FEAR THE MOB.

It appears as though thought leaders in both major political parties are rallying their bases by characterizing the other party's base as a mob.

Mob action, and direct democracy, are dangerous places to go.  Here is a warning, on display in Bayeux Cathedral.

Cathedrals are excellent venues for instruction: the statuary, the stained-glass windows, the Stations of the Cross, and a series of panels illustrating fifteen centuries of Popes, French rulers, and events sacred and profane.

The balance of this post is profane, although no guillotines will be sharpened, or shotguns cleaned.

We'll start with Betsy Newmark calling out the deplorable-shaming Hillary Clinton to promise the leftist temper tantrum will end once Democrats get some power.  (What did I just tell you about power?)

Democrats can be civil, but that will only occur when they're in power. Until then, in her view, anything goes. See, she really does regard conservatives as deplorables. Notice her argument is that Democrats will continue screaming at Republicans until they get elected. Isn't that what screaming toddlers do when they're throwing a tantrum? It's hard to believe that a person with that attitude would lose to Donald Trump.

Republicans must be hoping that she'll keep putting herself out there saying such objectionable things.

It's also a lie: you know full well that a Democrat House will be a never-ending spectacle of investigations, impeachment hearings, and attempts to repeal tax cuts.

Mrs Newmark is the voice of reason this morning.  Here's Julie Kelly at American Greatness, telling the identity-politics harpies where they can stuff it.

Democrats cannot sway white women based on their ideas for the economy or national security or tax policy, so they’re left with coercion and intimidation. They want to shame white women voters into electing more Democrats by implying if we vote for Republicans, we are enabling and empowering rapists.

It is a highly cynical, if not craven, ploy with major implications for the health and sustainability of our political system. It does nothing to ensure the consideration of real sexual assault victims, assigns automatic guilt to half of the population based on gender, and empowers the peddlers of despair and racial hostilities. And it unfortunately guarantees the nation will suffer through many more horrific periods like the past few weeks.

But to the Angry Left, any invocation of "white women" is a whiff of Reactionary Mob Rule.  Here comes Nancy LeTourneau of the formerly sensible Washington Monthly.

It is very clear that, for our Founding Fathers, the idea that democracy would give equal rights to all men and women was viewed as providing an opening for mob rule. It was also clear that the mob they feared consisted of women, people of color, and the poor who didn’t own property. In other words, it was the triumvirate of sexism, racism, and classism. In their minds, it was the minority of white male landowners who were equipped to vote and govern.

Over time, our country has struggled with the dissonance of calling itself a democracy while originally limiting the vote to the minority of white men. Republicans are still working on those limits with their attempts to suppress the vote. But men like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Brett Kavanaugh have reason to fear the empowerment of what they so casually call “the mob.”

These United States are a constitutional republic, and, Howard Zinn-esque invocations of Popular Struggle notwithstanding, the extension of the franchise is written into the very Constitution that Mx LeTourneau implicitly criticizes in that passage.  Her conclusion is instructive.  "In any way that is meaningful, we’re still in the process of fighting a battle to live out the ideal of a democracy that empowers 'we the people.'" I'm not sure how constructive it is to invoke the intersectionality trinity in waging that battle.

Mx LeTourneau, however, is clarity personified compared with Gordon Adams.

White, male, religious extremism, backed by big money, is warping that mirror. This authoritarian extremism, cloaked in the language but not the reality of American history, has captured state houses, legislatures, courts, security forces, and, for now, the Congress of the United States and the White House, with all the executive power that office can control. It is a semi-visible, gradual coup d’état that’s well on its way to success.

In these times, I am starting to think, it is important not to listen, not to give respect to the siren songs of authoritarians. They are the distortions in a fun-house mirror. It is important to gather together, find common strength, to assert truth in the face of authoritarian fake news—starting now, with this election, which may be one of the last in which democracy can reassert itself as voting rights and citizen rights are slowly taken away.

Speak up. Support the anti-authoritarians. Get tough and real about this political battle. Start spreading the message everywhere it needs to be heard, at all levels. Reach out to those who are preoccupied with television shows and sporting events and have their eyes off the ball or are just plain tired of the political game.

At the dinner table, in social settings, remind them that this is not normal.

I bet he's real fun at Thanksgiving.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY?

Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty looks at Colgate (better known for hockey) University's attempt to square continuing and fearless sifting and winnowing with the niceties of contemporary identity politics.

