WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKS THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

That's a central element of Richard Vedder and Justin Strehle's Case for Taxing College Endowments.

There are two good reasons why the endowment tax makes sense to some politicians. First, public attitudes toward universities have distinctly soured in recent years. What the public perceives as outrageous student behavior, feckless university leadership, and excessive tuition fees has combined with a growing hostility by Republican lawmakers angered over the large political donations and public criticism that academics have made attempting to oust them from office. Lawmakers are growing tired of feeding the mouths that bite them. Revenues raised by taxing colleges can modestly help fund other tax reductions that lawmakers want to make, which are probably economically beneficial to the well over 90 percent of the population living outside the Ivory Towers of Academia.

Second, our econometric examination of college endowments suggests a large portion of endowment income is dissipated in relatively unproductive fashions, financing a growing army of relatively well-paid university administrators and giving influential faculty low teaching loads and high salaries. We estimate that roughly only about 15 cents out of each additional dollar of endowment income goes to lower net tuition fees (published tuition fees—sticker prices– are much higher at highly endowed schools, but those schools also give more scholarship aid). When a newly endowed scholarship is created, schools typically either reduce their student aid support from other funds or raise sticker prices to capture some of the newly funded endowment resources for other purposes.

I've been fighting with Business as Usual along lines suggested in the first paragraph for years: no surprise there.  The second paragraph, referring to empirical work not otherwise cited or acknowledged in their essay, raises the unsurprising point that money is fungible.

Continuing, though, perhaps taxing endowments is another way of reducing the regressive transfers inherent in higher education as currently understood.

A healthy portion of [endowment returns and other subsidies] are used to provide higher salaries or other perks such as hiring lots of new administrative assistants such as more assistant deans, “sustainability coordinators” or “diversity officers” to perform irksome jobs or meet politically correct objectives such as fighting global warming or achieving the optimal skin colorization of the students and faculty. As endowments rise, so do full professor salaries and the numbers of professors serving a given number of students. To a considerable extent, endowments are a successful rent-seeking scam of the power brokers within universities.

At public universities, subsidies are provided by state governments that usually are less than $1,000 a student but are occasionally higher. The five highest state appropriation levels per student among the 13 public Big Ten universities range between $10,000 and $15,000, equal to the amount that would be provided by an endowment of $250,000 per student where the annual spending rate is four to six percent of the endowment principal. Thus, the GOP excise tax on endowments takes effect only at institutions where endowment spending is generally well above the public subsidies provided at state universities.

Now, if we could get the land-grants and mid-majors to recognize that they are in the same business as the Ivies, and turf out all the irksome special education impedimenta that keep U.S. News selling those ratings ...

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

Last year, DeKalb Iron and Metal and the city kept a ton of used Christmas lights out of landfills.

This year, the recycling drive will last to the beginning of February.

To prevent used holiday lights from ending up in landfills, the DeKalb County Health Department will be partnering with the DeKalb Iron and Metal Co. for the Holiday Lights Recycling Program.

The program, in its seventh year, will run through Feb. 2. All string lights and extension cords are accepted.

"String lights" refers to those new series-wired miniature lights (sometimes light-emitting diodes) that can be a pain to troubleshoot.

Maybe it's my New England and South Side of Milwaukee upbringing, but tossing extension cords?

Tree is in its 45th season, string of battery-powered light emitting diodes pushing 15, some of the ornaments are as old as I, and the vintage trains will be making their presence shortly.

THE BIGGEST CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF OUR TIME.

A thesis nailed to Newmark's Door.  Lawsuit shows California public schools where fifth graders are taught at kindergarten level and kids can’t read.

The lawsuit accuses the government of failing to assure basic literacy levels in California public schools, thus undermining the state constitution’s education guarantees. It offers yet another window into the way many public schools are run. It details classes where around half the students don’t have basic reading skills, examples of fifth graders taught using kindergarten materials, and teachers who “are forced to rely on audio and video content to provide students access to other subjects.” The state has previously identified an urgent need to deal with literacy issues, but has never implemented the plan, per the suit.

It's likely some defenders of the government schools will blame school funding formulas and Proposition Thirteen from forty years ago, and yet one can't help but suspect a substitution of trendy pedagogies for eternal verities is contributing.

A GIANT LIPOSUCTION SOUND?

A Nasty, Nafta-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity.  Reality is more subtle: the human physique evolved through millennia of starvation, and only recently has cheap, plentiful food become common. "Across the world, trade deals have made food more affordable and accessible. A major selling point for the World Trade Organization, founded in 1995, was that it would relax trade barriers so “food is cheaper” — though such deals can also influence diet for the worse."  By all means, read the article.  Then read and understand Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux's response.  "Are you prepared to criticize increasing prosperity – and perhaps to implicitly endorse policies that prevent increasing prosperity – because some people use their greater access to a wide variety of goods and services to make choices that offend the sensibilities of intellectuals?"  Not to mention food that might taste better, as the article notes.  "On a recent Sunday, the Ruiz brothers went to Sam’s Club to stock up for the restaurant. They like the expansive meat section with marbled beef that is often cheaper than the sinewy cuts sold by local butchers."

MARKET TESTS ARE SUBTLE.

And Oberlin might be getting an education.

Oberlin College has been showing signs of strain as leaders of the well-off liberal arts college in Ohio seek to close a multimillion-dollar budget deficit driven by lower-than-expected enrollment this year.

The strain became evident most recently when The Oberlin Review, the college’s student newspaper, obtained and published a letter written this summer by two faculty members objecting to a salary freeze. The letter, which the student newspaper published Friday as Oberlin’s Board of Trustees was scheduled to meet, said it is “inadequate and depressing that neither the board nor the administration has the leadership or imagination to address this crisis in any way other than by eliminating raises for faculty and staff.”

But the publication of the faculty letter was just the latest in a string of moves by a college grappling with a structural budget deficit.

It might be simply a shrinking pool of traditional students, along with a market premium for quality faculty, stressing the finances.

In response to the enrollment and budget issues, the board approved a plan to hold nonunion salaries at current levels for the coming year, [board chairman Chris] Canavan said in the June email. Doing so would not eliminate the deficit but would make a significant difference without cutting essential services and positions.

Not all faculty would agree with that assertion. Some have argued a pay freeze will lead to a loss of talent at Oberlin as professors pick other, better-paying jobs. Such a trend would hurt educational quality, an essential service for a college.

The board also asked administrators, faculty and staff members to find ways to shrink the structural deficit by bringing in more revenue or cutting spending. The goal laid out was to cut 5 percent of the cumulative budget over the coming 10 years.

“The enrollment shortfall is a sign that Oberlin’s long-term financial model must change with the times,” Canavan said in the June email. “The cost of running institutions like Oberlin gets more expensive every year, while the pool of high school graduates, which grew steadily beginning in the mid-’90s, will stay flat over the next decade. We must spend the next few years making important decisions that will ensure Oberlin’s financial strength well into the future. These decisions must be made thoughtfully and with broad consultation.”

At the margin, though, Oberlin's product differentiation efforts might be hurting enrollments.

Conservative news outlets have delighted in Oberlin’s struggles. The college is generally considered one of the most liberal institutions in the country, and it is regularly the target of conservative media, some of the more extreme of which have attributed the college’s enrollment declines to politics. But they provided little in the way of firm evidence to support that link.

