed investigation of the hypothesis.

[Arizona State psychologists Steven] Neuberg and [Catherine] Cottrell are both adamant to point out that just because prejudices are a fundamental and natural part of what makes us human, that doesn't mean that learning can't take place and that responses can't be dampened.

"People sometimes assume that because we say prejudice has evolved roots we are saying that specific prejudices can't be changed. That's simply not the case," Neuberg says. "What we think and feel and how we behave is typically the result of complex interactions between biological tendencies and learning experiences. Evolution may have prepared our minds to be prejudiced, but our environment influences the specific targets of those prejudices and how we act on them."

That's no surprise: being receptive to mutually beneficial interactions with people who are in some way different also confers evolutionary advantages, and strategies that are safe for new adopters can be more robust than strategies that exclude all but old adopters.  As William A. Levinson notes,

The Romans' development of an extensive road network along with uniform Roman laws, meanwhile, may have similarly counteracted ethnic bigotry. The only armies were of course Roman legions under very strict Roman discipline, and bandits stayed away if they knew what was good for them. Merchants could travel safely, and there was no need to fear violence from them. There was far less need to regard strangers as dangerous, although this changed quickly when the Empire collapsed; hence the Dark Ages.

Today, of course, we can talk to somebody on the other side of the world from our own homes, and few people live their entire lives within 20 miles of the places of their birth. Strangers, at least those who share almost universal basic values as to how people should behave toward one another, are no longer dangerous. This makes prejudice against people of other ethnicities obsolete and dysfunctional.

Obsolete and dysfunctional, provided there are relatively few strangers who opt out of the universal basic values.  Deconstruct those, though, and stranger danger returns, instantaneous communication notwithstanding.

A THOUSAND YEAR CROSSOVER EVENT?

Season Four of Vikings just wrapped up with the Sons of Ragnar Lothbrok at war with each other and bent on different things.  But with The History Channel about to launch another speculative show, this time involving the Knights Templar, and with their continued attempt to outdo Geraldo Rivera's attempts to find Al Capone's treasure -- that, mercifully, over in two hours -- on Oak Island, here's how it might play out.

I needed a new Saxon character who might be able to stand up to the Vikings and I discovered these people called warrior bishops. They're real people and Heahmund was a real [person] and he was a precursor of the Knights of Templar.

Floki, in a quest for spiritual enlightenment, sails his new boat off to Nova Scotia, er, Vinland, where a Skraeling shaman enlightens him about the Great Spirit.  He later returns to Kattegat to take up his role as Seer.  (There was a later Floki involved in explorations of the Western Ocean.)

For him, his previous life is over. He's going to submit himself to the gods. He's going to get into a boat and he's going to sail away at the mercy of the tides and the mercy of the gods. He just feels he has to change his life completely. The end of the season is marked with huge change in Floki's life. But for all the fans, everyone who loves Floki as I do, don't worry. He's going to be around. He's going to do some pretty spectacular things in his new life.

Bjorn Ironside and Halfdan return to the Mediterranean in quest of a great golden bell (oh, wait, that's so 1964) and while Halfdan is carving his initials on a railing at Santa Sophia, they are told of great religious artifacts on the Anatolian coast.  These turn out to be the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant.

Bjorn comes back to lead the great army against the killers of his father, but as he said at the end of the season, he wants to go back to the Mediterranean. And he goes back to the Mediterranean and boy, does that pay off. We shot scenes in Morocco that you won't believe.

On their return, they are intercepted by galleys crewed by the Knights of Malta, or perhaps by pirates operating out of Penzance, and the treasures find their way to Winchester Cathedral, or perhaps to a Roman vault in Swindon.  Later, one of the warrior bishops of the Knights Templar, who has heard of these vast lands to the west, spirits the Grail and the Ark away to a hiding place off the coast of this new found land.

COLORED WATER. BLUE CANS. DUMB GUYS. MUST BE SUPER BOWL SUNDAY.

That didn't stop Anheuser-Busch from sidelining the Clydesdales and the Bud Bowl in favor of what might be a rebuke to Our President.  But whatever Germanic tradition Adolphus Busch brought to St. Louis was watered down long ago.  "Beer Advocate and Rate Beer placed one Anheuser-Busch product, Natural Light, at the top of their lists of America's very worst beers."

We can drink better, dear reader.

THAT SHIP SAILED LONG AGO.

