WAIT, WHAT?

U.N. fails to stem rapes by peacekeepers in Africa.  That's right, having your country pacified by blue-helmeted representatives of the so-called international community might not be any better than having your country pacified by the local warlord.

Today, blue-helmeted soldiers and U.N. staff still rape with impunity despite pledges by U.N. leaders to end the abuses, victims allege.

"I am ashamed of the so-called international community," a tearful Marie-Blanche Marboua said as she described how a U.N. soldier raped her 10-year-old son a year ago in Bouar, 300 miles from this capital city. "My son is still traumatized."

"I have realized that nothing must be expected from these white people," she added. "Now, I put everything in the hands of God.”

The U.N.'s international peacekeeping forces were sent to Central African Republic to stabilize the country after more than a decade of civil war. While there, soldiers sexually abused hundreds of boys, girls and women, according to child rights organizations and the U.N.'s own records.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the exploitation and pledged when he took office a year ago to crack down. In August, he appointed a victims’ rights advocate.

“Sexual exploitation and abuse have no place in our world,” Guterres said in September. “It is a global menace, and it must end.”

Yes, another layer of management is just the thing to prevent the servants of the international community from viewing the place they have been sent to nation-build as a s***hole?  I suppose I should be grateful that the SecGen recognizes at least one categorical imperative.  On the other hand, an organization that offers legitimacy to kleptocrats and cronyists the world over isn't going to be the most reliable of self-reporting.

Human rights groups dispute claims of fewer assaults, saying the U.N. still does not have an accurate account of abuse victims.

"The U.N. is claiming things are getting better, but it is in complete control over the assessments of people coming forward, said Paula Donovan, a former U.N. official who is co-director of AIDS-Free World, which tracks peacekeeper abuses. "They are police, judge and jury."

It doesn't help that the peacekeepers are being sent to places that don't have much by the way of civil society, mediating institutions, or social norms in the first place.  Thus, for instance, "Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy."  Therefore, there's nobody to turn to when the representatives of the international community act out.

Some victims and their families fail to report assaults because they don't know how to file a claim, believe there won't be an impartial investigation or fear reprisals. "So people are not coming forward," Donovan said.

One 17-year-old girl said she did not report being raped at gunpoint in June by two peacekeepers in the city of Bria because sexual assault by U.N. soldiers is so common. She said many friends and neighbors ended up having children as a result of being raped by peacekeepers.

“I did not tell people that I was raped by the peacekeepers because they would make fun of me," said Merveille, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy as a sexual assault victim under USA TODAY's policy.

At Turtle Bay, the illegal parking and the scoffing at parking tickets seems like a minor thing. But when nobody is calling out the senior diplomats for small things, who in the name of Dag Hammarskjold has the authority to call out the troops on the ground?

While soldiers who are accused are sent home, U.N. staff members can be tried locally because most don't have diplomatic immunity. Still, the U.N. doesn't deal with them harshly enough, complained AIDS activist Donovan.

"If you rape a child, you might get investigated, but that is an investigation that will lead to demotion or getting fired, not jail," she said. "They don't want their people spending time in a jail in Central African Republic."

Nobody is saying third world hell-hole, and yet, everybody understands what a third world jail is.  Meanwhile, the emoluments of the local satraps, kleptocrats, and current presidents-for-life depends more upon stipends from the so-called international community than upon providing the conditions for a self-sustaining civil society to emerge.

Local officials remain silent because they are embarrassed about the scandal and view the peacekeeping mission as a powerful force that provides desperately needed foreign currency for a barely functioning economy, said Pierre Marie Kporon, a researcher at Bangui University who specializes in child rights violations.

"When you touch the international community that pays the salaries of civil servants, you risk having problems even with the government,” Kporon said.

As allegations of rape persist, many people here feel betrayed by an organization that sent troops to make life better for the country's citizens.

"We were told that (the peacekeepers) came to protect us,” said Beatrice Mokoyo, 45, a farmer and mother of seven in Biabo, near Bangui. "Instead, we see that it is the (peacekeepers) who cause the rapes. It makes me sick."

"I'm from the United Nations, and I'm here to protect you." Yes, put that alongside "I'm from the Federal Government, and I'm here to help you."

What Karin McQuillan says about Senegal applies to the Central African Republic, or any other place where well-intentioned representatives of the so-called international community seek to do good without understanding why what they see is what they see.  "Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country's problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours." That's likely to turn out better, as something locally arrived at rather than imposed, whether by the missionary with scripture, the colonist with a rifle, or the blue helmet with good intentions, has a better chance at working, no matter how messy the getting there might be.

BEGINNINGS.

Florida's Brightline service conducts dress rehearsals with passengers, scheduled service to follow.

Jim Kovalsky, of the Florida East Coast Railway Society, has taken two round-trip rides on Brightline’s trains — the first on Saturday and the second on Sunday.

“It is wonderful,” he said of the service. “It is unlike anything else that I know of in this country. It is fast. It is smooth.”

Kovalsky, a longtime Brightline supporter, said Sunday’s return trip to West Palm Beach from Ft. Lauderdale took 31 minutes.

“Try to drive from downtown Ft. Lauderdale to downtown West Palm Beach in just 31 minutes,” he said. “I think it is going to change the way rail service is seen in this country.”

The initial service is ten round trips, West Palm and Fort Lauderdale, on 90 minute headways.  The company still hopes to run service between Miami and Orlando.

Brightline officials have said their service stands out from other rail ventures because it will be privately owned, operated and maintained. The company’s trains will run on Henry Flagler’s historic rail corridor, passing through the heart of many of South Florida’s coastal cities. Brightline’s launch marks the first time passenger trains have run on the Florida East Coast Railway tracks since 1968, when passenger service was discontinued following a union strike.

That's correct, this is a private rail operation, neither associated with a regional Commuter Rail authority nor with Amtrak.

THE HOG IS CORN INCARNATE.

So did a mid-nineteenth-century writer explain the emergence of Chicago as "Hog Butcher for the World."  It's straightforward Weberian location analysis: the hog is fifteen or twenty bushels of corn concentrated, and the ham or sausage is the tastiest bits, suitably preserved for transportation.  There's less transportation involved with the corn converted into hogs near the cornfields and the hogs converted into food near the farms.  Thus, industrial meat packing displaces the local raising and butchering of a hog, the way it could be done without the abuse of immigrant industrial labor and the concentrations of various pollutants that have given writers from Upton Sinclair, describing Chicago, to Eric Schlosser, chronicling the further reduction of inbound transportation costs as the feedlots move closer to the corn-fields, and as Chicago's role as a central place for financial and manufacturing activities emerged.

And yes, there might be a political economy of the meat business, particularly to the extent that your cheap cold cuts rely on immigrant labor, and the dumping of fertilizer runoff, animal feces, and offal into the water table.  But all that conversion of vegetable matter into protein might be good for your health.  That's the despair of vegetarians and vegans.  "In reality, even reaching an equivalent level of nutrition without meat is not easy, even at the best of times in an area with great access to the foods needed. It takes careful planning to make sure you get enough of all the right foods to get you close to a healthy protein intake."  And part of Making America Great Again, or perhaps of a nascent economic recovery, might be evidenced at the butcher shop.