Nonetheless, Oberlin has found itself at the center of several politically charged events of late. The Associated Press recently reported that Oberlin has been sued by bakery owners who accuse the institution and a dean of slandering their bakery as a racist establishment following a shoplifting case in 2016 -- a charge the institution and dean denied. This fall, the college also put in place a policy under which it will not send out email notifications about hateful fliers unless there is suspicion of immediate danger or a larger pattern.

Sometimes, what is unseen is as salient as what is seen. It is unlikely that anybody is going to tell a pollster or a guidance counselor, "Oberlin comes off as too full of crazies."  On the other hand, it is easy enough to send in applications to institutions other than Oberlin, for whatever reason, and leave it to the admissions office to puzzle out the reasons, or to engage in wishful thinking.

TO REALLY FOUL THINGS UP REQUIRES A COMPUTER.

At the macro level, it's Norfolk Southern's artificial intelligence dispatching that renders Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited Late For Sure.

At the micro level, it's Amtrak's new internet reservation front end, which, in the manner of all hyped business improvements, is a bodge.

I can’t explain exactly why, but I had a terrible time with the new “improved” Amtrak web site. Admittedly, there are six segments in all, but it took me forever to get it all done.

My return includes a Boston-to-Chicago segment and this gave me the chance to see if I could perhaps save a little money and avoid some inconvenience, too. For those who don’t know, the westbound Lake Shore Limited starts out with two sections: Train 49 originating in New York City’s Penn Station and Train 449 originating from Boston’s South Station. The two sections meet in Albany, New York and proceed to Chicago as one train from there.

This combining of trains is a survival from Penn Central days, well, actually New York Central, which, without telling anybody, started combining The New England States and The Twentieth Century Limited at Buffalo, in the summer of 1967.  And, thanks to contemporary rules governing the adding and cutting of passenger cars in trains, the sleepers of the two parts are at opposite ends of the train.

The Boston section consists of one Viewliner sleeping car, several coaches, and a lounge car serving snacks and drinks. Half of this car is configured with Business Class seating. The New York section has five or six coaches and what AmtraK calls a “Combined Diner/Lounge”. The trouble is—and, OK, I’ll admit it’s a minor issue unless you have trouble moving about a moving train—after leaving Albany, passengers in the Boston sleeper have to make their way through six or seven coaches in order to get their dinner in the Diner/Lounge car.

It's not so minor an issue when the Boston sleeper has a number of older and slower-moving passengers in it. On my trip, we got to cross the platform to the diner (a little cooperation between the sleeper attendant and the dining car crew) but we had to organize a team to get everybody back to the sleeper after dinner, which involved a walk from Schenectady to Utica.

So this time, instead of booking a roomette all the way in the Boston sleeper, I made two separate reservations: the first, a seat in Business Class from Boston to Albany; the second, a roomette in the New York section from Albany to Chicago.

True, in Albany I’ll have to gather up my belongings and relocate to the Viewliner sleeper, but I should have only one car between me and the diner. I saved $7.60 on the combined fares, too. Altogether, a small, but satisfying triumph, as long as I overlook the fact that it probably took me more than an hour on the new Amtrak web site to make it all happen.

Am I being churlish to suggest that the $7.60 represents the difference between the cup of tea offered to business class riders and the full lunch (OK, a sandwich) that the sleeper passengers get upon departing Framingham?

On the other hand, without the Century and its accompanying mystique, would we have a Lake Shore, or an Amtrak, at all?

LEARNING TO WIN.

The Green Bay Packers trailed the winless Cleveland Browns by two touchdowns at the turn to the fourth quarter.

The Green Bay Packers walked off the field with an overtime victory.  Second straight overtime win.

Somehow the Packers have managed to go 7-6 and stay in the playoff hunt with a second straight overtime victory, this one a 27-21 comeback against the winless Cleveland Browns on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium.

[Packer head coach Mike] McCarthy was an unpredictable combination of daring and convention against the Browns and somehow it all worked out. He walked out of the stadium, still alive, needing in all likelihood three more victories to have a shot at reaching the playoffs for a ninth straight season.

“There were a lot of good things today,” McCarthy said after the game, trying to make people forget all the bad things that happened. “We’re finding different ways to win and that’s what you have to do.

Yes, the three wins in the past eight games came against last place teams (Bears, Buccaneers, Browns), and yes, the Steelers and Saints exposed weaknesses in the defense that will continue to occupy pundits both formal and informal.  But you have to play mixed strategies, and the Packers did a more effective job of mixing than did Cleveland.

“Probability, risk assessment,” McCarthy said of the call. “It’s all part of your game plan. (It) has other variables on when you’re going to call it. I didn’t jump up in the team meeting and say we were going to fake the first punt today.

“That was not the plan. Where we were on the field on fourth down, momentum, what he was giving me, it was more of a confidence thing.”

McCarthy stayed aggressive on the drive, dialing up a pass play from quarterback Brett Hundley to receiver Randall Cobb on fourth and 1 at the Cleveland 38.

The most controversial decision came midway through the third quarter with the Browns up, 14-7. Hundley had led the Packers from their own 19 all the way to the Cleveland 10, only to face a fourth and inches.

McCarthy would need two scores to win, so why not take the field goal? Last week against Tampa Bay, on fourth and 1 at the 5-yard line with 2 minutes 34 seconds left, he had Mason Crosby kick a 22-yard field goal to tie the game at 20-20.

This time, McCarthy called a misdirection play that turned into a disaster when Hundley went the wrong way and failed to pitch the ball to running back Aaron Jones.

“There are some plays leading up to that, that set that play up,” McCarthy said. “The execution wasn’t there. That’s football. There was a lot of time left. I was confident in the way we were moving the football.”

It appears that Cleveland concentrated on stopping the emergent Packer running game, and dared quarterback Brett Hundley to complete short passes and not be tempted to go for the long plays.

After Trevor Davis set up the Packers at the Cleveland 25 with a 65-yard punt return, McCarthy stayed aggressive, calling passes on five of the seven plays, including first and goal at the 1, when he called a run-pass option that allowed Hundley to throw a back-shoulder pass to Davante Adams for the tying touchdown.

In overtime, McCarthy kept the foot on the pedal and threw on four of six plays, including consecutive downs at the Cleveland 28 and 25. The last one took the game out of Crosby’s hands. Adams turned a short pass into a 25-yard touchdown to finish off the comeback.

“We were just trying to take advantage of the matchups we felt we had in the perimeter,” McCarthy said. “But hell, we’re trying to score.”

There's something about experiencing victories that affects a team's mind-set.  Here's the take from Cleveland about how the game ended.

7. From the moment the fourth quarter opened, the defense could not make a single, significant stop. You could feel the game slipping away. That's what happens when a team is 1-28 in the last two years.

8. In the overtime period, [quarterback DeShone] Kizer threw a horrible interception. The Packers still had the ball on the Cleveland 42-yard line. How about stopping them? At least make them try a field goal? Instead, the Packers roared into the end zone. Gregg Williams is a good defensive coordinator. His stats over a long career show it. But he seemed helpless to come up with anything to stop Green Bay when it mattered.

9. As for Kizer, he needed to throw his last pass of the day away. As Jackson mentioned, "the play fell apart." Josh Gordon was the original target, but he wasn't open. He actually was held by a defender, but no matter ... he was not a primary target.

Not that any of it matters, when Clay Matthews III remains in the running for the Pro Bowl.

