STILL A REGRESSIVE TRANSFER?

Dimitrios Halikias and Richard Reeves of Brookings evaluate the effectiveness of the state colleges and universities.  Some of the news is not good.  "Just 20 percent of America’s selective public universities manage to accomplish both objectives—to be both ladders [providing upward income mobility] and labs [establishing a reputation for scholarship]. Twenty-five percent are laggards, failing on both counts."  They don't quite say "subprime party school," but consider this.  "The majority of low-mobility universities also produce little to no research."  And the egalitarians who are offended by the reality of mediocre students from wealthy neighborhoods matriculating at a rate higher than that of strong students from poor neighborhoods will not be surprised.  "Almost thirty percent of students at low-mobility, low-research institutions come from the top quintile of earners, while under 7 percent come from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution." Safety school!

And the regressive transfer is there.

[W]e estimate that students from top-quintile families at these laggard public universities receive almost two billion dollars in annual subsidies. Such expenditures seem almost indefensible. Why should taxpayers pay to send relatively affluent students to public universities that both fail to produce research and fail to facilitate social mobility? There is a strong case that this money could be spent more wisely.

Don't apologize for being selective, and look for that excess capacity in what I call access-assessment-remediation-retention.  I like "laggards" in place of my lengthy formulation.

But there is trouble, even among the ladders, notes longtime higher education skeptic Richard Vedder.

Only 70 schools, 20 percent of the sample, were cited as the “leaders” in higher education (having high-income mobility among the students, along with high levels of research among the faculty). I took six schools from the top 20 on that list: the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of New Orleans, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Wayne State University, the University of South Alabama and Cleveland State University. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education website College Scorecard, I observed that at all of these schools, a large majority (over 60 percent) of full-time students failed to graduate in six years –well above the national average. These “leaders” did not do what many of us consider Job One: graduate entering students.

A decidedly alternative interpretation: many schools prey upon the poor and academically unprepared: they admit them, telling them college is a ticket to a better, solidly middle-class life, knowing full well that most of them will fail to graduate –but will incur large student loan debts (at “leader” Wayne State, over 60 percent of students who borrowed had failed to pay at least one dollar of their student loans back –three years after attending). Yet these schools sucker academics of the Thomas Piketty perspective into believing they are “leaders” in the quest for intergenerational income mobility. A better than decent case can be made that some of the Halikias-Reeves “leader” universities should actually die: their social costs exceed the social benefits.

That might be equally true of any institution of higher education that will not recognize its work is the same as the Ivies and the state flagships, but achieving a political consensus to defund whole campuses and limit enrollments to the college-ready, -willing, and -able doesn't seem likely.

But something that cannot go on, won't.

LIMIT OTHER FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.

There isn't enough traffic in Hawaii for tandem and triple trailer rigs, but Jim "Travel and Trains" Loomis encounters them when he's on the mainland.  (On some of his cross-country trip reports, it would be interesting to know how many triples are being kept off the interstates because they're on container and van trains.)

I have no idea what sort of safety record these double and triple units have, but it’s got to be scary for other drivers who have to negotiate around them.

It is, particularly given the free-for all the rig operators engage in to get in ahead of the competition.

On top of that, there’s the latest device the big trucking companies are using to skirt the law and increase their profits: they turn their drivers into independent contractors. Since, technically, they are no longer employees, the trucking company is no longer responsible if the drivers choose to be on the road 12 or 14 hours a day. Or even more.

It's worse than that, but the fleet operators who hire in these contractors have yet to grasp why there's a driver shortage.

And now comes one more thing to worry about. There is a proposal pending in Congress to increase the maximum allowable weight for trucks from 80,000 pounds to 91,000 pounds.

Holy Gross Tonnage, Batman! Did you realize that some of these big trucks highballing along our highways could weigh as much as forty tons? And now they want to raise the limit by another five-and-a-half tons?

It’s estimated that some 60,000 bridges in this country are potentially unsafe. Swell! Then let us, by all means, allow the truckers to carry an additional five-and-half tons over those bridges and out onto whatever Interstate highway is nearby. There’s too damn much government regulation in our lives anyway.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say there's too much rent-seeking. That Congressional mandate becomes another unfunded mandate for the states, which are running short of money to fix the roads they've already built.

Something that cannot go on, won't.

POLITICS DIVIDES, TRADE UNITES.

"Additional steel tariffs would actually damage the U.S. economy."  Martin Feldstein, Alan Greenspan, Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Joseph Stiglitz, Laura Tyson inter alia concur.  Additional background.

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE.

Destination: Freedom will cease weekly distribution effective 31 July, 2017.  The National Corridors Initiative organization and web presence will continue.

LIDICE, INDIANA.

Kurt Schlichter's Indian Country is a warning, inspired by the attempts of the self-styled resistance and the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academic Complex's efforts to impose their vision on the country.  "Maybe someday we will realize that the path we are currently on ends in a place that looks a lot like Kosovo...  The people there chose expedience and violence over the hard work of sustaining the rule of law."

Is that the course the United States are on?  Book Review N^o. 14 will not offer spoilers.  I purchased the paperback edition.  Is its publication in large type with a lot of white space a statement that in future, print editions of books will have in mind the deteriorating eyes of aging Baby Boomers, as everyone younger can still pick up the words on portable screens?

The events of Indian Country take place shortly after the partition of what was the United States, thus serving as a prequel to People's Republic, a prequel that none-the-less allows plenty of opportunity to describe the effects of all sorts of arms and ammunition, as well as to make fun of the pronoun pretensions of the preening progressives running the People's Republic.

But those preening freakazoids of unknown body type, while probably older versions of these future Morale Conditioners from Evergreen College, none-the-less have historical precedent for coming up with the muscle they will deploy in Indiana.

Retrieved from Bret Weinstein's Twitter postings.

The formula is simple enough:  arm some former felons, tell them they are facing a race and class enemy, condition them to think of that enemy is "deplorable" (an Americanized version of Untermenschen), then turn them loose.

Mr Schlichter suggests that, sales and other interest permitting, there might be additional stories about this partition of the country.  People's Republic has a hint that the principal character might be back at work in the failing part of the country; that the protagonists were able to block two Interstate Highways and get the leaders of Hillaryland to contemplate starvation of the cities suggests another set of possibilities.  That somehow, the nachalstvo in Chicago or on Manhattan or in Washington City or in San Francisco still have their cafes and craft beers also raises possibilities, more along the lines of Roumanians turning on the Ceaucescu clan.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IT TAKES SOMETHING TO BEAT NOTHING.

The American Conservative reposted a lament by longtime Republican court intellectual Bruce Bartlett.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.