Some have long argued that rigorous inquiry and respectful debate do not stand in opposition. Indeed, the American Council on Education, backed by survey data, has stressed the importance of not “pitting” inclusion and speech against each other. Yet many if not most conversations about campus speech still revolve around two poles: absolute freedom of expression and the importance of creating an inclusive environment.

That last sentence poses a false choice. By construction, isn't an institution of higher education there to test truth claims, which means, to pick an extreme example, there's no reason to offer a platform to an advocate for astrology or a flat earth.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT DE KALB?

Here's something being built that might do more for the academic enterprise than the nutrition coaches.

A news conference was held Tuesday at Barsema Alumni and Visitors Center to announce NIU has joined the Illinois Innovation Network, in partnership with the University of Illinois system. Of the $500 million committed in the spring to IIN, $15 million will go toward the state-of-the-art facility on the far-west end of campus, according to Gov. Bruce Rauner. NIU will foot the other $7.9 million through in-kind contributions, private investment and donations, according to a news release from the university.

Christmas is coming. I can't guarantee I'll open my checkbook.

NIU President Lisa Freeman said the building, dubbed the Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability, will feature cutting-edge laboratories, classrooms, and collaborative spaces. Additionally, the 20-acre plot will provide space for greenhouses and field sites. An Allied Environmental Policy Institute and Environmental Law Clinic are also planned. Freeman said NIU's three foci through the partnership will be food systems, water resources and climate change.

"The goals are ambitious," Freeman said, "to be a local leader in food systems, climate change, and water research, to develop a talent pipeline for all aspects of community sustainability, to attract new sources of funding to support basic and applied research, education and workforce development, and to drive innovation and economic development."

All the usual buzzwords. Will anyone being talking seriously about closing the Lake Calumet locks?  Replacing the Byron Generating Facility with a state-of-the-art nuclear steam power plant?

The pocket agriculture campus will occupy vacant space all taxpayers paid for, thanks to a 2005 "porkulus" transportation bill whipped through the House by Northern Illinois graduate and disgraced House speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

NIU is the first non-University of Illinois institution to join the network, and is the fourth hub across the state, which also includes U of I campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield. A facility similar to the one that will be built in DeKalb will be erected in Champaign-Urbana, and then the other campuses will follow. Each center will capitalize on their respective university's strengths.

Freeman said next steps here will include focusing on architectural and engineering issues in the next year, with hopes to have the facility up and running in fall of 2021, and no later than 2022.

We'll be following developments.

WHY IT IS IMPERATIVE TO MAKE PEOPLE EMBARRASSED TO CALL THEMSELVES "PROGRESSIVE."

Sonali Kolhatkar makes it clear voting for Democrats is simply an act of convenience.

If the past two years has taught us anything, it is that we must remove Republicans from power and do so with aggression and righteous anger. If that means replacing them with Democrats (or independents or third-party candidates), then that is our immediate task, first and foremost. Our next task is to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire with as much fervor as we demanded an end to Trump and Trumpism. It is imperative that we remember Democrats are politicians, not activists. They want power and have adopted lip service to the ideals of liberalism to get it. They are not inherently compassionate and progressive. It is we who are and we who must keep the fire under them alive.

So much depends on the outcome of the November midterm elections for our short-term national outlook. It is imperative that Democrats win, and win big, in order to bring the Trump agenda to a screeching halt. In the longer term, we ought to view the Democrats as part of the problem.

That's despite the rapprochement (if that's what it is) with North Korea and the renegotiation of the North American trade agreements, the latter being something Ross Perot and the industrial policy left could agree on.

Dear reader, view with extreme skepticism any political piece in which an advocate accuses her opponents of wanting power.  Government is force.  I would be particularly skeptical of any seeker of office that wasn't seeking power to do something.

It's even funnier to see "aggression and righteous anger" in the same paragraph with "compassionate and progressive."  Undermine them with mockery!

FAREWELL, AMTRAK.

Longtime transportation writer and Passenger Rail advocate F. K. "Fritz" Plous explains.

Unlike the federal government’s other three transportation responsibilities—highways, civil aviation and waterways—Amtrak is not positioned alongside the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Aviation Administration and United States Maritime Administration on the USDOT org chart. It is not equal to those three agencies in status, budget, access to the Secretary or influence on national transportation policy. Most important,  FHWA, FAA and MARAD have missions, among them, building infrastructure. Instead, Amtrak is a federally owned corporation with no explicit mission except that of making a profit, at which it inevitably fails because it must compete against these two stronger agencies that earn no profits (and aren’t required to) and thrive on huge government subsidies that dwarf that of Amtrak.