The most-closely watched bone scan in Wisconsin football will be taking place sometime today or tomorrow.  The battle of attrition that is the National Football League 2017 season continues.

WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT OBERLIN?

It's tempting to wish that they be occupied by the Russians, or sacked and pillaged by Ivar the Boneless.  But perhaps they ought to be let alone as the quintessence of clueless snowflakery.  Apparently, to the Obies, campus outreach means its the students' privilege to instruct their elders and harass the businesses that serve them.

Students at Oberlin College have long enjoyed pastries, bagels and chocolates from Gibson's Bakery, a century-old, family-owned business near campus. That sweet relationship has turned bitter amid hotly disputed accusations of racism, roiling a school and town long known for their liberal politics.

The dispute, which began in November 2016 with the arrest of three black Oberlin students who tried stealing wine from Gibson's, is now a lawsuit in which the exasperated bakery owners accuse the college and a top dean of slandering Gibson's as a "racist establishment" and taking steps to destroy the family's livelihood.

Caught in the middle are longtime residents of this town of 8,300 people, many of whom identify themselves as liberals but who have patronized Gibson's for decades. Many believe the timing was right for the conflict to boil over; the arrests came the day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, electrifying students who had long heard suspicions of racial profiling at Gibson's.

Look, it wasn't my intent to turn today's post into the Ohio Follies edition, but we're the day after a Green Bay Packer win in Cleveland, which will rate its own post, and the Chicago Bears, yes, the Fire John Fox and Drain The Swamp Chicago Bears made mincemeat of the Cincinnati Bengals, whose defense was mostly in rehab or the House of Correction after last week's rumble with Pittsburgh.

FIRST DATE FROM HELL?

There's a new Everyday Feminism post, "10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date."  I'm suspecting it's a Sokal Hoax, based on the opening paragraph.  "As a queer femme of color, I keep close relationships with people who go beyond allyship; they’re true accomplices in the fight against white supremacy, queerphobia, and misogyny. If you’re not going to support marginalized folks, then we can’t be friends, let alone date. The personal is political."  As if xe is going to have much of a social circle starting with those constraints.

But it is providing much-needed comic relief.  "How To Become A Crazy Cat Lady" is Rod Dreher's take.  "In 30 years, she will write an article asserting that living solo in a house that smells like cat pee is a sign of progressive purity and radical independence."

Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green quips, "Anyone who isn’t heading towards the door after the third question — 'How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?' — deserves whatever comes next."

There's a healthy serving of Undermine Them With Mockery at Twitchy.

THE VICTIMS REMOVE THEIR SANCTION.

Michael Barone suggests that "Feds, Meds, and Eds" have too long been mooching.

The tax bills would impose a new 1.4 percent tax on the investment income of endowments of very wealthy colleges and universities. They would eliminate deductions for student loans and tax tuition waivers for graduate students.

These institutions have been coasting on their reputation for excellence and as havens of free thought, even as they impose speech codes, conduct kangaroo courts on sexual assault charges and allow humanities and social science departments to be dominated by postmodern agitprop and gibberish.

Student loans impoverish many students, especially dropouts, while the money they pump into universities produces administrative bloat, to the point that there are more administrators than teachers in higher education today. Government subsidies produce an oversupply of people with doctorates, causing their theses to go unread and their job prospects to be dismal.

Polls show that many voters have become aware of the intolerance and unaccountability of these institutions and that the economic rewards of a degree are diminishing. The tax bills send a signal to the people running higher education that they'd better change their ways.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

It gets better.  Apparently "make high earners pay their fair share of taxes" doesn't mean "stop letting high earners write off their state and local taxes."

Or consider the yelps about the Republicans' planned repeal of the deductibility of state and local taxes (except for some property taxes). This would be progressive in its incidence because most of the increased federal revenue would come from high earners in high-tax states, especially New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California, whose residents tend to vote Democratic.

Americans in lower-tax states have been effectively subsidizing bloated public payrolls and astonishingly generous pension plans. Removing the deduction would put pressure on politicians in high-tax states and on the public employee unions to hold taxes and spending down.

Maybe. The problem, at least as I see it from Illinois, is that the productive people are moving out, leaving only the beneficiaries of the government generosity to keep voting themselves that generosity.  There's nothing new here: maybe, finally, there is a government in Washington that sees what is going on and considers doing something else.

Heather Wilhelm is more to the point.

Why should Americans who don’t live in New York have to cushion the state’s unwieldy, ossified tax-and-spend regime? True tax pillaging, after all, starts at home.

It’s not news to point out that people are fleeing blue states for red states. Recent reports show that Texas gained 1.3 million new residents over the past ten years. (Texas, of course, has no state income tax.) During the same time period, Illinois and New York lost more than 2 million. The GOP tax bill, which rips the mask off of high state-tax regimes, could very well increase the bleeding. “High-income earners on the East Coast understand the implications of this,” a friend who works in finance told me this week. Some of his contacts on Wall Street, he added, are toying with the idea of voting with their feet.

If blue states can’t get their act together soon, perhaps that’s not such a shabby idea. It would certainly send a message, loud and clear: “It’s not the tax bill that’s the problem, dear high-tax state governments. It’s you.”

So mote it be.

UNDOING BEECHING'S CUTS.

The British are figuring out that when the track is in place, it might be foolish to take it out.

“Rail travel has transformed over the last 20 years and our railways are carrying twice as many passengers as they did before privatisation," says Chris Grayling, the secretary of state for transportation. “But we need a new way of working to help our railway deal with the challenges it faces.”

Grayling cites lines such as the “Varsity” line linking Oxford and Cambridge, an 89-mile stretch between Edinburgh and Carlisle, a line between Southampton to Dorchester, and a route connecting Nottingham to London Marylebone.

Most of the candidates for rehabilitation were victims of the infamous "Beeching Axe" that closed a number a number of rural branch lines on the recommendation of Dr. Richard Beeching, chairman of the British Railways Board between 1961 and 1965. Beeching's modernization plans closed more than 4,000 miles of track and 2,000 stations.

It's true that in parts of Britain, the traffic might better be handled on one line, rather than on two or more lightly-used formerly competing lines.  The example that stands out is the Trans-Pennine between Manchester and Leeds via Huddersfield, which brings to mind the old Lehigh Valley and Central of New Jersey toward Sayre, Pennsylvania, and way too much track once the anthracite mines stopped working.  The Varsity Line has potential as a cross-country route to the west and north of London.  That Edinburgh to Carlisle is the old Waverley Route, which might have been axed as redundant thanks to it being a mountain railroad through a traffic desert.  And the closure of the Nottingham to London line, a former Great Central route, was subject to protest back in the day, as that line had been engineered to the more generous (by European standards, mind you) Continental loading gauge, and as such would make a logical connection to points north once a Channel tunnel opened.  But in the middle 1960s, a Channel tunnel was probably still something that would have to be closed off if a latter-day Napoleon or Hitler had designs on England.

Thus, much of the Great Central was torn up, although the Nottingham end is a preservation railway on the original metals.  Have any other preservation lines been turned back into main lines?

HE'S MORE MACHINE THAN MAN.

That's part of the evolution of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, and there's something similar at work with Ivar the Boneless.

Speaking of Ivar, he's almost starting to turn into a movie villain.

With that hood over his head and that evil look in his eyes, was anyone else reminded of Anakin Skywalker from Revenge of the Sith?