I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.

His fear at the time was that his allegedly conservative brethren failed to have a message that might appeal to, well, an electoral majority in a presidential election, and to the relevant majorities in elections to the Senate and House of Representatives. Then the Affordable Care Act came unglued, and the Obama stimulus packages failed to stimulate, and, well, you know ...

SOMETIMES IT IS SIMPLE.

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff gets the last word, and the deep word, on David Brooks's disquisition on food snobbery.

Brooks has it right at the beginning of his article. It’s all about behavior codes. If you get them right, it doesn’t make that much difference what neighborhood you start out in, and you don’t even need to know what a latte is.

I'm discovering other public intellectuals with platforms bigger than mine who are discovering the same thing, and hope to report on those discoveries shortly.

YOU'D THINK THEY'D UNDERSTAND THIS.

By Attacking Western Civ, the Left Empowers the Alt-Right.  Didn't the Communist Party pick up a lot of sympathizers, fellow-travellers, and useful idiots when hardcore segregationists suggested that any effort to protect the right to vote as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment, and the freedom to use public facilities, as guaranteed in a number of ways, and the opportunity to participate in any housing market, which is the quintessence of free enterprise, were all communist plots?  (Yes, there were people who thought that way.  Do your own research.)

Apparently, the current crop of intelligentsia, if that's an accurate description, don't get it.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

Put another way: if a defense of the traditions of free minds, free markets, and skeptical inquiry become signifiers of the political right, I am directing my course to starboard.

But to grasp that point requires thought.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

There's still a lot of work to be done: simply change the inventory to read "freedom from religion, the rules are a system of power, property is theft, popular sovereignty is a scam, and equal dignity implies privilege."  But cleaning up after the deconstruction is work.

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS, AND STACKER OF BURRITOS.

Truth to tell, you can find just about any kind of Mexican (or Central American, or Caribbean) food in Chicago, at any level of extravagance, in any kind of atmosphere.  But the division of labor is different in metropolitan areas.

As we can see, the largest cities in the country dominate this list. Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles hold the top three positions. Cities on the list are from all over the country, though there is an abundance of cities from the Southwest (especially Texas).

This list is a bit disingenuous though, and I’ll explain why. As we said at the beginning, we are looking for the cities with the most Mexican food - when I hear that, I think of independently owned restaurants or smaller chains. This list above includes many fast food and fast casual chains that many taco/burrito enthusiasts would not consider authentic, for example, Taco Bell.

But the enthusiasts know where to look, or they develop their own local knowledge.

And the article (via Marginal Revolution) hasn't considered the taco trucks.

WAL-MART SHOULD GET A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

And other cheerful tales about the benefits of voluntary exchange and trade-tested betterments, from Voluntary Xchange.

INSTEAD OF DONNING SACKCLOTH AND ASHES?

Perhaps the reason Chris "Tingles" Matthews is so over-wrought about Our President these days is to atone for his efforts to ... get entertainer Donald Trump thinking about national office.

His one hour show included several such clips, in which national affairs or public office might never have come up in the course of discussing, say, Celebrity Apprentice, or New York infrastructure, or whatever frivolity fills in the minutes before there was any Bush Derangement Sydrome or Obama Hagiography, or which might have offered a bit of summer relief from same.

But somehow, Tingles steers the conversation to something involving national affairs and public office; and note, it's all respectful and on occasion insightful or provocative.

The spittle starts flying only after that famous escalator ride, and we see greater escalation as the Trump candidacy goes from entertainment to there's something happening to acceptance speeches and inauguration.

Watch, review the evidence, click the other clips if you wish, and make up your own mind.

TOO MUCH WATER FOR THIS ELEPHANT.

It takes a lot of water to sweep an elephant out to sea, but it happens.  Fortunately, the Sri Lankan navy understands Semper Paratus.

Photos posted on the navy’s website show the animal trying to keep its trunk above the water as divers approached it. Elephants use their trunks as a natural snorkel and have a unique lung structure among mammals that allows them to withstand variations in pressure above and below the water.

Genetically, they are also close relatives of manatees and dugongs, both water-dwelling animals.

Biologists have speculated that elephants might have first reached Sri Lanka by taking a similar route to the animal retrieved on Monday, swimming from southern India.

See you on down the road.

WILL LESS INFORMATION LOOSEN PRIORS?

The people responsible for public relations at San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit will not be releasing security camera video of wilding incidents on the trains and in the stations.

[Transit authority director Debora] Allen told us the agency issued an explanation for why it is being tight-lipped about the thefts.

“To release these videos would create a high level of racially insensitive commentary toward the district,” she was told. “And in addition it would create a racial bias in the riders against minorities on the trains.”

According to a memo distributed to BART Directors, the agency won’t do a press release on the June 30 theft because it was a “petty crime” that would make BART look “crime ridden.” Furthermore, it would “unfairly affect and characterize riders of color, leading to sweeping generalizations in media reports.”

It gets better.

[Rapid Transit general manager Kerry] Hamill responded, “If we were to regularly feed the news media video of crimes on our system that involve minority suspects, particularly when they are minors, we would certainly face questions as to why we were sensationalizing relatively minor crimes and perpetuating false stereotypes in the process.” And added her opinion of the media: “My view is that the media’s real interest in the videos of youth phone snatching incidents isn’t the desire for transparency but rather the pursuit of ratings. They know that video of these events will drive clicks to their websites and viewers to their programs because people are motivated by fear.”

Maybe. On the other hand, pretending that the rapid transit is a safe space when it is not doesn't do much for ridership.

Let's say that there's not a lot of reconsideration of priors going on in the comments section.  Even in San Francisco.

ENCOURAGING FURTHER TAX EVASION?

There's a compact between Illinois and Wisconsin under which Wisconsin residents who work in Illinois pay Wisconsin income tax.  Wisconsin cuts Illinois a check to make up the difference.  In the wake of the recent, this time apparently permanent, increase in the Illinois income tax rate, Wisconsin is on the hook for a bigger check.

Because of a tax reciprocity agreement enacted in 1973, Wisconsin residents who work in Illinois file their taxes in Wisconsin to avoid filing two tax returns. Under the agreement, whichever state has more revenue as a result must reimburse the other state.

The effect will be a $51 million loss to Wisconsin’s general fund in the next budget.

That's a first approximation: for instance when those Illinois workers fuel their car in Wisconsin, and shop at the Pleasant Prairie outlet mall rather than Gurnee Mills, and buy cheese in Wisconsin for consumption in Wisconsin, Illinois gets no cut of that tax.  (I'm being only partially facetious: there's a Use Tax entry on the Illinois income tax forms, and the instructions stipulate that if a flatlander buy cheese in Wisconsin for consumption in Illinois, there's a one percent food tax due.)