Production of both red meat and poultry will increase in 2018, at the same time the US economy is growing and Americans have more money to spend on food, it found.

Meat prices vary wildly from month-to-month. Ground beef cost $3.64 per pound on average in US cities in November 2017, a 1 percent increase from the previous year, according to the US Department of Labor Statistics. Sliced bacon cost $5.71, a nearly 12 percent increase from the previous year. Poultry is more affordable, while fresh chicken cost $1.45 per pound in U.S. cities in November 2017, a 1.8 percent drop from the previous year.

This is a prime indicator that the economy is strong, said Ted Schroeder, professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, with economic growth forecasts reaching the fastest pace in three years. “The conditions around employment and disposable income are creating demand from consumers,” he said. “As income grows and we gain more confidence, we will spend more at establishments on meat, especially products like high-quality steak.”

Unfortunately, as Pajamas Media's Tom Knighton notes, there's something in the vegetarian personality that can't affirm differences. "I keep hearing of vegans and vegetarians who simply can't handle the idea that someone else makes different choices."  That goes back at least as far as George Orwell's experiences with nutball socialists (excuse the redundancy) and the whiney feminists continue to amuse with their attempts to treat meat as male chauvinism or as pornography.

Consider, for instance, this recent appearance by an academician, Penn State's Anne DeLessio-Parson on Tucker Carlson's show, to argue that meat eating contributes to toxic masculinity, or something.

What's up with Fox News video sharing?

The interview was funny, in that the professor kept telling her interlocutor to do more reading, that some memorandum he had received was incomplete, or something.  (If you can't explain it in thirty seconds or less, you really don't understand it, but I digress.)  Her argument involves locational economics, in that she suggests a meat-based diet takes up more space.  With the corn concentrated in the hog, and the protein concentrated in the sausage, that isn't immediately obvious.  Her other arguments, invoking Argentine sex roles, or something, don't come off so well.  Angela Morabito has one deconstruction for Washington Examiner; there's something angrier at a men's rights weblog that picked up the story.

Alas, if being a carnivore somehow reinforces sex roles, there's not necessarily redemption in being vegan or vegetarian, particularly if you're rich and famous.

“Indeed, Beyoncé’s uptake and promotion of a vegan diet highlights what Elspeth Probyn has called ‘choicechoisie,’ by which she means the bourgeois, neo-liberal logic of shaping personal identity through the exercise of consumer choice,” they state.

“Ultimately, the post-feminist endorsement of veg*ism becomes a business opportunity, with celebrities such as Beyoncé capitalizing and aggrandizing their wealth through a dietary practice that eco-feminism has employed for political and ethical reasons,” the professors conclude.

Put another way, going on a diet so as to look hotter is somehow wrong?

While these diets have an important role for vegetarian eco-feminists, as signs of resistance against the patriarchal and capitalist exploitative system, in post-feminism they have become sexy and business oriented. This shift is analyzed through the case study of Beyoncé’s involvement with the commercial enterprise “22 days,” a dietary regime that involves the elimination of any animal product for 22 days. Our argument is that while eco-feminists have embraced vegetarian and vegan regimes as ethical and political choices, post-feminism depoliticizes and deradicalizes them. In this way, they become part of an individualistic project that emphasizes empowerment and meritocracy; choice, agency, and responsibilization; and the focus on a healthy, sexy body.

But wait, are vegan men more responsible, or more sexy?

[DeLessio-Parson] also noticed characteristics unique to male vegetarians, asserting that although many men in Argentina “still have these very hegemonic masculinity traits,” male vegetarians “seem more egalitarian and respectful” and “more open about talking about how sexism exists.”

DeLessio-Parson concludes that vegetarianism can help “destabilize not just gender, but also other hierarchies, and drive social change.

Taken together, it appears that the intersectionality enterprise is incoherent.  But then, any line of study that cannot distinguish between good empowerment and bad, good merit or undeserved, or take a stance on agency ought be laughed unto scorn, not funded.

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE ANTHEM PROTESTS.

It's the weeknight football, even though headquarters won't admit it. "In six home football games at Huskie Stadium during the 2017 season, NIU averaged 11,291 fans per game, down nearly 10,000 fans from only five years ago when the Huskies drew 21,000 fans in 2013." In 2013, the team was returning from an Orange Bowl trip, with Jordan Lynch figuring in the Heisman Trophy conversation.  The interim director of "Marketing and Game Experience" (no, I am not making up that job title), one Morgan James, is not cleared to address the polar bear in the woods.

James, however, is in a tough position as Director of Marketing and Game Experience, a job he started in January 2017. Besides facing budget issues within his department, he is also serving in an interim role. As he approaches his one-year work anniversary, his position was recently posted on NIU’s hiring website – James obviously applied and he’s hoping to be promoted to a full-time director, a decision that’ll be made by NIU Director of Athletics, Sean Frazier, along with other administrators.

Frazier did not respond to interview requests.

Without getting into further detail, James admitted NIU’s schedule, specifically mid-week MAC games, has hurt attendance numbers.

“That’s a question for guys way above my pay grade,” James said of NIU’s conference schedule.

Three of four non-conference games will be away, thus limiting the late summer Saturday experience.

WHY NOT TELL FLATLANDERS CHICAGO TRANSIT SUCKS?

The Bears still suck, but let's take one victory at a time.

Ads popped up on the outside and inside of 15 CTA Brown Line cars this week. In addition, posters went up at downtown Chicago health clubs, while drink coasters deliver Wisconsin’s pitch to millennials at restaurants and bars.

Wisconsin is hoping the Brown Line — which, along with the Purple Line, is one of only two CTA lines that run through the Loop but not through the city’s South or West sides — will reach the very specific target audience it is seeking.

“The Brown Line was chosen because it travels within the downtown Loop and North Side neighborhoods popular with millennials,” said Mark Maley, spokesman for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s Madison-based development arm.

Digital advertising includes sponsored posts on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, streaming ads on Pandora and YouTube, and mobile ads targeting millennials within a 25-mile radius of downtown Chicago and north to the Wisconsin state line.

The ads promote employment opportunities, rents that are 42 percent lower in Milwaukee than Chicago, shorter commutes and the natural resources exiles from Chicagoland can explore with their extra money and time in Wisconsin.

“We’ve already had anecdotal stories from individuals that have moved from the Chicago metro area and were somewhat surprised and very pleased with the quality of life that they were afforded in Wisconsin, and so we built on that,” [Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation representative Tricia] Braun said.

When somebody points out that omitting the other transit lines is exclusionary, and someone will, I'll let you know.  In the meantime, Streetsblog's John Greenfield doesn't like the implicit transit-bashing.

A video spot shows zombie-like young people looking depressed and yawning on a drearily lit ‘L’ car. “An hour commute or an hour with friends? In Wisconsin the average commute is less than 22 minutes,” says the voiceover. The spot then cuts to images of happy millennials paddle boarding on a river in Milwaukee, drinking beer on a terrace above Madison’s Lake Monona, mountain biking through the woods, and kayaking. “So you’ll have more time to do the things you love. Wisconsin. It’s more you.”