Ivar is about to go complete Darth Vader, guys.

He looked like he was completely losing his mind just sitting there laughing, his face covered in blood, while a whole battle commenced around him. If he were going for an insanity plea in a trial, I would believe it.

Ivar has a new set of orthotics, his helmet is more substantial than those of the other berserkers, he alone has a war-chariot, and he's been schooled in the mystic arts by Ragnar and Floki.  So why not?

Yes, Vikings returns, complete with cheesy Geico commercials and selective compression of the sagas.

Or perhaps, we're looking at extended remakes of classic swashbucklers.  So far, there's no half-brother to restage Tony Curtis killing Kirk Douglas, but we do have Bjorn and Halfdan on their way to the Mediterranean, if not on a quest for a great golden bell, Floki off on a day sail that has not yet brought him to the coast of Nova Scotia, and way too much twenty-first-century sensibilities among the women running Kattegat.

Ivar and Ubbe are clearly at odds, with Hvitserk as the wild card. Floki and Bjorn are off on their own crazy adventures. Lagertha retains a tenuous grasp on power in Kattegat. And Harald is off to gather his strength.

Both Ivar and Harald have their [sights] set upon Lagertha---the former for revenge, the latter for power. But Ivar, at least, will have his hands full in England. Aethelwulf was a poor strategist, but Heahmund strikes me as a more clear and present danger to the vikings' ambition.

Perhaps. The bishop is almost as crazy as Ivar.  "Ivar has the potential to be a very interesting character, but he also has the potential to become Vikings' own Ramsay Snow---essentially an Evil Mary Sue who is always victorious, always right, always one step ahead of his enemies."  Mr Kain notes that Vikings is doing a lot of selective compression with the chronicles as we have them, which means there is likely a church-yard in Manchester with Ivar's name on it.

I love that we don't know where any of this is headed (beyond the broad-strokes historical stuff like Floki and Iceland or Rollo in Normandy or Ivar in Ireland and so forth---basically all the major historical points in vikings history condensed into one abbreviated timeline where all the great heroes of these sagas come from Kattegat.)

I do have my concerns over Ivar, but I have faith that at the very least this show always complicates its heroes and villains enough to make them more than just one-dimensional. And I'm curious to see where all these shifting alliances and betrayals go as the season progresses.

More to come. We'll be following along.

THEY CHOSE POORLY.

St. Norbert women's basketball team suspended 10 games for alcohol-related incident.  That's a Division III squad out of De Pere, Wisconsin, toiling in the shadow of longtime Northern Illinois nemesis Wisconsin - Green Bay at a Catholic college better known as home, back to when Vince Lombardi was doing the bed-checks, to the Green Bay Packer training camp.

The incidents happened at a number of locations on campus over the course of one evening last month.

Along with the 10 games, the Green Knights will be ineligible for the Midwest Conference tournament and the regular-season championship because they are not playing a full league schedule.

SNC women’s coach Connie Tilley, who is in her 41st season with the Green Knights, was not available for comment.

The decision to suspend the team was made by the school and its judicial board and not by the league office. It was not possible to hand out individual suspensions because there were too many involved on the 13-player roster to be able to field a team.

Administrators are not sanctioning some middle-of-the conference squad, either.

SNC is 5-3 to start the season, including 3-0 in league play. It made the NCAA Division III tournament in March despite having 10 freshmen on the roster. It was the fourth straight season the Green Knights advanced to the national tournament, but they already know the streak is over.

That's what "This is not who we are" looks like.

TRAINGATING.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train calls at Wauwatosa.

It wasn't Lambeau Field Sunday afternoon but a busy parking lot next to the train tracks in Wauwatosa that drew Elaine Sprenger and around 20 people in the Friendship Club. They snacked and sipped while waiting patiently for a train to arrive.

Not just any locomotive. Sprenger and thousands of others turned out to see the brightly colored, pulsing, rocking Canadian Pacific Holiday Train slowly chug to a stop behind Cafe Hollander and Saz's.

I'll give them that "chug" with those rebuilt "GP20" diesels assigned to Holiday Train service.

Now that Harwood Avenue has an overpass, this stop, near the historic Wauwatosa "Village" and Hoyt Park is possible without blocking any level crossings.

Automobiles began pulling in a couple of hours before the train's arrival in Wauwatosa, filling up parking spots on the street and lots near the tracks. Some people sat in the hatchbacks of vehicles, brought folding chairs or stood holding cups of warm drinks. Parents pushed strollers, carried children on shoulders or kept an eye on toddlers, some yelling "choo choo!"

I hope they remembered their cash or in-kind contributions to the food banks. Wauwatosa isn't the upscale suburb it once was.

YOU DON'T JUST WIN A BASKETBALL GAME BY SCORING.

Last year, the Northern Illinois women's basketball team were among the Division I leaders in scoring  (the good way) and in points allowed (the bad way).  The team took an education from that points allowed ranking.

Holding a late fourth-quarter lead over Toledo, NIU seemed well on its way to its first NCAA tournament appearance since 1995. Instead, the Rockets exposed [forward Courtney] Woods and the Huskies on defense, cutting NIU’s postseason short with a 82-71 defeat.

Woods said she’ll remember those 10 minutes for the rest of her life.

“It was always a thing that I wasn’t good at defense, but in that fourth quarter [versus Toledo in the MAC championship], they exploited me defensively,” Woods said. “I wouldn’t say it cost us the game, but it definitely didn’t put us in position to win the game.”

For most of Woods’ life, the Brisbane, Australia, native always has played hard on offense, but relaxed on defense.

Not this season.

“Coming into this year, it wasn’t even going to be a thing where I would be like, ‘I’m not that good at defense, but that’s OK,’ ” she said. “It was something I knew I had to fix because I knew it hurt us in the championship.”

I had a colleague, tasked with the mathematical economics courses, who would ask students who pleaded a long-time difficulty with mathematics what they had done to get better at it. Often ... crickets.

DIED FOR A THEORY.

With the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution behind us, it is useful to consider the toll of actually existing socialism, or perhaps of the Stalinist perversion thereof.   Blood-Red Century, writes Ryan Fazio for City Journal.

Western culture and education today do an admirable job of teaching about the atrocities of fascism. Nazi Germany is reflexively understood as pure evil, and fascist regimes in Italy and Spain have also been damned. People understand the Holocaust to be history’s worst genocide. Broad awareness of fascism’s crimes serves as a bulwark against future threats to freedom.

The twentieth century yielded another evil ideology, however, one that marked an anniversary this fall, with the centennial of the Bolshevik coup in Russia: Communism reigned in Russia for eight decades and spread to dozens of other nations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These regimes subjugated more than 1 billion people and murdered tens of millions in the name of social revolution and abolition of private property.

Radical leftism has largely avoided the stigma that we attach to fascism in the West.

In part, that might be because the liberal democracies attempted to provide their own versions of the allegedly free stuff the Iron Curtain countries were giving away.  Nils Gilman's The Cold War and the Welfare State in The American Interest elaborates.

During the Cold War, the choice facing ruling elites in Western countries was between perpetuating the interwar laissez faire system that had created working class misery, and which in turn threatened to create an opening for Communists, and building welfare states. Even for conservatives, that was an easy choice. Building North Atlantic welfare states in the postwar period was an explicitly counter-Communist political project shared by Christian and Social Democrats alike. Its explicit political goal was to marginalize the influences of the far Left.