Reason's Eric Boehm correctly contemplates the follow-on consequences.

Wisconsin, however, could still come out ahead. A 32 percent income tax increase is sure to drive more residents out of Illinois. The Land of Lincoln lost more than 37,000 residents in 2016, the third consecutive year that Illinois lost more people than any other state.

And that was before a massive tax hike.

No wonder Gov. Scott Walker is rolling out the red carpet for the exiles.

When you figure in the Combine's efforts to tax businesses even more, for the privilege of doing business in Illinois, for instance, it can only get worse.  It is no accident, dear reader, that the Foxconn factory location team has been observed in Wisconsin and Michigan, but so far not in Illinois.

The workers follow the factories.

I’m writing this from a house in southeastern Wisconsin my wife and I bought recently. I figured we’d get ahead of the escape-from-Illinois crowd that’s increasingly feeding demand here. If Illinois doesn’t adopt the radical changes it needs by the time my youngest graduates from high school there, I’ll make this my permanent home — like so many Illinois ex-pats I’ve met here have done. In the meantime, we’ll buy our groceries here often, where they’re exempt from any sales tax.

Is it disloyal or selfish to avoid paying in Illinois?

On the contrary. Paying into an unreformed Illinois is what should be questioned. If you think some of the social service providers have been underfunded by the state, as I do, contribute to them yourself. Think the state universities are underfunded? Write a check. You can get money to any of those far more efficiently and selectively by doing it yourself and not through the tax collectors.

Personally, I’d be OK with higher taxes if they were needed after massive reform. Wisconsin isn’t exactly a low tax state, but it’s honest, delivers value and welcomes employers.

Illinois, however, is none of those. More here.

And the Green Bay Packers will soon be returning to training camp.

WRONGFUL TERMINATION.

I had to turn off the Fox News confrontation between Tucker Carlson and Lisa Durden.  But Essex Community College terminating her adjunct appointment?  An administrative usurpation.  "As such, she deserves redress."

Wrongly fired.

Foremost, Durden appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show not to discuss any campus issues, but rather an event miles away, in an entirely different city and state. Moreover, even in explaining the rationale of Black Lives Matters in restricting attendance at their event, Durden expressly stated that she might not have made the same decision that they did, and that she was simply respecting and defending their position. Durden did not endorse or encourage similar activities at ECC, or anywhere else. Nor is there any indication that Durden has engaged in any form of discrimination against her students, or that her students will ever risk being treated differently based on their race.

Plus a lot of other legalese.

No word from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education yet about a "Dear REMF" letter or more substantive legal action.  Developing.

THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF THE LOBSTER FORK.

Put it in every youngster's bag of tricks.

Joanne Jacobs:

Of course, social confidence can be learned as an adult. Kids need access to safe, orderly schools staffed with competent teachers using a content-rich, structured curriculum. The students whose parents can’t help with homework, hire a tutor, pay for computer camp, etc. need good schools the most.

Just go read it. While you're there, read this.  "Progressive [c.q.] educators are reluctant to do this .... They validate the home culture and language, refusing to teach students the “codes” that allow success in the larger society." That's from this longer essay.

But the idea that American schools should explicitly familiarize children—especially those from other countries, cultures, or traditions—with a uniform body of knowledge in elementary and middle school falls upon contemporary ears as awkward, anachronistic, even inappropriate. We are far more likely to honor or even revere a child’s home language, culture, and dialect. But we must seriously consider the possibility that this well-meaning impulse is quite wrong for all the right reasons.

Read it all.

That is all.

THEY COULD HAVE LISTENED TO ME, YEARS AGO.

Cold Spring Shops documents a lot of the foibles and failures of higher education, but always with the hope that the People In Charge come to their senses.  They haven't.  What comes next will not be amusing, according to National Review's Elliot Kaufman.  "The next successful Republican politician will rally the Right by making America’s universities his punching bag — and the universities will prove even more vulnerable to that politician’s attacks than the media were to Donald Trump’s."  In a country where less than half the population has a four-year degree, and many of the degree holders might be underemployed (we'll look at the reasons for that another day) or carrying a lot of debt, there might be something to what he says.

Imagine how many more Republicans would come to view the nation’s academic enclaves negatively if their party’s standard-bearer complained daily about the indoctrination of our children, the ceaseless rise in tuition costs that bleeds regular folks dry, the decline in pedagogical rigor, the political bias, the lies. Imagine what would happen if such a politician branded universities as the “enemy of the American people.”

That might be a bit much, and expect the defense-of-the-academic-enterprise public service announcements that accompany the bowls and the basketball tournaments to increase in frequency and urgency.  All the same, it might be hard for higher education to live down this perception.  "Radical professors, race-obsessed provocateurs, gender-studies grifters, anti-Israel fanatics, weak-kneed administrators, disgusting libertines, angry feminists, and illiberal student protesters."  Unfortunately, the faculty and administrations of the land-grants and mid-majors and community colleges are likely to miss the opportunity to distinguish themselves from the hothouses.

The elimination of core curricula in the ’80s and ’90s has destroyed the foundation of American liberal-arts education. The “studies” majors have themselves drawn students in without being able to offer a promise of real erudition or substantial job prospects. Many disciplines have shifted dramatically toward the study of race, gender, and class.

The bias is undeniable: Left-wing professors and students predominate, while conservative thought is often ignored, sometimes marginalized, and occasionally forbidden by oppressive speech codes or threatening mobs. Political correctness and identity politics rule many campus student groups. And college life reliably promises socialization into progressive ideas and sexual mores, as well as a confrontation with the most relaxed attitudes toward drinking and drugs.

Away from the hothouses, the -studies majors are there, but the students are in engineering or business or allied health, and likely working a job or two to keep the finances together.

But the administrators and faculty are more likely to protect their commercial interests, which align with those of the hothouses, rather than to suggest that the accusations are misplaced.

It would help, dear reader, if those people did have something resembling a rigorous core curriculum to point to, and if they didn't bundle those relaxed attitudes with the bowl bids and the tournaments.

THE GHOST OF PENN STATIONS PAST.

Double exposure photographs by Zach Gross.

PRIVILEGE IS CIVILIZATION.

David Brooks is catching on.

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.

Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.

He's correctly got the bourgeois conventions ahead of the Lucky Sperm Club, and the expenditures on everything from Harvard Prep Day Care to nannies to College Board prep courses.  He's got the snob zoning, and he could point out that the land-grants and mid-majors aren't doing as good a job providing higher education as the Ivies and the state flagships allegedly are.  Maybe that's OK: one of these days I can acknowledge Mr Brooks getting on the Cold Spring Shops cause.