With no goals, no growth strategy and no meaningful success/fail criteria, Amtrak’s management is left to freestyle. Any set of interests powerful enough to get its paws on Amtrak can play with it—and they do. The reason why Amtrak is subject to so many influences is simple: The U.S. has no passenger train policy. Absent a policy and a bureaucracy to administer it, passenger trains have no theme, no role in the nation’s pursuit of a larger objective, such as mass mobility in the service of economic growth.

In part' that's because the Wise Experts expected Amtrak to go away after a few years, with the government being able to say "We tried, but we couldn't do it." (That might be the rationale behind Ronald Reagan bringing the conductor's change-counting machine to a budget meeting back in the day.)

Much like other temporary arrangements, though, sometimes reality catches on.

As Rush Loving makes clear in his magesterial [c.q.] The Men Who Loved Trains, President Nixon agreed to sign the 1970s Railpax legislation that created Amtrak only because the congressional aides who drafted it persuaded him that Amtrak would last only about five years. Passenger train ridership had been slumping since the end of World War II, and as the nation transitioned to Interstate highways and jet travel, the slump turned into a plunge that all the experts deemed irreversible. No business had ever survived what amounted to a mass repudiation by its customers, and there was no reason to suspect that a battlefield tourniquet like Amtrak could staunch the hemorrhage. Because Amtrak was expected to go out of business, there was no attempt to reform it, update it or find a permanent place for passenger rail in the nation’s larger transportation policy.

But a funny thing happened on Amtrak’s way to extinction: success. People confounded the experts by starting to ride the trains again. Congress, the Administration and the railroad industry couldn’t believe it, and most of them still don’t.

Loving provides a hilarious account of how Washington’s decision-makers and the Class I railroads who were depending on them stood blinking and squinting like moles dragged out into the sunlight when predictions of the passenger train’s death proved exaggerated, and Americans started riding the trains again—and demanding more trains. Amtrak didn’t know what to do.

And it still doesn’t, because the decision to run more passenger trains over more routes to more destinations is not a commercial one that can be made by a corporation—even a federally owned corporation. It’s a high-level policy decision that can be resolved only by the establishment of a new National Transportation Policy that positions passenger train development at the same level of importance as highways and civil aviation and creates a new passenger rail policy and development organ occupying the same line on the USDOT org chart as the FHWA and the FAA.

It's clear, Mr Plous concludes, that business as usual isn't working.

Today, the U.S. faces a third transportation emergency characterized not by sudden breakdowns as in 1916 or the appalling epidemic of fatal airline crashes between 1952 and 1961, but by a long twilight mobility blight in which American travelers lose millions of hours per year stranded on backed-up highways trying to reach congested airports, where they will lose another hour in a bovine shuffle through a tedious security ritual that has turned the speed and convenience of air travel into a national joke.

Airways and roadways are congested in part because Our Political Masters will not take on the challenges of applying congestion pricing (although the punditry is beginning to catch on: there will be good news on that score coming up in a few days) and because nobody wants to admit that there are too many roads, bridges, and airports.

The freight railroads, on the other hand, are (understandably) reluctant to allow government passenger trains onto their tracks, but perhaps what Mr Plous is doing is reinforcing an argument Trains columnist Malcolm Kenton recently made.

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO GO WOBBLY.

The insurgency must continue.

Mark Davis urges voters in the swing states to turf out their Democrat senators.

Democrats who participated in the attacks on Kavanaugh are up for re-election in several Trump states.  They must be shown the door back to private life in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, and dare we dream, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In West Virginia, Joe Manchin distinguished (and maybe preserved) himself as the lone yes vote for Kavanaugh in the party that otherwise savaged him.  President Trump is surely grateful, but he should not dilute his vocal support for Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey.

It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

Republicans, from the President on down, have finally sprouted spines that do not collapse out of fear over what Democrats or media tormentors might say.  Confronted with hideous attacks that have withered past GOP majorities, this Trump-infused army drew a line in the sand and refused to budge.

Senator Graham, for instance, might not be invited back to Meet the Press for some time, although I think it would be fun to see him go full naval officer on Chuck Todd.

Perhaps Neo-Neocon (a recovering Massachusetts liberal mugged by reality around September 11, 2001) has the best explanation for those former RINO squishes punching back.  It's a nine point argument: the bottom of the order comes through for Team Normal.