One display ad states that Chicago has the longest commute times in the country and asks Chicagoans if they’d rather be “waiting for a train or waiting for kabobs” at a barbecue. Another one shows glum-looking straphangers juxtaposed with people playing beach volleyball, asking “Bump elbows or bump on the court?” The message is clear: Public transportation is a drag, and you can avoid it if you move north of the border.

Bike Federation of Wisconsin director Dave Schlabowske confirmed that, unfortunately, it generally is so easy to drive in Wisconsin, including Milwaukee, where he lives, that just about everybody who can afford to commute by car does so. “Parking is often free in Milwaukee, and also easy to find. People downtown will literally drive four-to-six blocks to go to a meeting or for lunch rather than walk.” Obviously that’s not a good thing for air quality or public health.

Perhaps that Union Terrace reference is a pitch to bring back departed Badgers, whether home-grown, or Illinoisans who studied there.  But when you defend your rapid transit by comparing it with the worst?

But while the average Chicago commute may be longer than a typical drive to work in Wisconsin, a recent study found that Windy City commutes are less stressful than those in other cities thanks to our relatively robust CTA and Metra networks. In contrast, Wisconsin has no rapid transit, and Governor Walker seems intent on making sure it stays that way.

Personally, I’d much rather relax on a train while listening to music, reading a book, or catching up on emails than deal with a stressful, potentially dangerous car commute. And then there’s Chicago’s Divvy bike-share system, which offers a fun, healthy public transportation option, with more than 580 docking stations compared to Milwaukee’s Bublr network, which only has 83.

That noted, Milwaukee's Summerfest and the ethnic festivals that also play there is not a bad walk from the railway station, and at weekends there are late night trains.  Other attractions might be more easily reached by car.

THE BEST OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A DEAL?

Congressional Democrats would like a clean amnesty for "Dreamers" (and perhaps for their parents as well.)  Congressional Republicans might prefer to bundle the amnesty with appropriations for a stronger border fence, and perhaps additional resources for border enforcement.  Our President appears to favor the bundle.

President Trump promised Tuesday to sign what he called a "bill of love" to extend protections to 800,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children — if Congress can work out the details.

"You folks are going to have to come up with a solution," Trump told 25 lawmakers in a remarkable televised negotiation at the White House. "And if you do, I'm going to sign that solution."

But funding for a wall along the border with Mexico remains a sticking point, as Trump insisted that border security remain a part of any deal.

Lawmakers are under a March 5 deadline — imposed by Trump — to come up with a legal fix to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA, as it's known, is now the main stumbling block holding up a wide range of other Trump administration immigration priorities.

Conservative Republicans in the House want to link DACA to Trump's request for $18 billion for a border wall. That would give immigration talks even more urgency, as the spending bill must pass by Jan. 19 to prevent a government shutdown.

Newsmax's Michael Stopa suggests this is no time to make a deal, simply for the sake of making a deal.  "The basic problem with trading amnesty for so-called 'Dreamers' (illegal aliens brought to America as children) for increased enforcement of laws against illegal immigration and greater border security is that those aims are fundamentally in contradiction." Perhaps, although we've been here before, and opportunities for additional research remain.  Perhaps it is cheaper to offer regular status to people whose only crime has been to sneak in, and to credibly commit to making it more difficult to sneak in (and to shorten the waiting time for persons legally admitted to attain permanent residency and citizenship?)  Mr Stopa's fear appears to be that Congress, particularly the Democrats and the squishy Republicans, are not bargaining in good faith.

The logical conclusion therefore is that in exchange for amnesty for DACA recipients the negotiators of the bill will give as little as possible in the way of actual immigration law enforcement — a Potemkin wall jazzed up with high tech gizmos, chain migration limited to first cousins (anyone notice that first cousins of first cousins are second cousins?) and an E-Verify provision that will be sieged [c.q.] by the courts for years.

Meanwhile, low-skill native-born workers will continue to be hard done by.

In contrast to this harlequinade of a DACA negotiation process among Congressional knaves it is worth remembering for a moment what the forgotten men and women actually have on their side. By dint of electing Donald Trump, they have a dedicated organization of law enforcement professionals in ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol who recognize that their mission is to enforce the existing immigration laws and who are not seduced by the siren song that says that that mission is impossible so they might as well not even try.

The forgotten men and women have on their side the now demonstrated fact that illegal immigration is fragile; that it is driven by hundreds of millions of daily texts, emails, and skype communications between illegal aliens in the U.S. and family members south of the border, and that the content of those messages becomes decidedly more pessimistic and the human flow palpably abates, when enforcement proceeds apace.

It’s not a lot, what the forgotten men and women have going for them.

What effect will the tightening labor market have? Stay tuned.

In Washington, however, Paul Mirengoff would like the negotiations to play out on the predictable pattern.

Immigration reform deals follow a familiar pattern: Illegal immigrants get some form of legal status in exchange for statutory language that, if implemented, will discourage or prevent future illegal immigration. Unless those who insist on such statutory language can be confident that the language will be adhered to — rather than ignored on humanitarian grounds and/or ad hoc “cost benefit” analysis — these legislators have no reason to make such deals.

As long as there are time inconsistency problems in public policy, there will be people who will risk entry into rich countries in the hope of a subsequent change to legal status. Perhaps there are ways for rich countries to fine-tune the mix of immigrants.

ELITE ASPIRATIONS CONSIST OF MUCH MORE.

USA Today's Mike Jones documents that playoff teams offer no excuse to lose.

Mike McCarthy could’ve made excuses. Pete Carroll could have asked for a mulligan. Ron Rivera could have said, “We were this close…”

But as their offseasons began in disappointing fashion these last two weeks, those three coaches demonstrated that in the NFL, there’s no room for complacency.

McCarthy didn’t view the Packers earning a 7-9 record despite the nine-game absence of his future Hall of Fame quarterback as a moral victory.

The Seahawks going 9-7 and missing the playoffs by just one game amid an injury-plagued year didn’t give Carroll any consolation. And Rivera didn’t accept the Panthers’ return to the playoffs (where they lost 31-26 to the Saints) one year after going 6-10 in 2016 as sufficient progress.

Instead, all three coaches made the difficult decisions to fire key members of their coaching staffs in hopes of better positioning their teams to win the Super Bowl in 2018.

No, when your backup quarterback plays well enough to beat the Saints at home and the Steelers in Pittsburgh and the defense can't get off the field, you have a problem.

Firings and hirings happen every year. But it’s not often that you see perennial playoff contenders make such drastic moves.

McCarthy, however, best explained the reasoning.

“Are we doing enough to win a world championship, or are we doing everything we need to do to win a championship?” he asked during a recent news conference after his team having missed the playoffs for the first time in nine years and for only the third time in his 12 seasons as head coach.

“You don't get to say, ‘But if Aaron (Rodgers) doesn't get hurt’,” McCarthy said. “That's a loser's mentality. We don't get to operate that way.”

How many times have team leaders preached staying the course following bumps in the road similar to the ones Green Bay and Seattle experienced this year?  How many coaches have given the “trust the process” line when their teams still don't quite deliver?

McCarthy, Rivera and Carroll will not settle, however, because they understand any NFL team's window remains open for only so long.

Yes, and process worship is for mediocrities. And politicians. There is still a steep grading curve in sports.

DON'T HECTOR ME AND CALL IT DIALOGUE.

It wastes your time, and annoys me.