But what got him into a lot of trouble was his attempt to call out the Arch Deluxe in upscale comfort food.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

The status markers we have always had with us, perhaps it's using the lobster fork to pick at the oysters.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

You'd think Mr Brooks had made fun of Starbucks-speak.  Plus: #MakeASandwichScary.

But he's onto something.  There's no longer a John T. Molloy giving advice on how to signal class status, and Rod Dreher notes that being able to navigate the social milieu matters.

I’m really sensitive to this stuff because for years I had to live with the disdain of some members of my Louisiana family for my allegedly fancypants and inauthentic tastes. It was all class anxiety on their part, but they found a way to put the knife in emotionally over these things. They were reverse snobs, and were at times really mean about it. I don’t believe that is excusable. That said, the fact that I was far more comfortable moving in cosmopolitan settings, and had more cosmopolitan tastes, meant that I had doors open for me, professionally and otherwise, that they would not have had.

Much of this is just normal sociology. Every society has its codes of behavior. A New York City lawyer who relocated to small-town south Louisiana would find himself totally at sea, culturally, until he learned the local ways.

Yes, and if you're used to buying a cup of coffee and you have to confront assorted roasts, let alone "venti" and "grande" it can be baffling.

That brings us back, dear reader, to the land-grants and the mid-majors, and perhaps to the common schools not modelling the behavior of high status people for all their charges to observe, and to emulate.

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel education reporter Alan Borsuk revisits the teacher shortage.  "Certain jobs — science, math, special education, bilingual, to name four — are a challenge to fill. Some areas, especially the most rural and the most urban, are finding it particularly difficult to attract top candidates for jobs."  Pay packets.  Duh.

Unfortunately, the kinds of people that run public education, or run their mouths about public education, refuse to understand.

[T]he third big matter is what the changes might mean for getting people into teaching jobs, and whether the tough-to-fill positions can be filled without lowering quality.

Teacher shortages and declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs have been reported nationwide.

Some critics put a considerable amount of the blame on political forces opposed to teachers’ unions and in favor of using public money to pay for private schools. One outspoken advocate of such views is Tim Slekar, dean of the School of Education at Edgewood College in Madison.

Testifying at the public hearing, he called the teacher shortage “a manufactured crisis” and said that changing licensing requirements “will do nothing except dramatically increase systemic inequity and genuinely harm the teaching profession.”

“Softening teacher license policies or doing away with the license altogether will kill the profession and turn teaching into a low-wage service sector,” Slekar said.

That presupposes licensing is serving as an impediment to participation, and there is a reserve army of math teachers raring to go, at any wage, but for the license.  Reality is that the districts with better schools and better students likely offer some bundle of better schools and better working conditions.

PUNISHING STEEL CONSUMERS.

Our President is still making noises about protecting domestic steel production.  Via Cafe Hayek, here is George Mason's Dan Griswold, making the case to The Wall Street Journal that protecting steel jobs comes at the expense of other jobs, among people who build the products that use the more expensive steel, and among people who build the products that consumers might buy with less of their disposable income going into steel-using products.

Professor Griswold notes that raw steel production in the United States is currently around eighty million tons a year; that is a substantial decrease from the hundred-plus million tons of the early 1970s (Approximately 104 million tons, or seventeen efficient-scale integrated steel works, in 1972.)

That change reflects, in part, the ability of steel consumers to build their products stronger and lighter.  The employment declines reflect, in part, the ability of steel producers to produce more steel with fewer workers (and there is no way for the entire work-force of the United States to produce eighty million tons of steel with late nineteenth-century technology).

But I still fear that Our President will be swayed by the blandishment of the domestic-content advocates.  Their schtick used to be that it wasn't enough to protect domestic steel production: to the extent that imported automobiles or imported refrigerators or imported computer towers sourced their steel overseas, it was both steel workers and consumer durables workers being put out of work.  Put another way, a domestic content policy supports the rights of U.S. consumers to pay higher prices for a smaller set of goods.

HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKS THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

Jason Willick for The American Interest documents the payback.

Over the past few years, leftwing activism on college campuses has reached a level of intensity not seen since at least the “canon wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and possibly not since the countercultural movements of the 1960s. Meanwhile, campus PC blowups—over trigger warnings, safe spaces, sexual harassment, and offensive speakers—dovetailed with the 2016 presidential campaign, as Hillary Clinton touted “intersectionality” on her Twitter feed and Donald Trump reveled in raising a middle finger to the ever-proliferating codes of academic liberalism.

Conservative media has also played an important role. Privileged students ensconced in $60,000-per-year institutions shouting down speakers for incorrect opinions on gender pronouns makes the perfect foil for the new anti-PC right. So right-wing journalists have followed the excesses of the campus left closely, spreading news of the latest insanity far and wide, often with a touch of hyperbole thrown in.

Most campus lefties will probably look at these numbers as evidence that Republicans are even more anti-intellectual than they thought, and that the #resistance against them needs to be taken up a few notches. This would be a big mistake. The homogenization of leftwing views on college campuses, and the obvious hostility to conservative ones was bound to produce a backlash from conservative voters. That backlash has been wrapped up in class conflict between a highly-credentialed professional class and a working class that finds higher education and the well-paying jobs it provides to the elite increasingly out of reach.

That the credential isn't what it used to be, and an increasing proportion of graduates, even from the hundred or so institutions claiming to head the U.S. News rankings, are finding themselves unemployed or underemployed isn't helping.

But for the guardians of business as usual, this time at Vox, it's another day of denial.  "Wait, you mean there’s not a bunch of jobs out there for people who major in underwater basket-weaving?!"

It's likely that defenders of public higher education will see censorship in efforts by Republicans, in the state-houses and at Washington City, to defund the left.

America’s higher education system, as currently structured, depends on consensus support from both parties. If universities continue to torch their reputation with the right, they may find that some of the privileges and resources and social prestige they have become accustomed to will go up in flames as well.

Dear reader, the use of public funds to support any sort of content delivery is censorship per se, and it has been the obligation of the faculty and the trustees to exercise their powers properly.  How many times must I remind you.  "Set up no machinery of repression you would not entrust your most severe critic to operate."   Even the most perceptive among you will benefit by a modicum of repetition.  "Professional protesters misuse academic respectability for non-academic ends."  Put another way, higher education's Republican problem, or Trump problem, or whatever it is, is self-made.

INTERPRETING THE HISTORY.

National Park Service volunteers have ridden the cross-country trains for years, including various bits of the Empire Builder route, the California Zephyr, the Southwest Chief, the Capitol Limited.