That might be based on a misinterpretation of the causes of the 1929 depression and its persistence.  And policymakers in Europe and the United States had a victory dividend that they thought would make all things possible until it didn't.  And there are enough people drawing parallels to the Thirties, through last year's U.S. elections and on into the wrangling over health care and taxes and infrastructure that Ron Grossman's analysis, in Chicago's Tribune, has purchase.

Socialists downplayed talk of barricades in favor of "Evolutionary Socialism"— making a better world through legislative victories. Presumably that is what [Vermont's Bernie] Sanders means by calling himself a democratic socialist.

Meanwhile, conservatives started taking a page from their opponents' playbook, as successful politicians will. In the 1880s, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck established a comprehensive social-welfare program in Germany: unemployment and old-age insurance, industrial safety regulations, limits on the working day and employment of minors.

It was the world's first such, and its champion was anything but a bleeding-heart liberal. Known as the "Iron Chancellor," Bismarck was an archconservative. But with the socialists vote rising, he realized that he needed to play their hand before they did.

As a result of similar give-and-take, Europe's economy became neither quite capitalist nor purely socialist but something in-between. Capitalism with a human face, you might say.

That didn't happen here. Instead, the dominant idea was that unfettered capitalism grows the middle class that is democracy's bedrock. It was hard to argue with that proposition. The American middle class was a joy to behold — larger and enjoying a larger slice of the economic pie than any before it.

More recently that has changed. The middle class is declining in numbers; its incomes have been stagnant or receding. Foreclosures have taken the homes that were its share of the American dream. Students graduate so deep in debt it will take years for them to have the enhanced earnings they were promised when they went to college — if they can even find a decent job. Yet the rich are getting richer — the now famous 1 percent.

And socialism has gone from a dirty word to the virtual lapel button of a grandfatherly senator who packs them in like a rock star. His white hair flailing, he thunders against bankers and Wall Street like an Old Testament prophet. He warns his followers that electing him won't be enough. America needs a revolution.

But think not of that revolution in terms of guillotines, or cadre storming the Winter Palace.  Northeastern Illinois philosopher Tyler Zimmer suggests that revolution is emergent.

Marxists value free speech because they are committed to building a society where all can decide matters of public concern democratically, as genuine equals. Thus, the Marxist has a consistent way of explaining why speech that aims to dominate or marginalize others should be challenged rather than protected: it is contrary to the very values animating our commitment to free speech in the first place.

What’s more, since our own society falls radically short of the democratic ideals of freedom and equality, it would be absurd to say that acts of disruption or civil disobedience aimed at realizing those ideals are wrong.

He wrote those paragraphs shortly after Bernie Bros, or perhaps just disaffected Illinois state employees, disrupted a Donald Trump rally scheduled for the sports arena at University of Illinois - Chicago.  But in that "challenged rather than protected" and that endorsement of "acts of disruption" is precisely the totalitarianism of Critique of Pure Tolerance.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  "Actually, liberating tolerance, or progressive intolerance, makes suppression of reactionary speech the sole, and most important, criterion for shouting down a speaker. In time, though, the zealots begin to turn on each other."

DON'T THROW GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD.

After Douglas Baker left the presidency of Northern Illinois University, a court stayed the payment of part of his severance package, in part because the board of trustees took the decision without proper disclosure of the agenda or open discussion.

The matter of the severance came before the board again today.  The Illinois Policy Institute didn't want the money to be spent.  "[T]he NIU Board of Trustees can take a positive step Dec. 7 and vote to deny Baker’s severance, in what would be a clear win for taxpayers and a welcome deviation from the state’s track record of misguided higher education priorities."  The editors at DeKalb's Daily Chronicle also pray for the trustees to hold back the money.  "We hope some people show up at the Northern Illinois University Board of Trustees meeting Thursday to share their opinions on the $600,000 severance deal the board gave former President Doug Baker."  To do otherwise is to send the wrong signal.

We hope that this will be the last time the university, whose leaders frequently complain about the lack of state funding for higher education, will throw away so much money with so little benefit. We would rather see new programs, facilities, professors – even repairs to the chipped and broken paving stones all over campus – than another nickel thrown away on severance, legal fees and bogus consultants.

The payout to Baker is about what the average American earns in a decade. The public has had enough of big payouts to make public-sector managers go away.

Perhaps the university could outsource the severance money to donors.  That has been done, with some success, in college athletics for years.

The taxpayers lost.  The board's stance simplifies to "we took the right decision in conclave, we'll take the same decision in public, and we'll stand by our decision."

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS MANNERS.

Idea Pod's Tina Fey, who I suspect is not the political hack masquerading as comedienne who shares her name, argues "Introverts don't hate people, they hate shallow socializing."  For instance, "The dilemma introverts face is we need people, but we need meaningful interaction more.  If you want to talk about the weather, your mother in-law, the price of rice or the best way to keep linen white, you have lost your introvert friend."  That used to be called making conversation.  Heck, every member of the British Royal Family gets coaching on making conversation, the better to be able to interact with any of Her Majesty's subjects.  Don't be stupid about being smart.  "Introverts will surprise you with animated expressions of very definite opinions on just about any topic.  That is because we spend a lot of our time reading and thinking.  Hence the boredom with small talk -- there is so much that could be discussed other than the latest family spat or Mary's latest boyfriend."  On the other hand, being animated and definite about something that the rest of the party hasn't given much thought to, or might have strongly held and different opinions, can ruin a party as quickly as the latest gossip.  Don't be stupid about being smart.

THAT PRESUPPOSES A PROFESSIONAL DISPOSITION.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan suggests that professors distinguish "extra credit" from "extortion."  "Through the long life of this blog, UD has read one account after another of some professor somewhere offering extra credit if the kids will help her husband distribute campaign literature (he’s running for school board!), or if they will show proof that they gave blood (blood donation is a virtue, and I want to encourage it!), or will show proof that they voted (it’s your civic duty!), etc., etc."

Yes, that would be desirable, provided the faculty understood their role as being able to teach the controversies and strengthen their students' jive detectors.

A half century of deconstructing those institutions and changing the mind-set leaves more than a few professors in the position of a Maoist re-educator, using every opportunity to set their charges on the One True Path.  By those lights, Earning an A for Political Effort On My Behalf is Serving The People.

Per corollary, calling attention to such efforts must be the work of Enemies of the People.  And outlets such as Campus Reform and College Fix?  Engaging in violence!

To their credit, senior scholars in the various trendy -studies departments have been asking the critics to concentrate their fire on the thought leaders.

However, those of us who are senior scholars doing critical work and authoring articles in this special issue are strongly committed to providing our support to critical scholars under attack by Trump-inspired rightwing individuals and groups, like Campus Reform and The College Fix. We know these attacks are only going to grow, and we know we cannot just be in a defensive mode. This issue represents our first efforts to start publishing on these issues, speaking up in public forums (e.g., conferences, speaking engagements) and organizing within our universities and national organizations. In other words, as senior scholars, we are pledging to actively support and protect critical scholars in colleges and universities across the US. Further, we challenge those rightwing organizations—instead of focusing on mostly untenured junior scholars, the most vulnerable among us—to focus your fervor on us.

Many of these authors are affiliated with the colleges of deaducation education.  That is already a target-rich environment, particularly as it is the graduates of the colleges of deaducation education who staff and run the common schools, and rare is the week I don't get to note the Distressed Material originating therein.