Truthdig's Chris Hedges proposes to subvert Mr Trump and Make America Ungovernable.  But the seeds of the incipient fascism he fears were planted long ago, and not by the Koch brothers or Amway.  "Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the 'silken threads' of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the 'iron chains' of dictatorship will impose social cohesion."  Habit, tradition, and legality have been deconstructed, thank you very much, as Othering, Privilege, and Technologies of Oppression.

And now Mr Hedges wants to present himself as on the side of the angels?

If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be easily crushed.

We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority.

It's a little late for that.

IS ROSENDALE A RURAL FERGUSON?

That's Rosendale, Wisconsin, at the crossing of State Highway 26 (linking Interstate 41 at Oshkosh and Interstate 94 at Watertown) and State Highway 23 (Sheboygan west to Waupun and beyond).  I've passed through it a few times on a convenient (now that much of 26 is to expressway standards) route from DeKalb to Oshkosh or Green Bay, without getting a speeding ticket.  That's a tribute to prudence, as the place has long been notorious as a speed trap, so much so that the convenience stores sell t-shirts.

Local officials will defend the speed enforcement as providing a safer environment for pedestrians, but there might be something more afoot.

Rosendale gets $30 of the fine for each ticket it writes for low- and intermediate-level speeding citations that ends in a conviction. Income from traffic citations averaged just over $100,000 from 2013 through 2015, or about 14 percent of the village’s revenue, according to village clerk Emily Wirkus.

That's the Ferguson connection ... Ferguson being the notorious St. Louis suburb that lost out in the suburban growth ponzi scheme, local business taxes and utility revenues being inadequate to meet city payroll and maintain the roads and water mains in a state of good repair, and local police perhaps serving as tax collectors issuing citations for defective tail lights and the like.  Perhaps the same downward mobility of once-vibrant suburbs is also affecting rural towns that served as market centers in the days when farmers brought crops to the elevator and the railroad using a wagon and team.

RALLYING WITH GROWING CONFIDENCE.

Basketball highlight tapes are generally about the scoring, and there has been plenty of that from the Northern Illinois women.

"Every high school kid," second-year coach Lisa Carlsen said, "when they walk into the gym, they shoot the basketball. They don't walk in and do a defensive slide.

"But it's a lot of work. Everybody wants to play up-tempo, but not everybody understands the work. We are intense running in the offseason. The kids joke all the time that they hired a track coach, not a basketball coach.

"It's a lot to ask of them, but they are also reaping the benefits of it. We're not just killing them in the offseason, then not seeing the reward. They are definitely seeing the reward."

The way to get an up-tempo team in trouble, though, is to take them out of their comfort zone. That's what the Wisconsin men's teams have been demonstrating for years.  Or sometimes, as we noted a few weeks back, nothing works right and an objectively weaker team wins.

Over the weekend, Western Michigan, a middle-of-the-division team, came to town for Alumni Weekend, or Winter Family Days, depending on which branch of public affairs you talk to, and a number of past players who were pretty good at lighting up the scoreboard were watching.

"You see how many points they score? I don't care what level basketball it is, you have to respect that," said E.C. Hill, who became the last Huskie to be named an All-American when she earned the honor in 1993-94. "They're highly skilled. I think maybe we made them a little nervous, but they got the W. When you're scoring 100 points and people are scoring 30 points, they make you watch them.

"No disrespect to the other coaches, but everybody likes offense. Everybody likes seeing you put the ball in the basket. That's part of it. When they score 100 points and they're first in the MAC, you got to go. You want them to knock our banners down."

It's a lot of work getting there.

In just her second year as the head coach, Lisa Carlsen not only has secured the Huskies' first winning season since 2006-07, but has the players and fans – and alums – eyeing a potential trip to the NCAA Tournament. If there's anybody that understands the excitement of playing a high-scoring style of basketball and the difficulty of turning around a program, it's Carol Owens.

Owens, an NIU Hall of Famer who was a star player for the NCAA Tournament-bound 1989-90 team that scored 94.5 points per game, took over as head coach for the Huskies in 2005-06 – a year after they went 7-21.

In just her second season, the Huskies went 19-12 and it's the last time they've had a winning record.

"It is extremely hard and I'm sure she's coached a lot of different teams and knew what style fit this team," said Owens, who went 66-81 in five seasons at NIU and is now an assistant coach at Notre Dame. "I just like that (this season's team) can score. It reminds me of when we played. We averaged 90-some points per game. They do it here.

"I think they play so well together and so unselfishly and that kind of reminds me of the teams that we had. Nobody cared who the leading scorer was this game or that game, they shared the ball and wanted to win."