Now comes David Blankenhorn, suggesting that the hectoring deplorable-shamers recognize what they're doing.

My job these days involves inviting red and blue Americans in our deeply polarized nation to talk with, rather than simply at or about, each other. I love the work, and believe with all my heart that it’s essential for the nation. But today the word most often publicly used by its advocates to describe it is “dialogue”—and for me that’s a problem, a hindrance that makes the work harder. The main reason this is so is not trivial.

The essence of the problem is that “dialogue” is an almost entirely “blue” linguistic marker and institution. That’s why it’s no accident that liberals are typically eager for “dialogue,” while many conservatives wince at the use of the term and are wary of the concept. The result, if I may be allowed a sports metaphor, is that an effort to bring together tennis players and weightlifters is being led by tennis coaches working on tennis courts.  Is it any wonder that the weightlifters are often less than receptive?

Let's leave aside the possibility that the tennis coach thinks of the weight-lifters as deficient in some way.  That will come up, but let's let Mr Blankenhorn develop his case.  It takes him a bit of work on the etymology of "dialogue" and "debate" before he gets to the heart of the matter.

[I]n a typical U.S. dialogue, who gets to frame the questions? Set the tone? Do the coaching on how to be sensitive to others? Determine what defines “expert facilitation” and what is politically charged facilitation presenting itself as expertise? In Orwell’s Animal Farm, we learn that, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” To extend this idea, conservatives considering whether to engage in liberal-sponsored dialogue might be displaying more than simply defensiveness or paranoia to suspect that, “All voices in a dialogue are equal, but some voices are more equal than others.”

Yes, particularly if the facilitator comes with the imprimatur of Student Affairs or the Diversity Office.  Not much by way of growth on the part of the facilitator there.

REBUILDING THE SOCIAL CAPITAL.

Writing for The Atlantic, Abdallah Fayyad bemoans "The Criminalization of Gentrifying Neighborhoods."

Over the past two decades, gentrification has become a norm in major American cities. The typical example is a formerly low-income neighborhood where longtime residents and businesses are displaced by white-collar workers and overpriced coffeehouses. But the conventional wisdom that image reflects—that gentrification is a result of an economic restructuring—often leaves out a critical side effect that disproportionately affects communities of color: criminalization.

When low-income neighborhoods see an influx of higher-income residents, social dynamics and expectations change. One of those expectations has to do with the perception of safety and public order, and the role of the state in providing it. The theory goes that as demographics shift, activity that was previously considered normal becomes suspicious, and newcomers—many of whom are white—are more inclined to get law enforcement involved. Loitering, people hanging out in the street, and noise violations often get reported, especially in racially diverse neighborhoods.

“There’s some evidence that 311 and 911 calls are increasing in gentrifying areas,” Harvard sociology professor Robert Sampson told me. And “that makes for a potentially explosive atmosphere with regard to the police,” he added.

Put another way, there's a soft bigotry of low expectations in poor and non-white neighborhoods? Oh, sorry, I'm being churlish.

[Former federal prosecutor Paul] Butler, who recently wrote the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, believes that this is a result of newcomers refusing to assimilate to longstanding neighborhood norms. “Culturally, I think the way that a lot of African American and Latino people experience gentrification is as a form of colonization,” he said. “The gentrifiers are not wanting to share—they’re wanting to take over.” One of the tools they can use to take over public spaces, he argues, is law enforcement.

Butler’s home of Washington, where he’s a law professor at Georgetown University, provides an illustrative example. On most Sunday afternoons, a performance group hosts a drum circle in Malcolm X Park, whose official name is Meridian Hill. The tradition dates back to 1965—shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated—and was intended to celebrate black liberation. While the drumbeats can still be heard today, the ritual was called into question when the surrounding neighborhood began to change in the late 1990s. New arrivals living in the blocks surrounding the park repeatedly complained about the noise until the police imposed and enforced a curfew on the drummers.

That's rich. I don't recall any such solicitude when those neighborhoods changed during the era of block-busting and red-lining, about being colonized. But now the meme that gentrification is colonization is everywhere.

MORALLY CORROSIVE CASUISTRY.

They're beginning to catch on. Incoherence is the consequence of denying coherent beliefs.

Start with J. H. Kunstler, focusing on what he calls the "'long emergency' of recession, globalization, and identity politics."  It's not "the women would have no more children, and the men lost reason and faith," and yet it is.

A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people.

Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of “normal” life in the USA. They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics—especially entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats.

The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure in our time to establish a utopia on earth. By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically determined, yet so-called cis-gendered persons (whose gender identity corresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by dint of not being “other-gendered”—thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry anyone?

The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals-yet-idiots,” hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves—here is the key take-away: it’s not about ideas or ideologies anymore; it’s purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting! In fact, it’s intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career advancement. It’s rather perverse that this passion for tyranny is suddenly so popular on the liberal left.

I'm not so sure. Curly hair, goatees, and granny glasses might have been a hippie thing, or that might have been Trotsky-envy all along.  Make that Trotsky-envy, dressed up with intellectual-sounding French puns, and bad typography.

The new and false idea that something labeled “hate speech”—labeled by whom?—is equivalent to violence floated out of the graduate schools on a toxic cloud of intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called “post-structuralist” philosophy, where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain comprised of one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down to the proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values, in particular the search for truth. Under this scheme, all human relations were reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their oppressors, the former generally “people of color” and women, all subjugated by whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described “oppressed” and “marginalized” are based on the credo that the ends justify the means (the Alinsky model).

This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for “social justice,” is to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer.

I would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair over the outcome of the civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of progressive ideology. It did not bring about the hoped-for utopia. The racial divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black president.

There is more, much more, to read, at that column, contemplating the effects of globalization, which creates new middle classes elsewhere in the world, but that hasn't turned out so well in the United States, Mr Kunstler argues, and the absence of any sort of logic isn't going to end well.

Mr Kunstler and The American Conservative carry on an interesting, and probably not surprising, relationship engaging themes of decadence and decay.  Thus, finding a deconstruction of trendy methodologies and jargons there is not a great surprise.

When it's the house organ for business as usual in higher education, however, are we hearing the sound of the last trumpet?  Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith might be chanting Dies Irae.  "Higher Education Is Drowning in BS."  By all means, read, understand, enjoy it in full.

Even worse, the accumulated effects of all the academic BS are contributing to this country’s disastrous political condition and, ultimately, putting at risk the very viability and character of decent civilization. What do I mean by BS?

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

Indeed. Don't attempt to dismiss that with loose talk of hegemonic discourses, either.  "BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games."  Look, just go read it, understand it, enjoy it, before the house organ for business as usual puts it behind a paywall, or the Student Affairs types get it stuffed down the memory hole.

BS is third-tier universities offering mediocre graduate programs to train second-rate Ph.D. students for jobs that do not exist, whose real function is to provide faculty with graduate RAs and to justify the title of "university."

BS is undergraduate "core" curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to "get out of the way."

BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance.

BS is hypercommercialized college athletics and administrations sucking the teats of big money, often in the process exploiting and discarding rather than educating student athletes, and recurrently corrupting recruitment programs, tutoring services, and grading systems.