They might be coming next to the South Shore Line.

Rail Rangers’ Guides will be presenting programs two to three Saturdays per month. Upcoming dates in 2017 include: August 5th, August 26th, September 9th, September 23rd, October 21st, and October 28th. Additional fall and winter dates will be announced soon. Eastbound programs take place on Train #503, which departs Chicago-Millennium Station at 8:40am CT and arrives at South Bend Airport Station at 12:10pm ET. After an hour layover, Guides will present a program for westbound passengers on Train #506, which departs South Bend Airport at 1:05pm ET and arrives into Downtown Chicago at 2:39pm CT.

The program is not eligible for National Endowment grants, thus the Rail Rangers are using a more conventional form of crowd funding.

As a fundraiser for their efforts, the Rail Rangers have written and published a 120-page railroad route guide for the South Shore Line between Chicago and South Bend. Copies of “Outside the Rails: A Rail Route Guide from Chicago to South Bend Airport” are available for $20 at midwestrails.com. Guides will also be selling copies aboard select departures of the train. Money raised from the sale of the route guides goes towards funding the onboard educational programs.

The project isn't playing well with some riders, who, in the manner of commuters everywhere, would like some quiet time to nap or read or work at their laptops or chatter on their mobile devices.

But perhaps there's something more ambitious?  On Amtrak, the ranger guides conduct their narrations from the Sightseer Lounge.  I'm not proposing anything that fancy, but recall, dear reader, that South Bend Limiteds once did offer dining and lounge service.

DO THEY REALLY WANT THIS CIVIL WAR?

Dana Loesch's "Clenched Fist of Truth" video has apparently cold-cocked the folks on the Angry Left.  I'm not sure what the big deal is, both that video and a subsequent interview with Tucker Carlson simply recited commonplaces she had raised in her Flyover Nation, all of which suggested that a judgement-free, excessively vulgar common culture in which the transgressiveness of some people is celebrated, whilst the objections other people raise are deplorable.

At Common Dreams, Abby Zimet is scared.

Organizers of the Women’s March have announced a July 14 protest in Fairfax, Virginia against an NRA so emboldened by the accursed times they've now followed up their recent, incendiary, let's-shoot-all-them-liberals ad with yet another stunningly bellicose screed. In the sinister new video, titled “We Don’t Apologize for Telling the Truth,” right-wing talk-show and NRATV host Grant Stinchfield begins with a snarling response to progressives objecting to the first ad: “You call it dangerous and demand it to be taken down? I’m here to tell you not a chance,” he sneers menacingly. Those of you on the violent left who claim we believe there’s an ‘us’ and ‘them’ in this country, you’re absolutely right. There are those of us who believe in freedom then there are those of you who actively burn down our country because you can’t get over the fact that your so-called progressive didn’t win the election. Get over it and grow up."

Here's the video in question, judge for yourself.

Reflect for a moment, dear reader, that Representative Scalise is back in hospital, with further surgery to treat an infection.  Then ask yourself why the Hamburg rapid transit operators are live-tweeting service interruptions this day.  Who has not grown up here?

NORTH TO THE OCOOCH MOUNTAINS.

Those are part of Wisconsin's Driftless Area, near the Kickapoo River.  (How Al "Lil' Abner" Capp came up with Kickapoo Joy Juice for his Arkansas moonshine I don't know.)

At one time, the Wise Experts had Tennessee Valley Authority envy, sailing under the banners of Flood Control and Water Sports.

In 1962, Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a dam at La Farge that would create a 1,780-acre lake. Dam supporters played up the recreational and tourism potential of the new reservoir.

Sometimes, further study is useful.

Ground was broken in 1971 and the government bought up 140 farms — some taken through eminent domain — along the river. Highway 131 was moved, a control tower started going up and work began on building the earthen dam.

But when a more intense environmental impact survey revealed the lake’s water quality would be abysmal and costs began soaring, support for the project began to erode. In 1975 after $18 million was spent, work was stopped.

The area remained stuck in that special brand of government amber for two decades, until Congress authorized return of the land to Wisconsin and the Ho-Chunk nation, its original human inhabitants, to be turned into the Kickapoo Valley Reserve.

Might be worth a trip, this is not far from Baraboo, where there will be a Ringling Barnum reunion later this month.

FIRST, PRICE THE RESOURCES PROPERLY.

Trains correspondent George Hamlin contemplates striking the proper balance in freight transportation between motor trucks and intermodal trains.

For the trucks, double trailers (and triple, in some locations) provide an answer to the need for productivity: one driver is now responsible for more than a single truckload.  On the rail side of the equation, there is both the shedding of tare weight afforded by containerization and the ability to stack the containers two-high, although ... not all major rail routes are able to make use of this benefit, ...

From a purely cost-oriented perspective, rail has had a significant advantage.  Even in the days of piggyback, a two-person train crew could move many trailers; double-stacking literally doubled this advantage, for all practical purposes.  Trucks, on the other hand, have the upper hand when a moderately-sized shipment needs to be moved expeditiously from A to B.

No waiting for hundreds of other containers to be loaded onto intermodal platforms, and for the train to be assembled.  Multiply this times two when the stack train reaches its (rail) destination.  Yes, trucking costs more, but from a service perspective, it delivers, in a very real sense, from a service perspective.  And, cost notwithstanding, apparently many shippers are happy to make use of this alternative. 

That's long been the conventional wisdom in traffic allocation studies.  Rail has the advantage on longer hauls, particularly with larger shipments; motor trucks on shorter hauls, particularly with retail-sized shipments, and if you're Wal-Mart, retail size means hauling a few cartons shy of a load, the faster to unload and get back to the warehouse.  The usual partnership between the container liners, the railroads, and the motor trucks recognizes this, with the stack trains from quayside to a major container terminals, and drayage, often involving several hundreds of miles on the roads, from there.

THE SUCCESS SEQUENCE.

George Will.  "In healthy societies, basic values and social arrangements are not much thought about."  Healthy societies have healthy institutions, and civilization.  Everything else follows.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day, as in ours, it was said that problems were so daunting that old principles must yield to new realities. Perhaps, however, unfortunate new realities are the result of the disregard of old principles. Hawthorne recommended consulting “respectable old blockheads” who had “a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.” Ideas like getting an education, a job, and a spouse before begetting children.

Paging the Gray Champion.

RASKOLNIKOV'S NOTEBOOK.

A local coffee house also sells used books, and on its shelves was The Bishop and the Missing L Train: A Blackie Ryan Story, by the late Father Andrew M. Greeley.  The notion of someone stealing an L train appealed to this ferroequinologist, and for three bucks, why not offer up Book Review N^o. 13?