For the record, I've been linking to people who are skeptical of this "critical scholars" enterprise for the fifteen years of Cold Spring Shops, and raising such objections in curriculum committees and university governance for at least fifteen years before that.  Mr Trump is late to this enterprise, but if his activities bring my objections, and the objections of others, to national prominence, so be it.

THE SWAMP CREATURES ARE HIGH AND DRY.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed doesn't find much to like in the current Federal tax rewrite.

I'll start with the part where the bill is on the shakiest ground, which is the treatment of tuition waivers and the like as implicit income.

One of the few perks we’ve been able to afford to offer employees is tuition waivers for themselves and their dependent children. One proposal calls for taxing those as income. I don’t see proposals for taxing “employee discounts” in other industries, though. Just education. Given that a dollar is a dollar, one has to wonder at the real motivation. Granted, the impact would be greatest on graduate students; in many cases, their tuition waivers are nominally higher than their stipends, so their tax increases would be by several multiples. (Eventually, that could reduce the pool of adjunct faculty, driving up costs even more.) It could also do a number on our non-credit corporate training side, where employers often pay for employee training. Given that we keep hearing about the need for colleges to be responsive to employers, that’s counterintuitive at best.

Just for fun, let's go through the whole tax code, and identify all the forms of compensation that aren't subject to taxation.  Take health benefits.  (Please.)  That was a subterfuge by which employers could avoid wage controls and recruit more-desirable workers by offering to cover their health insurance.  And once the Victory Dividend wore off, but not until we got Medicare and Medicaid, look how well that turned out.  Mightn't it be simpler to treat that compensation as income, and treat health care as another environment in which trade-tested betterments ought be tried?

PRICES FUNCTION TO ALLOCATE DEMAND.

Cold Spring Shops have long been the place for advocating sensible pricing of the roads.

Where the pricing is not sensible, you get traffic jams, or perhaps you get markets for hitch-hikers.

Encouragingly, in the nest of rent-seekers that calls itself Interstate 66 outside Washington, D.C., the high occupancy toll lanes are providing speed, but at a premium.

The estimated toll for one-way travel from the Beltway to Washington before 8 a.m. was $28.50. About 8:40 a.m., the toll was $34.50.

The rates are variable depending on traffic conditions. Officials with Virginia’s Department of Transportation said the $34.50 rate was the “peak of the peak rate.”

That's more money for one trip than I carry as a balance on my I-Pass, but then I'm not making decisions that can screw over millions of people and generate billions of rents.

Part of the reason toll prices can spike at any given time, VDOT officials said, is that the system bases rates on the volume and speed it is trying to maintain. On Monday, VDOT said the average speed was 57 mph, compared to 37 mph at roughly the same time a year ago.

OK, so that works out at about $105 to save an hour of travel time, extrapolating.  I defy you to find a lobbyist or lawyer anywhere in the District who bills his time at $105 an hour.  (At least one commenter on the article sort of sees that.)

Or perhaps it's because the calculus is no longer what it was ninety years ago.

EVERY SHAVER

NOW CAN SNORE

SIX MORE

MINUTES

THAN BEFORE

TINGLES FEELS THE INDIANS WON THE SERIES.

I thought we had settled that last fall, but Friday last, Chris Matthews couldn't stop at needling Mike Flynn for pleading guilty to lying to the sledstvie after leading Republicans in "Lock Her Up" cheers.

Perhaps he had to put in that "she won the election" line as an act of contrition to keep his entire travelling circus of Democrat hangers-on on his panels after speaking the truth about deplorable-shaming the normals.  (And why, CNN, did you move the more edifying S.E. Cupp panel to an earlier time slot, meaning I have less reason to avoid Tingles and his spittle-flecked rants after supper?  Yeah, I know, there's an off switch.)

THEIR ATTITUDE IS THEIR ERROR.

For a long time, I have suggested that the aesthetic sensibilities of learned people bring contempt for their otherwise inclined neighbors or former neighbors in train.  That's a suggestion.  If you'd like that argument codified, clarified, and extensively supported, pick up Fred Siegel's The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism has Undermined the Middle Class.

I'll keep Book Review N^o. 30 brief.  Mr Siegel is writing about the pernicious effect of the aesthetic sensibilities of learned people, or at least people who have persuaded themselves that their credentials, or their tone, or their hosts or guests at the right kind of parties qualify themselves as learned, or somehow better equipped to lead.  (We understand that they are not: and I have devoted fifteen years to counting the ways in which they are not.)  The usual suspects are there: Herbert Croly, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Susan Sontag.  His purpose is straightforward.  "Liberals believe that they deserve more power because they act on behalf of people's best interests -- even if the darn fools don't know it."  (Paperback edition, xvi.)

But the story is less about policy or winning elections than it is about the evolution of the cluster of ideas most easily summarized under the rubric of "fatal conceit."  It's also the growing frustration of the remnant of the middle class at their treatment by their self-appointed betters, and the growing frustration of those supposed betters at losing arguments, as well as elections.

The index notes no mentions of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.  They're not necessary.  The frustrations documented by Mr Siegel were in place long before those Wisconsin and Michigan electoral votes went on the board.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MORE IMPORTANT TO MOVE CARGO THAN TO KEEP SCHEDULE?

It's a metaphor I learned years ago, in the context of ensuring that students are learning, rather than fretting about getting through all the material.

Apparently there are people at CSX Transportation who get it.

Toyota Canada on Nov. 17 withdrew generally positive comments it made to federal regulators in October, saying they no longer reflect the service the automaker is receiving from CSX.

And under pressure from lawmakers, CSX last week reversed plans to curtail service to General Mills facilities, including a mill in Buffalo, N.Y., that makes Cheerios, The Buffalo News reported. CSX had planned to switch the Cheerios plant once a day, down from the current twice-daily service.

“As we progress the adaptation of Precision Scheduled Railroading across our network, CSX continues to respond to individual customer issues when they emerge,” spokesman Rob Doolittle says. “A good case in point is General Mills, where CSX has agreed to continue providing twice-daily service to General Mills' Buffalo facility as the company prepares for proposed changes to the rail-service schedule at its Buffalo plant. CSX remains committed to working with General Mills and all of our customers to meet their service requirements as we makes changes across our network to improve efficiency, safety, and customer service.”

CSX officials have said [new chief operating officer James] Foote is an important addition to the management team, particularly since he brings a deep background with Precision Scheduled Railroading.

He replaces both Chief Operating Officer Cindy Sanborn and Chief Marketing Officer Fredrik Eliasson, who left CSX on Nov. 15 along with Ellen Fitzsimmons, who was the railroad’s chief legal officer.

All that talk about "efficiency, safety, and customer service" is as of nothing when General Mills goes to drones to get those Cheerios right to your door.

DONALD TRUMP IS NOT REPUBLICAN IS NOT CONSERVATIVE.

I've been attempting to find clarity for years.  "Put another way, theological conservatism, or pro-business conservatism, or national-greatness conservatism, are all at odds with libertarian conservatism. These four mind-sets could make common cause against Soviet Communism, and there are ways for those mind-sets to make common cause against whatever the Democrats are currently up to."  And the Republicans and the Democrats alike continue to get by without the libertarians in the room.

The conservative temperament, Dalibor Rohac argues, bets on emergence.