I've noticed that these players seem to be feeding off their teammates successes, and they're enjoying being out there.  No stage fright, either, with all those past stars looking on.

That's a little off the scoring pace of most games.  There's also a fourteen-point second quarter deficit erased up there.

It wasn't the best outing for a Huskie offense that averaged 89.1 points per game heading into the day – they trailed 50-45 heading into the fourth quarter – but they took the lead for good on a 3-pointer by [Cassidy] Glenn to put them ahead 62-59 with 2:01.

"This was a nice win, but it really pushed us out of our comfort zone," [Ally] Lehman said. "Usually against all the other teams, we've been able to drive and kick and hit the three and they pushed us to try something else."

The Huskies trailed 57-53 with 4:07 remaining in the game heading into a media timeout. [Courtney] Woods said that this year's Huskies felt differently in the huddle than in years' past.

"I think it looks different this year because we feel that we deserve to win games," she said. "This year we're winning a bit more, so we feel like we're good enough to toughen those games out. ... I never thought we weren't going to win that game. I think we were just waiting and waiting and when Cassidy made that three, it was a switch and we were in position to win it."

They responded with a 10-2 run following the timeout to take the lead for good.

It's making for an entertaining winter.

DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR MARGINALIZATION.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson suggests that the Democrats fight the nomination of Judge Gorsuch as the way to enlarge the party's base.

Senate Democrats should use any and all means, including the filibuster, to block confirmation of President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. They will almost surely fail. But sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war.

This is purely about politics. Republicans hold the presidency, majorities in the House and Senate, 33 governorships and total control of the legislatures in 32 states. If the Democratic Party is going to become relevant again outside of its coastal redoubts, it has to start winning some elections -- and turning the other cheek on this court fight is not the way to begin.

Seriously? It's precisely the antics of the denizens of those coastal redoubts that got Mr Trump elected in the first place.

Substantively, Mr Obama has been a failure, certainly overseas, but the two-lies-for-the-price-of-one Affordable Care Act and the non-stimulus stimulus, both enacted with the help of reconciliation, a filibuster-resistant Senate, and a few political favors to Nebraska, for good measure.

And the gentry leadership of the Democrat coalition has been little help to the masses rendered helpless by fifty years of the Great Society and Model Cities and all the other Good Intentions. "Somewhere along the way [Democrats] stopped fighting for the little guy and became the party of the smug, educated elites who look down on those with less education and deem them unable or unworthy of being able to make personal decisions for their own lives." Wishful thinking. There has, all the way back to Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, been this strain of Four of Five Experts Agree, backed up by, inter alia, policy research demonstrating that a properly informed planner can produce Pareto-preferable outcomes.

It's precisely to those folks, though, that Mr Robinson wishes to speak.

The party's progressive base is angry and mobilized. Many Democrats are convinced that FBI Director James Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin decided the election. The very idea of a Trump presidency sparked vast, unprecedented demonstrations in Washington and other cities the day after the inauguration.

In the two weeks since, Trump has only piled outrage upon outrage, as far as progressives are concerned. He took the first steps toward building his ridiculous wall along the southern border, but with U.S. taxpayers' dollars, not Mexico's. He squelched government experts who work on climate change. He weakened the Affordable Care Act in the hope that it would begin to collapse, which would make it easier for Congress to kill it. He displayed comic ignorance of our history (somebody please tell him that Frederick Douglass has been dead since 1895). He signed executive orders banning entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from around the world, an action so appalling that huge crowds gathered at major airports in protest.

And Trump is just getting started. Democrats cannot even limit the damage, let alone reverse it, without more power than they have now.

Yes, but doubling down on the appeal to the base, who for now have the leisure time to protest, doesn't seem like the way to win new friends and influence new voters.

So what does the lower-income, white, evangelical from southwestern Ohio share with the upper-income moderate Democrat from outside Grand Rapids? The factors that led them to unite into a coalition to vote for Donald Trump were manifold: stagnant incomes, frustration with Washington, a sense of alienation from coastal elites, et cetera. This unity has created an identity-based voting bloc out of Trump’s white supporters in much the same way African-Americans have voted as a bloc for Democrats despite their disparate circumstances.

The way in which the organizers (as opposed to the participants, what little I saw of the day-after-the-inauguration march in Chicago looked like an excuse to get outside on a very warm January day) of the womens' marches got into their usual identity-politics silos probably isn't the best way to appeal to normals.