BS is second- and third-tier universities running expensive sports programs that do little but drain money away from academics, when some of their ordinary students cannot find the time to prepare for classes because they work two and three part-time jobs to pay their school bills.

BS is the ascendant "culture of offense" that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university leaders’ confused and fearful capitulation to that secular neo-fundamentalist speech-policing.

BS is the invisible self-censorship that results among some students and faculty, and the subtle corrective training aimed at those who occasionally do not self-censor.

The essay has generated a spirited bull session in the comments.  And yet, it is the absence of logic that is leading to the impasse in the wider world.

Dramatic political polarization, fake news, legislative paralysis, torrents of blatant lies told with impunity, violent radicals in our city streets, scandalous ignorance of large swaths of Americans about the basic facts of our most pressing national problems, some top officials boasting about their sexual harassments and assaults without consequence, international diplomacy conducted through schoolyard taunting and self-contradictory tweets, and the growing frustration and increasingly desperate rage of large sectors of ordinary Americans: These are exactly what develop when even the "educated" citizens of a country are for too many decades not educated well, and when the institutional centers of enlightened learning and debate become havens of ideology, intimidation, and mission drift. With academe in this condition, what hope can we have for the exercise of important social virtues in politics, law, diplomacy, the media, and the marketplace?

Emergence takes time. There are, as the pitchman says, no guarantees.

IN MEMORIAM.

Farewell, Milt Rosenberg.

In the often loud and frequently inane blah-blah-blah that is radio, Milt Rosenberg was for nearly half a century an oasis of intelligent conversation and learned curiosity.

Ever mindful of the intelligence of his listeners, Rosenberg was a late-night radio fixture who interviewed an astonishing array of guests from all walks of life — among the eclectic hundreds were Henry Kissinger, Carl Sagan, Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer, Bob Feller, Bill Murray, Jane Byrne and Barack Obama — and actively engaged with listeners, sometimes contentiously, on his late-night “Extension 720” program on WGN-AM 720.

The late John Callaway of WTTW-Ch. 11, no slouch himself at the interviewing game, once said, “When Milt Rosenberg formulates a question with a premise in which he refers in two different languages to four different books, I say to myself, ‘That's smart. That's big-time smart.’”

Sometimes, holding a temporary gig can be a good thing.  So it was with the long-time director of the DeKalb Municipal Band, and so it was with Professor Rosenberg on Extension 720.

When he was offered the job of solo host on “Extension 720” in 1973, he was not particularly confident, saying, “I thought I'd do it for a year or two — to buy a new car.”

But he had a longer run. “He is the Lou Gehrig of intellectual talk radio,” Joseph Epstein, the essayist and occasional guest on the show, said in 2008, when Rosenberg was awarded a National Humanities Medal, which cited him for “bringing the world of ideas to millions of listeners.” “During a single week he can do shows about financial markets, American musical theater, the state of contemporary academic life, nuclear warfare and the modern novel,” Epstein said. “It’s amazing, really."

The two-hour daily weeknight broadcasts (sometimes pre-empted by baseball or hockey games) featured an hourlong interview with his guests followed by an hour during which listeners could share by telephone their opinions, gripes and questions.

Yes, and when the quality of discourse wasn't up to what the audience expected, the callers would say as much. I recall one caller referring to the show as her "nightly seminar" and the conversation wasn't so great that night.

A frequent guest over the decades was Tribune writer Ron Grossman, who said, “He had an enormous fund of knowledge, beyond his social-psychologist base. That’s the reason callers would begin by saying, ‘Good evening, Dr. Rosenberg.’

“More than once, I was the victim of his erudition. Once I quoted an early Christian theologian: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it doesn’t make sense”). Milt named the guy who actually said it and what the guy I was referring to actually had said. I’ll miss him.”

For all of his admirers — Steve Allen once said, “All interviewers should be forced to attend a class in that particular art, conducted by Milt Rosenberg” — Rosenberg also had detractors, people who felt that his intelligence could often come off as arrogance and his manner as haughty or dismissive.

Perhaps, although the conversations that run on WGN on evenings when Blackhawks, Wildcats, or Cubs aren't playing tend to have fewer opportunities to call in, and more of the late-show snark substituting for analysis.

Farewell.

THE FOOTSTEPS OF DISTANT GIANTS.

The Green Bay Packers recently made a number of changes in the front office and among the coaches.  "Being in a position where it's Bring. The. Lombardi. Trophy. Home. is still not a bad place to be going into spring team activities."  Things could be worse, you could be a Bears fan.

Frankly, the Bears make too much of their history. It’s a crutch.

The franchise too often seems dedicated to an inverse version of Santayana’s maxim, hoping that by remembering the past it somehow gets repeated.

With little new to rally around, the Bears and their fans for decades have wrapped themselves in the team’s glory days and legacy as a pioneering NFL franchise the way Britons of a certain age recall the bygone British Empire.

They cling to history as if it were Linus Van Pelt’s blanket, ignoring a more recent past that inevitably feels like Lucy Van Pelt teeing up a field goal for Charlie Brown.

The distant past offers safe refuge from the sad realities of the half-century since founder and patriarch George Halas retired as coach for a fourth and final time.

It’s what enables the Halas heirs and loyal fans to continue taking pride in an organization that rarely lives up to a reputation from which it is now too long removed.

Better to glory in memories of bruising defenses, a litany of Hall of Famers and a burnished reputation for domination as the Monsters of the Midway than contemplate how modern Bears teams mostly sputter.

True, the Bears can lay claim to nine championships — the last being the Super Bowl triumph that 39-year-old Nagy recalls — which ranks second among all NFL teams behind only the Packers’ 13.

And yet, during the Ted Thompson era, the Packers had as many Super Bowl appearances, one at the end of the 2010 season, as did the Bears.  In Wisconsin, that's underachieving.  That the Packers won their Super Bowl, and beat out the Bears to get there, while the Bears lost their one Super Bowl, is not good enough.  One win and three losses in the conference title game, two of those losses coming in overtime, is not good enough.

THE FATAL CONCEIT GOES TO HOGWARTS.

The American Interest's Ben Judah pens an interesting hypothesis.  "American liberals’ love for J.K. Rowling misses the profound British conservatism of her books."  That might refer to "conservatism" as in "respect for the way things are done."  But that's not the same thing as conservatism, in any meaningful sense of the word.

I had half-forgotten about Hogwarts until I went to Oxford—or up to Oxford, as they say, as if it was a cloud, or a magic castle on an outcrop. Only on the other side of the university Sorting Hat myself did I begin to realize that Harry Potter was in fact a Tory.

Few Americans realize this, but a lot of what reads like fantasy in J.K. Rowling is in fact the British class system with magic wands, house elves and the Order of the Phoenix.

The Hogwarts Express is instantly recognizable as the Flying Scotsman to the Queen’s Balmoral and the prize Highlands shooting estates. The Hogwarts Houses are the Oxford Colleges. Harry’s scholastic shopping trips to Diagon Alley (to get your owl and your magic wand) are so obviously the pricey ritual of stocking up for country boarding school. Platform 9¾ at Kings Cross is, surprise, surprise right next to Platform 10 that takes you “up” to Cambridge. And as for a game of Quidditch, it’s either cricket or the sui generis Eton Wall Game.