Radicalism instead requires making leaps of faith, and often making impossible promises to mobilize the masses. But that sets in motion a dynamic that inevitably appears in the context of revolutions driven by utopian ideologies. Once the impossibility of promises made becomes apparent, a search for saboteurs and traitors gets underway in order to identify those responsible for derailing the will of the people from being translated into effective policy. At some point, shifting the blame around becomes unsustainable. The revolutionary edifice collapses and is replaced by reactionary backlash.

That's a contemporary abuse of the term "radical" to mean "trying extraordinary methods" or "relying on vanguards" (heck, you could subsume the entire cult of the presidency under either of those rubrics) rather than "looking for the underlying structure."

Emergence is harder work, but more likely to produce less unsatisfactory outcomes.

Intellectuals and political leaders still have the responsibility to make the case for more open immigration and trade regimes if their social benefits outweigh the costs. However, there is a difference between carefully building support for that case and taking such support for granted, while dismissing dissenters as bigots and protectionists. The experience of the past decade shows that particularly in environments of zero-sum politics—which are usually associated with periods of sluggish or absent economic growth—utmost care needs to be exercised in making decisions that can be seen, albeit wrongly, as benefitting foreigners at the expense of “our people.”

In themselves, prudence, humility, and moderation are hardly winning political messages. But in a world of complexity and unintended consequences, they are necessary components of any honest right-of-center politics. Let us remember it when the time comes to rebuild on the ashes of the current conservative radicalism.

Let us remember that the Puritans liked to use names such as Prudence and Patience and Temperance and Thankful and Increase.  The bourgeois virtues.

THE ROAD TO HELL.

Learn Liberty's Ninos Malek clarifies.  "Good intentions do not always lead to good outcomes. In fact, many times, they lead to dire consequences."  Read and understand.

Pinned to the bulletin board in Cafe Hayek.

IT IS BETTER TO GOVERN IN ILLINOIS THAN TO SERVE IN INDIANA?

That despite Illinois being the canonical example of Getting the Blue Model Wrong.

No acknowledgment that this is a state government that is ranked last by almost every objective and measurable standard. A state government that fails every single one of its residents, day after day — and has failed its residents for decades. A state government that demands more and more money each year, to deliver increasingly less value to Illinoisans. A state government that cannot pay its bills, cannot make good on its promises, cannot help people in need.

The author wasn't fired as a whistleblower. She quit.

But well-heeled entrepreneurs, rent-seekers, and heirs are pouring money into gubernatorial campaigns as if a football franchise or a tech company office park at stake.

Self-government has failed in the nation’s currently fifth-most populous state (Pennsylvania soon will pass it). Republican Governor Bruce Rauner will seek re-election with a stark warning: The state is approaching a death spiral — departing people and businesses suppress growth; the legislature responds by raising taxes; the exodus accelerates.

Rauner, whose net worth earned as a private-equity executive is $500 million, give or take, probably will be running against someone six times richer. The race might consume $300 million — “maybe more,” Rauner says — eclipsing California’s $280 million gubernatorial race in 2010, when that state’s population was three times larger than Illinois’.

The strangeness of the contest between Rauner and the likely Democratic nominee (J.B. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune) is that Rauner’s real opponent is a Democrat who has been in the state assembly since Richard Nixon’s first term (1971) and has been speaker all but two years since Ronald Reagan’s first term (1983). Michael Madigan from Chicago is the “blue model” of government incarnate. This model is the iron alliance of the Democratic party and government workers’ unions. Madigan supports Pritzker, who is committed to the alliance. This is the state of the state under it:

Unfunded state and local government retirement debt is more than $260 billion and rising. Unfunded pension liabilities for the nation’s highest-paid government workers (overtime starts at 37.5 hours) are $130 billion and are projected to increase for at least through the next decade. Nearly 25 percent of the state’s general funds go to retirees (many living in Texas and Florida). Vendors are owed $9.5 billion. Every five minutes the population — down 1.22 million in 16 years — declines as another person, and an average of $30,000 more in taxable income, flees the nation’s highest combined state and local taxes. Those leaving are earning $19,600 more than those moving in. The work force has shrunk by 97,000 this year. There has not been an honestly balanced budget — a constitutional requirement — since 2001. The latest tax increase, forced by the legislature to end a two-year budget impasse, will raise more than $4 billion, but another $1.7 billion deficit has already appeared.

Those retirees might be subject to state income tax in Texas or Florida: even the reality that pension payments are exempt from Illinois income tax isn't reason enough to stay. (You can't build basements in much of Florida or Texas, thus I'm still here.)

Mr Pritzker is running against Christopher Kennedy, son of the late attorney general.  And Mr Rauner has been attempting to make of Michael Madigan what Our President is attempting to make of Elizabeth Warren.  There's a recent commercial in which the Rauner campaign has Republican governors of neighboring states saying "Thanks, Madigan" for the migration of voters and businesses into Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

George Will, confessed Cub fan, hopes that Illinoisans can arrest the decline before it's too late.  "The nation has a huge stake in this brawl because the 'blue model' is bankrupting cities and states from Connecticut to California, so its demolition here, where it has done the most damage, would be a wondrous story enhancing the nation’s glory."

The story has been nailed to Newmark's Door.

BEING A GENTLEMAN IS HARD.

That's Andrew Klavan, shortly after the news that Harvey Weinstein is a cad broke.  But there used to be a way of dealing with cads and bounders.

If a manly man finds out Harvey Weinstein abused his wife or girlfriend, Harvey Weinstein gets his lights punched out. Of all the people involved in this story, the only one I've admired at all so far is Brad Pitt. When Pitt found out Weinstein had made advances on his then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow, at least he went and confronted the producer and told him never to do it again. That may not be the last scene of High Noon, but, manhood-wise, I'll take what I can get. Good for Brad Pitt.

Mr Klavan is the moderate today.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg has a number of new epithets, including "Toxic Eunuchism" and "Genderquislings."  It's a marvellous rant, and it includes a link to Matt Walsh, with another marvellous rant.

What we need in our society are chivalrous, strong, respectable, productive, and self-sacrificial men. Real men, in other words. Men who protect, provide, and do all of the things that society has always depended upon men to do. If you are that sort of man, you certainly should not shut up, step to the side, or consider yourself "trash." Our culture needs your input and leadership more than ever.

It may be pointed out that there are fewer and fewer of these men available today. Again, I agree. That’s why we must raise our boys to embrace their masculinity — not apologize for it or feel ashamed of it — and carry themselves with dignity. The abuser and harasser never learned this lesson. He is an empty shell. He couldn't be a man so he decided to be a cartoon instead. He is not fueled by “toxic masculinity” or any kind of masculinity at all. He is a twisted, emotionally stunted little boy who never grew out of puberty.

The issue is not that he is a man but that he never became one. That's his problem, and ours.

Being a gentleman is hard.

CLOTHED WITH A PUBLIC INTEREST.

I've sometimes wondered whether the Civil Rights era might have had a better outcome, fifty years on, had the national government used its Constitutional authority to limit the power of states, under the principle that "separate but equal" is contrary to "equal treatment under the law."  Thus any state or local segregation statutes would be unconstitutional, and state and local authorities would no longer have the power to compel transportation companies or eateries to provide segregated seating or to refuse service.

What happened, instead, was an extension of the public accommodation doctrine, perhaps because of the visual effect of young collegians sitting-in at lunch counters.  And that extension well might have made perfect legal sense, given Supreme Court rulings on the ability of Congress and of state and local legislatures and common councils to use whatever criteria they wanted in finding property clothed with a public interest.