Trump’s voters have a point. They contend that political correctness is a cudgel used by the left only to silence the demographically undesirable (white, male, and rural). They chafe as the selfless members of law enforcement and the military are denigrated by the influential. They see their livelihoods choked off by regulation and they see their communities transformed by those who do not share their culture or values. What’s more, they are told that all these concerns and the associated sense of estrangement are bigotry for which they must be punished.

Trump tapped into this resentment, and it was remarkably successful. But make no mistake: this isn’t conservatism.

To Mr Robinson, however, it looks enough like conservative populism to propose a similar populist outreach.

Republicans made an all-out effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their motives were purely political; some GOP senators railed against policies they had favored in the past. Ultimately, they failed.  Obamacare became law.

But this losing battle gave tremendous energy and passion to the tea party movement -- which propelled Republicans to a sweeping victory in the 2010 midterm election. It is hard not to see an analogous situation on the Democratic side right now.

Democrats cannot stop Gorsuch from being confirmed. But they can hearten and animate the party's base by fighting this nomination tooth and nail, even if it means giving up some of the backslapping comity of the Senate cloakroom. They can inspire grass-roots activists to fight just as hard to win back state legislatures and governorships. They can help make 2018 a Democratic year.

Yes, that law, two lies for the price of one, converted the Democrats into a rump coastal party, an uneasy coalition of symbolic analysts, government employees, and dependents on the public purse.

Retrieved from Washington Post.

A related article notes, Democrats are basically extinct in the South.  What Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan could not do, Barack Obama did.  And how, exactly, does Mr Robinson hope to reach out to people who might have left the Democrats for the Tea Party, or who didn't bother to vote at all, until Mr Trump spoke to them?

MAKE HIGHER EDUCATION HIGHER AGAIN.

Conservative students, or perhaps bored students, at Berkeley, bring in a provocateur, and the local crybullies -- not necessarily students -- do what comes naturally.  This time, though, President Trump sends out a tweet.

The violent protests at UC Berkeley that ran Milo Yiannopoulos off campus were probably the best public relations gift the young administration has received to date. They also gave the President an opportunity to do what he does best: Exploit a political disconnect between elites and the median voter (i.e., on special snowflake ideology on college campuses) and then make an outrageous suggestion via a spontaneous tweet designed to send his opponents into fits of hysteria that would discredit them further. In this case, Trump raised hackles by suggesting that the federal government might cut off funding to California’s flagship public university.

As governor, Ronald Reagan didn't have a social media account, but he, too, used Berkeley as a foil for his ambitions.

That's probably not the best way to deal with the one-party state that passes for higher education.  But I like the guerrilla theater option.

Universities should generally be held accountable by market pressures and in the court of public opinion. The wanton use of federal investigations to bring pressure to bear on universities carries an enormous risk of abuse and politicization—as indeed occurred during the Obama years. And in all likelihood, the Trump Administration’s Department of Education will agree with this assessment.

That said, if the candidate wants to hassle the People’s Republic of Berkeley, he has a much easier route for doing so: Announce that he will go to the campus to give a major address on political correctness. The Secret Service won’t let fireworks-wielding anarchists shut him down.

Well, as candidate he did cancel a rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago's basketball arena.  But a major presidential address at Aaron Rodgers's old stadium, tweaking the assembled academics?  Heck, I'd tune into MSNBC to watch it.

RECYCLING MORE STEEL.

Charter Wire, which maintain a small fleet of private rail cars in Milwaukee and have made Saukville the Pittsburgh of Wisconsin, will be expanding their presence in Cleveland.  Look not, though, for massive works in the Flats.

Charter Steel, a division of Charter Manufacturing, is a leading American supplier of carbon and alloy steel bar, rod and wire products with distribution and manufacturing facilities in Wisconsin and Ohio. Built in 1996 and purchased by Charter Steel in 2002, the Cleveland Rolling Mill was designed to roll and process high-quality rod and bar from a full range of billets, including those produced from semi-finished blooms and basic oxygen furnaces. In October of 2012, Charter Steel announced plans to expand its electric art furnace in the Cuyahoga Heights steel mill. The plant employs about 330 workers.

Scrap sorting, melting, casting, and rolling no longer call for the large industrial armies.

Construction is expected to begin this spring, with the plant opening in the second half of 2018. Charter said the project will create about 25 jobs and represents the largest investment in the family-owned company’s 81-year history.

Steel work is still hot, dirty, and hazardous, but fewer people are exposed to those risks, and they are capable of producing tonnages that the immigrant workers of the late nineteenth century could not conceive of.