Even fewer Americans realize Young Potter is in fact, as I grew to realise, a Tory.

Yes, I, too, had the same impression upon getting invited to an academic conference at Oxford.  This mowing machine even looks like something you'd unleash on a Quidditch pitch, that is, unless you were making do with an intramural field at a directional state university (the horror!)

Not to quibble too much about the ferroequinology, but you go "up" to Cambridge on a "down" train, and the tourist-friendly entrance to N^o. 9^3/4 is in a location outside of the flow of commuter traffic, who are boarding electric multiple units for Peterboro or Cambridge.

Somewhere, too, the ghost of Sir Nigel Gresley is cringing about the thought of his Doncaster racers being unavailable, such that the producers of the movies hired in Great Western's 5972 Olton Hall to run as Hogwarts Castle, to the great amusement of the devotees of things Great Western.

SEE YOU IN COURT.

Marquette political scientist John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams continues neither to recant nor to accept his excommunication.  He's recently picked up prominent allies, who argue Wisconsin's Supreme Court ought hear his case against Marquette.  George Will, who never lacks for work involving such things as Trump dossiers, national security, or the Chicago Cubs, suggests the Court can "right a flagrant wrong."  That is, "Prospective Marquette students, and Marquette alumni, must decide whether this school, awash with the current academic hysteria and corruption, merits their confidence and support. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court must lay down the law that can stop some of the rot this case illustrates."  The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal also gets involved.  "A Jesuit School Gets Dogmatic," they say, and it gets better from there.  Professor McAdams quotes the editorial, in full.  A sample: "[J]esuitical is the word that fits its explanation for firing a tenured political science professor who defended a student who was badly treated by an intolerant graduate instructor."  We'll see whether that national attention concentrates any minds, at Marquette or at the Court. 

NOW, JUST WIN.

The Green Bay Packers begin a reorganization with a new general manager.

[Packer president] Mark Murphy played the percentages and made a football scout the Green Bay Packers’ new general manager.

Next comes the fallout.

Many signs over the past week pointed to Murphy, the Packers’ president and CEO, choosing the team’s salary-cap manager and top administrator on the football side, Russ Ball, as the new GM. Instead, Murphy surprised on Sunday by hiring the 44-year-old Brian Gutekunst, who first joined the Packers as a scouting intern in 1997.

That’s playing the odds. The Packers have been a model franchise ever since Bob Harlan, the team’s chairman emeritus, ceded to the quintessential scout, Ron Wolf, total control over football operations in 1991. There’s a lot to being a GM, but in the end his most important duties are drafting and signing players. If you don’t get that part right, the rest doesn’t matter. So the Packers’ GM really should be a scout above all.

That doesn’t mean Gutekunst will succeed. If it had been John Dorsey or John Schneider or Reggie McKenzie, there’d be a GM track record to go on. Gutekunst has never had this kind of authority, so just as with an on-the-rise scout from another team, we won’t know his capabilities until he does the job.

At the same time the Packers introduced Mr Gutekunst, Mr Murphy announced a change in the organization chart, with the general manager, the head coach, and the personnel director, Russ Ball, responsible for respecting the salary cap forming a troika.  That's apparently the organization chart of a number of other playoff teams.  Heavy, though, is the head that wears the crown.

It’s still too early to know how aggressive new Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst will be in free agency and the trade market, but if you’re head coach Mike McCarthy you got what you wanted.

Who knows how much McCarthy’s pointed remarks Thursday about the new man being a “good fit” (i.e., someone willing to stock his roster with more than just rookies), caused president Mark Murphy to choose a personnel man over an administrator (Russ Ball) as Ted Thompson’s successor?

It’s likely McCarthy’s comments helped influence Murphy’s decision to contact the Seattle Seahawks about the availability of general manager John Schneider. McCarthy and Schneider are close friends and Schneider was instrumental in McCarthy getting the job in Green Bay in 2006.

Even though the Seahawks blocked Murphy’s attempt, McCarthy still won.

Instead of working for Ball, whose mentor has been Thompson and whose aversion to free agency was predicted to be the same, McCarthy gets to work for a guy whose first impression in the personnel business was courtesy of Ron Wolf, the guy who rebuilt a failing franchise through the draft, free agency, trades and any other mode available to him.

Yes, and after his appointment, Mr Gutekunst was having a little fun on social media, teasing Mr Thompson about a box of scouting tapes devoid of any free agents ...

NO END TO THE ANKLE-BITING.

The University of Wisconsin football team won the Orange Bowl.  Alas, the Orange Bowl signed a contract, several years ago, with the Trump National Hotel at Doral.  Hilarity ensues.

After learning the University of Wisconsin football team will be staying at Trump National Doral Hotel in Miami, Florida in the days leading up to the Orange bowl, the Student Coalition for Progress issued a press release calling for an explanation from university officials.

The group is “disappointed” the team, band and alumni are staying in a hotel with the same name as the current president, who “oppresses those of color,” the press release said.

“The Student Coalition for Progress calls on the Orange Bowl and the Wisconsin Alumni Association to give a detailed explanation as to why this specific hotel was chosen,” the press release said.

Larry Wahl, Orange Bowl vice president of communications, said the contract for the hotels in which the team stayed for this game was set four years ago.

At the time of the press release, SCP was not aware that the contract was set four years ago, representative Ekenedilichukwu Ikegwuani, said.

“[The Orange Bowl] is in a multi-year contract with Trump Doral and Wisconsin is the fourth team to have stayed there,” Wahl said.

The hotels for the teams are determined by their partners’ requirements for accommodations and the Trump Doral hotel not only met, but exceeded these expectations, Wahl said. It is the bowl’s responsibility to make hotel arrangements for the team and band.

But, Ikegwuani said the team should have found other hotel accommodations in the Miami area.

“The Badger athletics isn’t hurting for money,” Ikegwuani said. “I felt like they had enough so that if they wanted to go somewhere else they could’ve.”

It's always easy to be generous with other people's money. That's always been a thing with the self-styled progressives.

Then comes the Emoluments Clause, where officials of the University have to back and fill to distinguish their business behavior from their priors.

Orange Bowl accommodations for the University of Wisconsin football team at a Florida resort owned by President Donald Trump may draw the Badgers into a lawsuit alleging the president's private business ventures violate the Constitution.

The Washington Post reported the stay may be used as evidence by the state of Maryland and District of Columbia in their June lawsuit that accuses the president of violating anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions from foreign and state governments to his private company.

No state funds were involved when the University of Wisconsin put up about 250 players, athletic department staff, senior university officials and members of the UW Board of Regents at the Trump National Doral golf resort from Christmas through New Year's, but the public university accepted the accommodations chosen by the Orange Bowl Committee.

The Washington Post estimates that the team's stay at the resort probably cost well over $100,000 based on rates paid by other groups. A UW-Madison spokesman said no tax dollars would be spent, and the university would pay for the accommodations with money generated by the Orange Bowl.

Accuracy in Academia's Malcolm Kline quips, "A college football team staying in a Trump hotel for the Orange Bowl should be easy material for a progressive wit, if you could find a witty progressive."

THE STRENGTH OF COLD SPRING SHOPS.

I recently found a picture taken during an upgrade of the East Troy Electric Railroad.