The train part of the story is tangential, as one might expect of a work by a Catholic public intellectual writing very much in the Social Gospel tradition.  Auxiliary Bishop John Blackwood Ryan is the Archdiocese of Chicago's consulting detective, and the story begins with the disappearance of another, recently appointed auxiliary bishop.  Although there are notionally only four levels of management in the church, namely parish priest, bishop, archbishop, and Pope, there are gradations of management in that not all archbishops are cardinals, and between priest and bishop there are monsignors and auxiliary bishops, the deanlets and deanlings of the apostolic and catholic church.  And plenty of opportunity to disagree on the mission of that church.

The auxiliary bishop in question has been seconded to Chicago from the Vatican, in a move that might have been ill-advised so soon after the death of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, and amidst the strains inherent in a largish archdiocese with substantial diversity among the congregants and within the church bureaucracy.  Thus the story, hey, if we're going to have a mystery based on a train, why not, becomes one in which Bishop Blackie sorts through the motives of the various people, laity and ordained alike, who would like to be rid of this troublesome new prelate.  And the struggles of these people give Father Greeley a chance to reflect on church doctrine, providing, for instance, the most intuitive explanation of "sacrament" I have ever encountered.  Plus a bit of whimsey, for instance four high schoolers all named Megan who, in best Bells of St. Mary fashion, serve as volunteers at Holy Name, and a gathering of Notre Damers including a lady soccer player conversant with Finnegans Wake.  Plus a foreign exchange trader who calls his priest before hitting on said soccer player, and a reference to a renegade nun called Joel (latterly, Joe) Read who may or may not be receiving a brush-back pitch from the baseball-fan priest.

So who is the miscreant?  I won't tell you, but I left a massive hint in the title, dear reader.

The trains?  Father Greeley confesses he made that part up.  Truly, truly, I say unto thee, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than it is for an unauthorized movement to go from Kimball on the Ravenswood to the Des Plaines Avenue tail track on the Lake.  But he's conversant enough with the history of the L to observe that the Ravenswood was at one time projected further north; in fact there was a 1912 proposal to bring the Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railroad onto the Ravenswood extension at Kenilworth, thence along the left bank of the North Shore Drainage Canal into the Kimball terminal.  The mind boggles at the thought of Electroliners coming this way.  But even before the Edens Expressway, the Chicago Rapid Transit had given up on the service between Howard Street and Niles Center.  He's more on point, though, anticipating the upscaling of the Ravenswood, although it still traffics as the Brown Line, not the Gold Line.

The troubled lovers work through it, too.  And it's 285 pages, not exactly Dostoevskian proportions (or Joycean syntax.)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE ETIQUETTE OF TRAIN RIDING.

Don't be that guy.  "For instance, there’s the person who stands in the corridor of the sleeping car and carries on a loud, lengthy conversation with the person in the roomette right across from mine."

Don't be this guy, either.  "There always seems to be a 300-pounder who comes barging down the narrow corridors of the sleeping cars forcing you to back up . . . after you’ve already come halfway."

And definitely, don't be this guy.

Then there’s the passenger seated next to me in the diner who is wearing a T-shirt, shorts, rubber slippers and a baseball cap (worn backwards, of course). Occasionally they even smell bad. I may make allowances if it’s a coach passenger, but not if they’re traveling in a sleeper. Every Superliner has a very adequate shower room.

I'm still in the habit of sprucing up a bit before heading to the dining car, that probably makes me a throwback.

STILL TONE-DEAF.

Our Former President still can't stop thinking about bitter clingers.

“If we don’t stand up for tolerance and moderation and respect for others, if we begin to doubt ourselves and all that we have accomplished, then much of the progress that we have made will not continue,” he said.

“What we will see is more and more people arguing against democracy, we will see more and more people who are looking to restrict freedom of the press, and we’ll see more intolerance, more tribal divisions, more ethnic divisions, and religious divisions and more violence,” Obama asserted.

Yes, as some wag at Pajamas Media had it, one of the great things about the Obama years was all the racial healing.

SHIRTSLEEVES TO SHIRTSLEEVES IN THREE GENERATIONS.

In the absence of bourgeois convention, the upscale residents of New Jersey suburbs are not exempt.

People f**k up here, too. In between the speed walking and the calorie counting on iPhone apps, there is a whole lot of wine drinking, which is somehow a more socially acceptable form of addiction than weed. There are teenagers who screw up in exactly the same ways as teenagers in every other community across the country. There are dubious debts, like second mortgages to pay for private colleges that aren’t worth the $300,000 price tag.

And while our community doesn’t have the divorce rates and rotating boyfriends that plague other parts of the country, we’re the only family that I know that actually eats dinner together every night. Kids spend long periods of time by themselves or with nannies that have no authority to reel them in. Kids work very hard at times, especially in the highly regimented sports programs and tutoring worlds, but other times, they are supremely lazy. They have no expectations for home chores or sibling babysitting. Even though they all go to college, the parents and consultants micomanage the process for them.

There have been lots of recent studies (too lazy to find the link right now) that show that the wealthier families are spending more on educational programs for their children than ever before. And that’s all true. But in between those scheduled activities, there is a parenting vacuum. Parents set up the activities and even drive them from place to place, but don’t talk with their kids or guide them or yell at them when they screw up.

My parents, who were the first generation college attenders and who came from very rough family lives themselves, are appauled [c.q.] at the bad habits that they see around them in their own UMC town and in ours. Entitlement is its own evil culture. Wealth can protect people from bad habits for a short time, but it’s not fool proof.

Indeed not, but in the absence of any commitment from education, from public policy, from anywhere, to cultivate the bourgeois habits in the poorer quarters (or worse, to enable the dysfunction and call it authenticity) the currently well off have a better chance of winning by default.  If they don't get fired by the new Chinese boss first.

FAILING THEIR MARKET TESTS.

There's more than one connotation to "academic reputation," and "hot-house for entitled social justice warriors" isn't the best way to bring in the enrollments.

That parents with the means to retain admissions counselors are protesting is encouraging.  Resource allocation always changes at the margins first.

The counselor said that she couldn't complain about a student landing at Stanford, but that she was frustrated by the family distaste for Yale based on, in the counselor's opinion, an uninformed sense of the place. Yale of course has plenty of activists on the left, and has had its share of debates over campus culture and politics -- from free speech to Halloween costumes. But the university has multiple, active groups on the right, has a president who has repeatedly defended free speech and has a storied history of educating Republican politicians. (Four of the five Yale graduates who served as president of the United States were Republicans.)