HIGHER EDUCATION BECLOWNS ITSELF.

Yes, tomorrow is Groundhog Day.  But I could post such a post whether it's Groundhog Day or Decoration Day or Circus Day, well, no, I'd take the day off and go to the circus.

The folks at Power Line turned up a doozy.

In Reality Bites Back, Jennifer L. Pozner states, “Women are bitches. Women are stupid. Women are incompetent at work and failures at home. Women are gold diggers. How do we know? Because reality TV tells us so.” Not only does reality TV shape what we think about the “way things are,” it also shapes how we think about and perform our own subjectivities, “who we are” as gendered, sexed, raced, classed humans. If the messages sent by reality TV are that women are incompetent, stupid, gold-digging bitches, what are women doing with those messages? Are we incorporating such messages, and writing them on our bodies? Repurposing them? Reproducing them? Actively and strongly resisting them? In other words, what is the work (on subjectivity production) of watching reality TV (watching other women being watched)?

The purpose of this dissertation was to take up that question by exploring the performative experiences of three women watching the 17th season of ABC’s The Bachelor. Using duoethnography, we explored how we challenged, (re)produced, assigned, and constructed gendered subjectivities both for ourselves and for each other through our performances within leisure spaces surrounding The Bachelor.

I am not making this stuff up.  "In other words, three women taped themselves watching TV, then talked about it afterward, and turned it into a Ph.D! Time to amend Socrates: the self-referential life is not worth living."

And here I spent the better part of a year gathering information on the location, inputs, outputs, and shipments of fully-integrated steel plants and expanded that information over the years.  But it's unlikely that the resulting research would come in for mocking on Real Peer Review.  And if it did, perhaps that would get me a few more readers.  The reaction of the culture-studies sillies is different.

The folks at Reel Peer Review take a lot of heat for giving wider exposure to the tendentiousness of so much academic output these days. But wouldn’t you think academics would want their work known by a larger public audience? The fact that they get angry when people read their abstracts (the underlying journal articles are usually even more unreadable) tells you something.

Yes, you strip the technical jargon out of a lot of academic work and the findings seem straightforward, common-sensical, sometimes even trivial.  But the value of the work is in confirming the straightforward, and if you come up with some surprises that are not so straightforward, then you have a solid reputation.  Why can't the culture-studies sillies offer even that explanation?

RESPECT EMERGENCE.

See "Top-Down Frustration in a Bottom‑Up World" by finance maven David Smick.

True economic success emerges largely as a result of behavioral changes from the bottom up—not the top down. In his book The Evolu­tion of Everything, Matt Ridley points out the fascination by elites with top-down design rather than bottom-up “evolution” when it comes to major achievements in science, economics, and social change. Most breakthroughs evolve without architects and a grand design. They appear suddenly from the bottom up.

Indeed, we live in a world where the elites are constantly being sur­prised, whether by the rise of Facebook or of ISIS. Observes energy-pol­icy strategist J. Robinson West: “The generals always fight the last war. An example is the U.S. energy surge. It was the independents, not the major oil companies or the federal government, that caused the shale boom, responding to market forces. The generals were clueless because big bureaucracies don’t work anymore.”

Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please.  Do you really think, dear reader, that Wise Experts who have trouble managing the Routine can really Manage Disruption in the Public Interest?

There might be one good thing to come out of the ongoing insurrections.  There's nothing like a market test to break the tyranny of the quarterly report.

This absolute obsession with the big, the established, and the corpo­rate over the small, the new, and the entrepreneurial permeates Wash­ington, DC. But this bias has come at the expense of economic growth. So has the preoccupation with short-term financial gain over long-term prosperity for all.

As a result, average working families, both in the United States and all over the world, have sunk down into the muck of economic disappoint­ment and heartache. The economic strategists are at a loss. They thought the global economic and financial landscape was under their control.

Oops.

TEN YEARS AGO.

We were contemplating additional Amtrak service between Chicago and Milwaukee, with an extension to Madison.

The Madison extension died in the Wisconsin Legislature, a casualty of misleading framing by opponents and inadequate explanation of its merits by supporters.

Additional schedules east of Milwaukee?  Still hung up in wrangling over the placement of sidings to recess freight trains.  And connectivity at Chicago?  Each regional route is a negotiation involving Amtrak, the contracting freight carrier, and one or more state departments of transportation.

There are hints of yet another summer to come, and I'm still fighting it out on the same line.