It came from a Facebook group, without further attribution as to photographer or date.

At left, locomotive L9 is pulling a string of ballast hoppers off the Wisconsin Central, now Canadian National, interchange track.  At right, locomotive L8 is on hand to provide additional muscle, and you'll note the classification lights for an extra train are lit.

Both motors weigh roughly fifty tons, inclusive of ballast.  The Eight was rebuilt from a work motor in 1955, and the Nine built new during 1944 to help move additional coal at the power plants for the war effort.  Eight remains in its interurban and Power Company colors, while Nine became the regular service freight locomotive when there were still carload freight customers to serve.  I'm not sure there are any remaining customers.  If there are, the locomotive has the contemporary rotating roof beacon and the other trappings intended to alert motorists that there is a real freight train coming.

LET'S COUNT OUR BLESSINGS, OR CHECK OUR PRIVILEGE.

Now that the Festive Season is winding down, and the vintage trains packed away, either for the year or first for a trip to the back-shop, let us reflect on Christopher Coyne's understanding of the political economy of Christmas.  "So this Christmas, as you’re huddled in front of fire drinking eggnog and singing carols, be thankful for the wealth and opportunity that the free market has generated, and signal your love by giving a gift that matters."

Yes, we'll be cheerful at Cold Spring Shops.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Sometimes, working on the railroad involves long stretches of new track, or large chunks of benchwork and sub-roadbed.

That's all to make possible the detail work, which means building a custom turnout to fit a space where the out-of-the-box hardware won't go.

Get the stock rail for the main route in place, but not spiked fully, locate the frog (this took some trial and error here, but I can get away with a Number Eight on a ten-foot radius curve), now I've tied the other rail on the main route to the frog, and I'm laying out the diverging route.

A few more of these in, and we'll be seeing some trains running continuously.  The absence of the Packers from the playoffs means more model railroading opportunities.

A ROLLING STONE IN BERLIN.

Book Review N^o. 1 for this year will mention John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  I picked up the fiftieth anniversary edition on an impulse, perhaps influenced by the cult of George Smiley that has taken over public television as a counterpart to the excessively flashy James Bond.  Author le  Carré did work in British Intelligence for a while, as a bureaucrat, rather than an intelligence officer, and his preface to the anniversary edition complains about how his works influenced public perceptions of intelligence services.  (Life imitating art: how many mafiosi watched the Godfather series to learn how a made man, in the sense they use the term, should behave?)

That noted: how is Smiley's world different from James Bond's, beyond the upscale casinos and hot babes?  The sense I get is, everyone in charge is too clever by half, and nobody should trust anybody, and people in difficult circumstances, which is reality for everyone in rebuilding Britain and divided Berlin, will do all sorts of odd things.  Perhaps I'm being naive thinking of the work as unremittingly depressing, or perhaps it's with the hindsight that Berlin is no longer divided.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IS IT FAREWELL TO FOOTBALL?

Yes, I've lost interest in the playoffs with the Green Bay Packers eliminated.  The articles I'm commenting on today, though, went on-line before that amazing rally in Dallas had visions of Super Bowls dancing in people's heads.  (The rally was necessary because the defense was already questionable, but I digress.)

What ought be dancing in people's heads are visions of strong men taking too many hits to the head.  The American Conservative's David Gornoski puts it this way.  "Our reckoning with violence will cause the NFL to go the way of the circus."  The circus analogy is probably wrong, as elephants are for kids to ride, they're not whipped during their acts, and anyway, as long as there are jugglers and acrobats, there will be circus.

In football, though, bigger, faster, stronger turn into more injuries.  Mr Gornoski suggests it's time to get beyond the human sacrifices of Rome, even in metaphor.

[T]he state, in collusion with powerful corporate allies, uses spectacles like football to distract and pacify the people. Instead of the violent slaughtering of Roman games, our Christianized culture sends players into simulated, padded warfare. We pick teams to unite our personal lives under and forget about the state’s socio- and economic abuses just outside our doorsteps. Studies even suggest that violent crime drops during major televised sporting events.

But now, Trump and his liberal mirror rivals have pierced the veil by injecting the NFL with the profanity of politics: the realm where real factions use real violence of the state to punish their rivals through regulations, mandates, and taxes. When Trump said “fire them” about the protesting players, invoking the specter of both the penal and paternal side of government, forcing people to take sides and not over the gridiron but at either side of the water cooler and dinner table, it did the game no favors.

Eventually, it took a church monk named Telemachus challenging the violent sacrifice of the Roman gladiatorial games to end their carnage. He climbed into the arena and protested until he was summarily slaughtered. His self-sacrifice for the defense of victims led to the public’s loss of appetite for the violence.The last known Roman gladiatorial event was in 404 AD, less than two decades after Telemachus’s death.

Yes, in fifteen centuries, we might have learned a few things.

Today, myriad scandals serve as a persistent Telemachus threatening to bring the NFL down. Mothers and fathers all around the country are pulling their sons out of football due to the increased revelations of concussions and resulting brain damage caused by the sport. Whereas Roman citizens demanded their fighters stripped of armor to maximize carnage, increased paddings will end up making players look like Michelin men with bobble head-sized helmets.

In Rome, no one cared how gladiators treated their lovers. Today, growing public disgust with widespread reports of spousal abuse is souring the NFL’s mystique.

In college, the NCAA’s state-protected profiteering off of unpaid players’ physical sacrifice is increasingly criticized as well.

Meanwhile, diehard fans once thrilled by simulated violence are losing interest with ever constrained penalty rules and concussion concerns. The suspension of disbelief required to enjoy the game is waning: talks of brain damage, flags no longer able to unify people around soldiers’ sacrificial deaths, spousal abuse, and racial undertones are all exposing football as just a silly game to appease desires for tribalism and aggression—and make fat cat owners fatter. Not worth all the drama.

We should be proud that we do not send hungry lions into arenas with naked prisoners anymore. We have made progress because of Christianity’s leavening of the collective’s history-long abuse against the misfit person. Yet absent such gladiatorial games, our culture must confront our sacrifices of the innocent and nonviolent to appease our love for aggression as the means of keeping peace.

Victor Hanson also thinks along the lines of injuries, and the antiquities. Perhaps, though, the football establishment isn't thinking clearly about its audience.

In truth, the NFL's hard-core fan base is not comprised of bicoastal hipsters. Rather, the league's fan base is formed mostly by red-state Americans -- and many of them are becoming increasingly turned off by the culture of professional football.

Professional athletes are frequently viewed as role models. Yet since 2000, more than 850 NFL players have been arrested, some of them convicted of heinous crimes and abuse against women.

The old idea of quiet sportsmanship -- downplaying one's own achievements while crediting the accomplishments of others -- is being overshadowed by individual showboating.

Players are now bigger, faster and harder-hitting than in the past. Research has revealed a possible epidemic of traumatic brain injuries and other crippling injuries among NFL players. Such harm threatens to reduce the pool of future NFL players.

There is a growing public perception that the NFL is less a reflection of the kind of athleticism seen in basketball or baseball, and more a reflection of the violence of Mixed Martial Arts -- or of gladiators in the ancient Roman Colosseum.

We may know that football is finished when a city government says no to the extortion.