The reality, the counselor said, is that while the dislike of Yale surprised her, there are other colleges that parents are vetoing. "Many won't consider Oberlin or Wesleyan, and Brown is completely off the table," she said.

At some level, such antipathy toward those and other colleges isn't surprising.

Read the article, though, and note, it's not only upscale Babbitts who are balking.  On the other hand, the hothouses continue to ride high enough in the U.S. News rankings that there are likely to be sufficient enrollments to keep the selectivity part of their rankings high.

The bad news is that Wesleyan's president Michael Roth wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal in which he appears to have concluded that the way to deal with the excesses of identity politics and affirmative action is ... expand the ambits of identity politics and affirmative action.

Roth wrote of efforts such as recruiting military veterans, who have different life experiences and, many times, different politics than others at Wesleyan.

But he also called for a greater diversity of ideas on the campus. "The issue, however, isn’t whether the occasional conservative, libertarian or religious speaker gets a chance to speak," Roth wrote. "That is tolerance, an appeal to civility and fairness, but it doesn’t take us far enough. To create deeper intellectual and political diversity, we need an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions, because on too many of our campuses they seldom get the sustained, scholarly attention that they deserve."

Just teach the controversies. Oh, turf out the deanlets and deanlings of the Diversity Boondoggle, and merge the -studies disciplines in with traditional disciplines.

Could get worse.  Notorious dropout factory Chicago State is expecting an enrolling class of ... eighty-six.  In food service, there's a symbolism to 86.  (I encountered the expression there, in 1972.)

On top of the financial concerns, Chicago State reported a graduation rate of 11 percent. In recent years, the rate had ranged from 13 to 21 percent.

Then, earlier this month, President Thomas Calhoun Jr. was let go after just nine months in the job, with trustees agreeing to pay him $600,000 in severance to leave immediately.

And the cash flow situation is so bad there are days the food service fails to open, or eighty-sixes much of the menu.

SIXTY YEARS AGO.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad shut down operation at noon, 3 July 1957, when a judge voided an injunction and went to lunch.  Never mind that it was the middle of the day and many commuters had ridden into Chicago with the full expectation of a train ride home.  In those days, if the Fourth of July was a Wednesday, there would be work Tuesday and also Thursday, no extended weekends.

The shutdown now gives the Illinois Railway Museum occasion to re-enact the shutdown, with none of the dramatics of the actual closure.  For the sixtieth anniversary, the script featured a transition to the modern image.

By 1957, Roarin' Elgin cars no longer shared platforms with the Chicago L.  The change of cars at Forest Park was one of the inconveniences to riders that hurt the railroad.  Here, Car 319 is re-enacting the Batavia shuttle car.

Plenty of passengers to transfer to the Elgin to Chicago car at Batavia Junction.

The connecting train reached Wheaton just before noon, where the passengers were set down, and the crew displayed signals as an extra to return to the car-barn.  There were still a few steam locomotives at work on the Chicago and North Western.

A few minutes later, an empty equipment extra arrived from the Forest Park end.

Those passengers had been set down at a rural station.  (Relax, everyone is in on the gag, and it's a more authentic railroad adventure than the train robbery you see at some preservation railroads.)

For this year's re-enactment, an honest to Ben Heineman Commuter Streamliner had been staged in a siding at the east end of the railroad, and a few minutes later, it delivered the rescued passengers.

The conductor was saying "Thank you for riding the Chicago and North Western."

The afternoon service featured the Commuter Streamliner, symbolizing the transition away from the interurban.

I learned that there had been plans to set up a transit authority to operate the former interurban in DuPage and Kane counties as a limited tram-line operation.  But in addition to the usual fears of overweening government from the usual suspects, there was opposition supported by the management of the Chicago and North Western, who, in those days, were still of the view that a commuter train operation could cover its above the wheels costs and make a contribution to the common and joint costs of the railroad.

THE ARKS OF YESTERYEAR.

Much of the passenger service on the East Troy Electric Railroad makes use of former South Shore Line cars, enough so that the South Bend Tribune notices.

In 1983, the aged orange and maroon South Shore Line cars were replaced with new sleek, silver passenger cars that still serve on the rail line. The South Shore is the nation's last remaining electric interurban. It's provided passenger service between South Bend and Chicago since 1908.

Among the arks are lengthened, but not air conditioned, coach Thirteen.

The War Production Board allocated steel to South Shore in order for the railroad to splice a center section into their existing coaches.  Fortunately, the railroad had been built with freight trains in mind, and the tight curves around the courthouse square characteristic of many Midwestern interurbans did not constrain their efforts.

In the fall apple and pumpkin season, a three car train is sometimes a possibility.

At least two of the box smoker cars, so referred to as they are original length cars, complete with the Pullman style smoking section at one end, regularly protect the service.

Car 30 has long been part of the museum formation.  For a while, it ran as car 1130, but a move toward historical accuracy prevailed.

Those are relatively new, old-look seats.  The two restrooms (no unisex potty on the South Bend Limited, thank you) are in the enclosure at right rear, and the wall of the smoking compartment is at the jog in the aisle.

Thirty has recently been joined in service by a sister car, 33, which until recently was among cars held by the National Park Service for some kind of vintage trolley operation in the Dunes.  The money for the trackage never got out of Congress, and the cars went to East Troy and other preservation lines.

It's been fitted with replica destination signs, and the small train indicator boards you see above the car number at right.

Also among the Park Service cars is a stretched trailer car, 213, that may not yet be ready for prime time.  The dinner trains, which operate a few times each month, comprise former stretched and air conditioned coaches that have been refitted as table cars.

Happy riding.  Pick up your treats for the road home at the Elegant Farmer, and remember to buy your Wisconsin Lottery Power Ball Home Run tickets before you hit the Cheddar Curtain.  No Power Ball in Illinois, remember.  Alas, no electric cars to Miller Park either, that Base Ball sign notwithstanding.

ASSIMILATION IS EMERGENCE.

Mexican immigrants are poised to reframe American culture, if white people would only let them, argues Sarah Menkedick for Pacific Standard.

American culture is not for "white people" to give, or for "Mexican immigrants," or anyone else to take.  Read the essay and that becomes clear.

[California resident Vianney Bernabé's] family here in Mexico, she explained, thought of her as American: a deserter of her home country, wealthy and privileged, a gringa come to strut around with all the gringa’s carefree assumptions of power. Meanwhile, in the United States, Vianney’s parents clung to the lowest rungs of a racialized U.S. labor and power hierarchy, having worked for three decades to give their children better lives. She and her sisters had grown up in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods in Los Angeles, struggling against failing schools, crime, racism, and poverty.