That approach converts any business into a common carrier (well, sort of: no service whether you're wearing shoes or not; no cheap watches at Sharper Image) and perhaps that ought to be the understood contract.  That argument has purchase to the extent that business owners might otherwise be willing to indulge their prejudices despite the voluntary sacrifice of business that accompanies those prejudices.

In Let Them Bake Cake, Richard Epstein suggests that market tests might be simpler.

When does it make sense to impose an obligation of universal service? The time-honored answer, as I have urged elsewhere, is in the case of common carriers and public utilities, which are not in a position to refuse service because they are the only supplier of standardized, impersonal, but essential services such as rail transportation, electricity, power, and communication, without which participation in ordinary life is exceedingly difficult. Historically, these services were supplied most cheaply by a single provider, which therefore had the correlative duty to serve all customers on what are known as FRAND standards—fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.

The necessary corollary is that duties of service should never be compelled in a well-organized competitive market, an issue that lies at the heart of the Masterpiece dispute. We are far removed from the days of Jim Crow when the unified exercise of state power and private violence blocked the entry of new firms to serve black citizens who were systematically deprived of rights to vote or to participate in public affairs. We are long past the days when local governments could covertly, and without effective judicial review, deny power and electricity to any firm that chose to integrate its workforce. Our brief pointed out the thriving market supplying services for same-sex marriages both in states that prohibit discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and those that do not.

That sounds like a standard legal brief argument.  A half century after the Freedom Rides, however, there are still people who perceive the country as just one bad Supreme Court ruling away from the Confederate Restoration, or something.

In this environment, moreover, the prospect of open entry—never mentioned in the behavioral economics brief—will encourage a sufficient number of merchants to target underserved sections of the market. The behavioral economics brief shows an ideological blindness when it assumes that the rigid totalitarianism of Jim Crow has its analogue today in the hostile social response to gay and lesbian weddings by, of all people, Jack Phillips. That outsized claim inexcusably ignores and trivializes the lynchings, lootings, and humiliations that turned the old South into a police state.

There's good work in behavioral economics, considering such things as endowment effects (the option value of keeping what you currently have).  But you get people seizing on the stylized fact that simple models of behavior don't apply in all circumstances and using that as grounds to toss out the received models of economics under any circumstances, including those circumstances where the model is good enough.

And all this over bakers and photographers who have qualms about same-sex weddings?  Particularly when there are likely other bakers and photographers who would be delighted to cater and record same?

WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKS THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

(Edited and bumped) The provisions in the current, not yet ready for a floor vote, tax code revision that will treat tuition waivers as income are not playing well in the common room and the administrative offices.  One might say the proposals are concentrating minds.

Perhaps, though, a quarter century of higher education breaking the social contract that used to ensure that students would learn, and taxpayers would support the enterprise, is behind the proposal.  Peter Wood suggests as much.

We are in deep educational trouble, much of which does not appear to be a matter of excessive tuitions or government programs. The erosion of intellectual standards, the rise of shout-downs and student-led censorship, the disappearance of regard for Constitutional rights and responsibilities are conspicuous evidence that something is amiss in our colleges and universities.  The price of education doesn’t all by itself explain this descent into the maelstrom, but it is a key factor that is often overlooked.  Let’s, for a change, consider it.

Most of his essay concentrates on the ways in which tuition waivers are part of a much more complicated framework by which nobody pays list price.  We've seen that erosion, midwived in part by political correctness, for better than a quarter century.  And the conversion of universities from places of learning to summer camps with beer 'n circus and maybe the odd imposition of a class here or there antagonizes politicians who want to be seen as fiscally responsible.  Maybe, as Mr Wood suggests, it's not so much the nests of court intellectuals for Democrats and latter-day juveniles dressing up as Leon Trotsky (!) that antagonize the legislators as it is climbing walls and water parks (while the classroom buildings and the libraries decay).  "Congress’s decision to start cutting the subsidies is what happens at the end of the river."

That's not to say that the trendy leftists with their intersectionality and culture studies and French rot and BLTGQUINOA and the rest of it aren't partly responsible.  Mark Bauerlein doesn't quite say "We told you so."  But we told you so.  "If the conservatives and traditionalists predicted a dark future of the humanities, well, that was just because they didn’t have the acuity to understand how rich and cutting-edge theory and cultural studies had become."

Facts are stubborn things, and shrinking enrollments and angry normals are real.

I haven’t seen any of the people who mocked conservatives and traditionalists for their sky-is-falling rhetoric say in response to the catastrophes of the last few years that they were wrong. They can’t. When you dispute an opponent over the facts, but stick to those facts and hold off on raillery, you can change your mind and make admissions. But when you desire not only to prove your adversary wrong but to discredit him, you can’t go back.

And discrediting adversaries is a game anyone can play.

A SPONTANEOUS EMBARGO?

It has long been a fantasy of the Perpetually Aggrieved that they can End War and Bring About Harmonic Convergence by ... sitting in front of trains.  Which is stupid, especially if you think that your statement will be more dramatic if you begin your sit-in as the train approaches.  That's a good way to lose, at a minimum, a foot.  That actually happened, in the San Francisco Bay area, during the Reagan years, but interfering with trains to disrupt the military-industrial complex goes back at least to the late Vietnam War era.  On the other hand, when real enemy agents attempted to interfere with real trains, in a real war, some of them got to sit in an electric chair.

But the fantasy lives on from the Weathermen down, most recently in the port of Olympia, Washington.

Among the protestors' demands is that the rail line no longer be used to transport fossil fuels or anything that's part of "military infrastructure." They are demanding "democratic" control of the port by the community as a whole -- which would not be "democratic," but socialist.

They also want to transition port employees over to mythical "green" jobs.

Once upon a time, The Milwaukee Road, which once served Olympia, used white coal to power trains, and a Milwaukee branch served Hanford, Washington, where the research that made nuclear steam electricity a reality took place, and both nuclear and hydro power are realistic responses to the cinders that blind and the carbon dioxide that accompanies the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

But there's that little problem of using hydro power to help make atomic bombs ...

There's also that little problem that the Perpetually Aggrieved do not make friends or influence wavering people with their certitude and their virtue signalling.

These folks have a right to protest, but they don't have a right to trespass on property and they have no right to inhibit commerce. They need to be either arrested, or at the very least dragged away from the tracks so business can get back to normal.

What these Leftist protestors don't understand is that they're never going to actually win with these tactics. All they're doing is pissing people off. Do that enough and no one will give a damn why you're protesting.

It might be that they're protesting at the wrong port, anyway. I have some stories ...  But Olympia is close to Seattle, and Seattle is full of Perpetually Aggrieved types, and the trains get blocked.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A PERMANENT BIPARTISAN ESTABLISHMENT.

Or so Accuracy in Academia's Malcolm A. Kline contends, quoting journalist Neal B. Freeman.  "We know what they’re against: the sad and widely unremarked fact that Obama is conducting what looks to many people very much like a third Bush term—bailouts, stimulus, entitlement expansion, war escalation, wall-to-wall Tenth amendment overreach from the school to the hospital to the bank to the gas station." Meanwhile, in Panem the Capitol District,  "Republican Capitol Hill staffers were as disconsolate as their Democratic counterparts."

That swamp was not filled in one presidential term, nor will it be drained in one term.