Over the last two decades, the American public has shelled out more than $7 billion to build or renovate NFL stadiums. Billionaire owners are able to blackmail the public to pay to keep a franchise or else lose it to a city that offers bigger stadium subsidies.

We'll be watching.

FINDING COHERENCE IN INCOHERENCE?

The Real Peer Review team flagged an article that's now ten years in print.  "Drawing upon insights from the sociology of science, I shall show how and why intersectionality could become a feminist success story. I shall argue that, paradoxically, it is precisely the concept's alleged weaknesses — its ambiguity and open-endedness — that were the secrets to its success and, more generally, make it a good feminist theory." I wonder if that's worth a trip to the library to see how its citation history has evolved.

As far as ambiguity and open-endedness: if you have an explanation that might work everywhere, it will be useless; on the other hand, if it yields no testable implications whatsoever, it will also be useless.

LOSING SITUATIONAL AWARENESS.

Preventable.

An 11-year-old girl was hit and killed by an Amtrak train in Florida Wednesday after she failed to hear the train conductor’s horn blow while she was crossing the tracks, investigators said.

Yazmin White was on the way home from a supermarket before walking through a wooded area and trying to cross over the railroad tracks, according to a media release.

Polk County detectives investigating the death said the conductor blew the train horn and started braking when he saw the girl attempting to cross the tracks. Investigators said Yazmin didn’t make any indication she was aware the train was approaching -- and evidence revealed she was wearing headphones at the time.

The conductor also told police she was looking down at her phone while she was walking.

That's an engineer who is going to be having nightmares, and there is a family mourning the loss, too young, of a young lady with an interest in music.

Dear reader, don't let your interest in music or current events or whatever is on your electronics render you unaware of your surroundings.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE VOTERS GONE?

Gone to Trumpland, most of them, according to Michael Barone.  (Give props to the political analyst who stays up late for the annual Census analysis of migration, rather than to ring in the new year or wait for Santa.)

Who are the big population gainers? Some small units: the District of Columbia, at 15 percent (big government, gentrification), North Dakota, at 12 percent (fracking, which liberals failed to stop), and Utah, at 12 percent (1950s-style high birthrate).

Those with the largest impact, however, are Texas, at 13 percent, and Florida, at 12 percent. Together, their population increase was 5.3 million, nearly one-third of the national total. Why? No state income taxes, light-touch regulation and resulting private-sector booms.

Three states actually lost population. Two are small and easily explainable. West Virginia's minus 2 percent can be attributed to Barack Obama's war on coal. And Vermont's minus 1 percent can be chalked up to Woodstock-era migrants -- Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean. They've liberalized the state's culture and politics, so with the state's high taxes and stringent environmental bans, no one is following.

The third loser is Illinois, at minus 0.3 percent. It takes some doing to get people to flee one of mankind's greatest artifacts, Chicago. But Michael Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House for all but two years since 1983, has proved that he's up to the task.

Here's Mr Barone's hypothesis.

All of which suggests a counterintuitive hypothesis, that the patterns of internal and immigrant migration of 2010-17 look less like Barack Obama's ideal America and more like Donald Trump's.

The flight from high-tax to low-tax states, diminished but higher-skilled immigration, the fracking boom in North Dakota, the decline in hip Vermont -- you might even say 45 started winning even when 44 was in office.

That suggests a very different Donald Trump from the one currently being called out for not being interested in winning, let alone in governing.

The serious social science will take a few more years.

ELON MUSK WILL NOT BE HAPPY.

Tough times on Boston's Ashmont-Mattapan shuttle, doing a good impression of a War-era limited tram line.

A collision between two Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority streetcars last week means the agency is down to just five operating PCCs on the Ashmont–Mattapan High Speed Line.

The two PCCs that were damaged in the collision near the Cedar Grove station on Dec. 29 have joined three other historic streetcars in the MBTA deadline at Mattapan. With five PCCs out-of-service, the agency has reduced service on the 2.6-mile route through Dorchester, Mass. This week, the Mattapan line was running with four PCCs and one standby.

“Customers should expect to wait during rush hour approximately six and a half minutes between trolleys rather than 5 minutes. The MBTA appreciates the patience of our customers as we work to restore regular service to the Mattapan line,” officials tell Trains News Wire.

Imagine how many more random strangers can accumulate in ninety seconds.

The cars being operated are long out of production.  Boston authorities are contemplating either replacing the cars with newer cars, or converting the route to a busway.  You don't go to the local Farm and Fleet for PCC streetcar parts.

JOHN ROCKER GOT CUT FOR BEING MORE COLORFUL.

Yes, that's ancient history in blogosphere terms.  We're referring to a pitcher for the team formerly known as the Milwaukee Braves saying some, shall we say, unkind things about subway riders, specifically on the Seven line connecting Times Square with Shea Stadium.  There's still a Seven line, and there's a new stadium, but apparently having scorn for subway passengers is still a thing.  Consider Tesla founder Elon Musk.

The fracas began when Wired on Thursday published comments made by Musk at an artificial intelligence conference earlier this month. Musk said that “public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?”

Musk further said that using public transit meant rubbing shoulders with “like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer. . . that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

Not that different in general disdain from the pitcher's comments.  But it's common to a theme, that riding the buses or the rails might not be for everybody.  Perhaps it is not, and perhaps transit exists in order for Thought Leaders to make it available to The Rabble.

Musk doesn’t want to share a vehicle with “a bunch of random strangers.” But the presence of random strangers is what a city is, and what successful transit is. The unique achievement of transit is to transport so many people in so little space with so little labor. Crowding—however much it bothers some people—is the essence of transit’s success.

Interestingly, his hyperloop is a plan to fill a faster vehicle with a bunch of random strangers, and perhaps those random strangers, even with toll roads and self-driving cars and all the rest, are choosing transit because it's still faster or less nerve-racking. (The shame, to take one example, is that there is only track capacity for three Naperville Zephyrs an hour without cutting off some of the shorter-turn fast trains during the rush hour, otherwise you'd likely have more people staying off the toll roads and expressways.)

Designing a transportation system, or any other public project, to reflect either the preferences of the designers or the perceptions by the designers of what is For Your Own Good, is unlikely to turn out well.

Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole.  Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere.  It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.

This is not a call to bash elites.  I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making.  The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the majority.  Even the elite minority won’t like the result in the end.

Bet on emergence, dear reader, and fight shy of the fatal conceits.

IS CIVILIZATION A WHITE SPACE?

No.  But I have to be provocative because the intersectionality crowd are doing everything they can to get people to think the answer is yes.  I'm only slightly kidding.  Consider "Teachers must prevent 'assimilation' of 'whiteness'."  Yes, that's Campus Reform, and yes, that might be hyping research on the importance of not being impolite, which is what diplomacy is about.  But within a civilization, the conventions for not being impolite are the conventions that have emerged there.  I know I'm quoting David Marcus again, but quote him I must.

Cultural norms are self-imposed limitations on speech and actions, meant to preserve peace and order in a society. It is like a stream with banks that allow our public discourse to flow responsibly. When that stream is broadened and deepened, dangerous ideas flow in from both sides.

Too often, though, the first instinct of the intersectionality crowd is to tear down the banks.  Yes, I've had fun with a number of these previously.  Kat Timpf has her fun as well.