For all our troubles, entering the 142^nd year of American Independence, the United States are still home to many a shining city on the hill, including the most stressed parts of Los Angeles.

Vianney had come to Mexico City expecting to embrace her past and to be embraced as a long-lost daughter. Instead, like many second-generation Mexican Americans who return to Mexico, she wound up being confronted with her Americanness. “I have never had turkey at Thanksgiving. I grew up listening to cumbia, but on the other hand my education was from the United States,” she told me. Our conversations were full of this vexed ping-ponging between Mexicanness, Americanness, and Mexican Americanness, an ineffable cultural zone inhabited by more and more Americans, including my own Mexican-American husband and daughter.

For Vianney and the other seven million second-generation Hispanics in the U.S., most of them Mexican Americans, this quest to define identity and establish belonging has significant ramifications. As a Pew Research Center demographic survey put it, “The kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.”

Just let the kids be kids, and the adults be adults, and the emergence will take care of itself.

Thirteen was the year Vianney leaned over the edge of the abyss, and 13 marked the beginning of her rise. Her mother enrolled her at the Harmony Project, an L.A. non-profit that offers students from low-income communities musical instruments, classes, community support, and field trips to cultural events. Vianney trained at Harmony for five years. When she turned 15, at the urging of her music teacher, she applied to the elite Music Academy at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. To her shock, she was accepted with a 50 percent scholarship.

Soon she was competing at summer camps across the country. She won scholarships to the Interlochen Center for the Arts and CalArts. Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay tuition. “My mom had to make payments of $100, and the work she had to do to make those payments was crazy,” she told me. Eventually, seeing the progress she was making, the Harmony Project offered to pay the other half of Vianney’s tuition.

The Music Academy at Colburn is a highly competitive pre-college program, and Vianney said most of the top musicians there were white. They came from elite private schools. She immediately understood how different her experience had been from theirs. “I was taking Honors Literature and I struggled,” she told me. “I mean, a lot. In private school they teach other stuff, because these kids walked into Honors Lit and they killed it.”

She started reading the newspaper every day, studying all the vocabulary she didn’t know. “It became like a mission,” she told me, “to just push myself, push myself, push myself.” In 2008, during her sophomore year, she read the phrase “religious crusade” and understood what it meant, and in that moment it dawned on her that her work was paying off.

Arguably, Ms Vianney is fortunate, in that her immediate family and her classmates in the common schools didn't undermine her at every turn. It's not so much about white privilege, either, as it is about cultural capital. Her classmates at music camp were insiders.

WHEN EVEN THE LOTTERY LOSES CONFIDENCE.

It's possible that the State of Illinois will have a spending plan, a couple of days late, but after two years of improvisation, that looks like a moral victory.  "[L]awmakers have learned that piecemeal solutions freeing up money to avoid pain has helped to allow the stalemate to drag on, and they're reluctant to do so again, at least for now."

"Piecemeal solutions" often means "kicking the can down the road," but ultimately, either the can falls apart or the road ends.  And relying on the courts to allocate the funds, which is what Illinois budget administrators have been doing, only works as long as there are funds.

Lawmakers on both sides spent the end-of-June special session publicly lamenting the destruction that already had been caused by the historic stalemate and declaring it time to bring the impasse to an end.

Still, fundamental disagreements remain. Even as the two sides were publicly professing a desire to compromise, a lack of trust had each privately questioning the others' sincerity in seeking a deal.

Meanwhile, the autopilot spending that allowed state government to chug along through the first two years of stalemate will largely continue as court orders and existing laws provide for continued payment of state employee paychecks, medical bills for the poor, pension contributions, interest on debt and transfers to local governments.

It's summer, and the construction closures on the road are mostly for suspended projects, the schools can hang on until August for their state aid, the universities are beginning to worry about accreditation (there has to be enough money to sustain the deanlets and deanlings whose support services are part of accreditation), and now Power Ball junkies have to cross state lines to throw a few bucks at those big jackpots.

"None of the potential pressure points has proved strong enough to move the needle on a deal so far." Perhaps, what will move the needle, is Cub fans crossing the Cheddar Curtain learning that Counsell's Crushers are hitting Wisconsin Lottery Power Ball Home Runs.

SHIPPING THE HUMAN CAPITAL OUT?

At the margin, taxes might affect the mix of migrants into or out of a state.

People move for a variety of reasons: jobs, family, weather, quality of life, schools, housing costs and taxes. Although academic studies differ on the level of importance, every study finds that taxes are one reason that people move. Sometimes, taxes are found to be the significant reason for migration to another state. Taxes have been found to affect even the location of star university scientists.

Some of the potential reasons for the growing out-migration can be eliminated. Many things haven’t changed in Wisconsin. The winters are still cold. Family and in-laws are the same as ever. The quality of life is good in every national survey. Housing costs are below the national average.

During the 1990s, Wisconsin gained residents in state-to-state migration. However, in the past 20 years, Wisconsin went from attracting people from other states to exporting people to other states.

At the margin, higher marginal tax rates on higher incomes might matter.

Wisconsin taxes today are relatively higher for upper-income individuals and on all investment gains. Those tax increases took effect during the Doyle administration and have not been reversed. Other states have cut taxes across the board. Wisconsin has not focused on individual tax cuts but rather on business tax cuts.

The specific driver on out-migration is the tax burden for middle- and upper-income families in Wisconsin.

Lower business taxes might bring in more businesses, but perhaps with a major financial and high-technology central place in Chicago, it is no accident that lots of state university graduates from other Great Lakes States migrate to Chicago, while support services, such as office supply warehouses and dollar store logistics, take advantage of the tax breaks.

Wisconsin attracted individuals from other states with lower levels of education — a net inflow of over 2,700 low-income individuals per year from 2008 to 2012. In that same period, Wisconsin lost 14,000 college graduates each year — the much discussed “brain drain” from the Badger state.

The efforts by Illinois politicos -- primarily Chicago Democrats -- to impose additional taxes on everything from carbonated drinks to the privilege of doing business -- I am not making that up -- might drive some of the financial services and technology businesses out of Chicagoland.  But are there enough loft developments and other amenities to make a Milwaukee, or a Madison, a logical place for setting up a trading floor?

NO BOY SCOUT HE.

Student columnists describe the administration of recently departed Northern Illinois University president Doug Baker.

Secretive, unbalanced, overrated; masked, undignified, expensive; disreputable, overlooked, unfinished; senseless, everlasting and selfish.

I CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP.

"I wanted to make sure everyone knew he deserves a great bag because of the work that he puts in, not because he's boinking me."  You'll just have to read the story.