(7) At that point, it was the moderate wing of the GOP that was galvanized. They suddenly discovered that the rules they thought they’d been playing by all this time, the ones they thought at least some of their Democratic colleagues shared, meant nothing to the opposition. They either had never held them at all, or were more than willing to abandon them—and all sense of decency—in their lust for power.

(8) And that’s why it was the moderate side of the right that stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods in the Kavanaugh fight. Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, all of them harshly vilified in the past by the more conservative wing of the party, found themselves uttering words that those who had previously reviled them were now cheering.

(9) Those words from the RINOs had more power to rally the base than if the same messages had been delivered by senators further to the right. The factor of surprise made for a much more attention-getting story. Lindsay Graham’s tirade was much more newsworthy because it came from Graham rather than, for example, Ted Cruz. But in addition, because one of the biggest beefs the far right had previously had with the RINOs was the latters’ lack of courage and fight, the experience of actually seeing and hearing those RINOs fight, and fight hard, did much to evaporate the base’s former reasons for despising them.

Dear reader, you must understand that "compromise" and "bipartisanship" are Democrat synonyms for "give us what we want." Sorry, no.  Welcome to the struggle, Senator Graham.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties.  Undoing fifty years of judicial error and misplaced faith in Governance by Wise Experts is going to be a long twilight struggle.

Republicans seem particularly energized, some even willing to sweep aside their NeverTrump neuroses and row along with the rest of us.   The challenging news is that this kind of resolve must be rekindled again and again and again.  If majorities in both houses of Congress can be preserved in November, those Republican members installed in January had better be ready to take the next hill, and the next and the next.  Do you think liberalism made its deep inroads with intermittent passion?  I have long opposed the ideology of the left while admiring and envying its tireless devotion.

It can be our turn if we are up to the task.   Let us bring Kavanaugh confirmation-style courage and energy to our fights for stronger borders, health care reform and fiscal sanity.  Maybe a uniquely brave wing of the GOP can even prod the President on spending cuts.

We fought for Brett Kavanaugh not simply to win him a Supreme Court seat, or just to bolster the Constitution.  This fight was necessary to deal a blow to the darkest of tactics and those who would deploy them.

They will not stop.  They will not slink away. They are not defeated.

We cannot rest until people are ashamed to publicly call themselves "progressive" in the current sense of the word.  Or, perhaps, until Democrat leaders change their message enough to be able to successfully campaign in the strongly Republican states.

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.

Kevin Anderson of Manchester gets to the heart of the climate change matter.

Dress it up however we may wish, climate change is ultimately a rationing issue.

The responsibility for global emissions is heavily skewed towards the lifestyles of a relatively few high emitters – professors and climate academics amongst them. Almost 50% of global carbon emissions arise from the activities of around 10% of the global population, increasing to 70% of emissions from just 20% of citizens. Impose a limit on the per-capita carbon footprint of the top 10% of global emitters, equivalent to that of an average European citizen, and global emissions could be reduced by one third in a matter of a year or two.

Put another way, climate change activism goes Thorstein Veblen and Ken Galbraith one better by turning the operation of those mauve-and-cerise, air-conditioned sedans into Crimes Against Humanity, as simply deplorable-shaming Babbitts isn't enough.

That's not what the latest report is going to do, though.

Ignoring this huge inequality in emissions, the IPCC chooses instead to constrain its policy advice to fit neatly within the current economic model. This includes, significant reliance on removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much later in the century, when today’s senior scientists and policy makers will be either retired or dead. Conjuring up such futuristic ‘negative emission technologies’ to help achieve the virtually impossible 1.5°C target is perhaps understandable, but such intergenerational buck-passing also dominates the IPCC’s 2°C advice.

To genuinely reduce emissions in line with 2°C of warming requires a transformation in the productive capacity of society, reminiscent of the Marshall Plan. The labour and resources used to furnish the high-carbon lifestyles of the top 20% will need to shift rapidly to deliver a fully decarbonised energy system. No more second or very large homes, SUVs, business and first-class flights, or very high levels of consumption. Instead, our economy should be building new zero-energy houses, retrofitting existing homes, huge expansion of public transport, and a 4-fold increase in (zero-carbon) electrification.

Where are the economic incentives to do these things?  Not necessarily in the various international agreements.  "Breakthrough analysts conclude that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have actually fallen faster since 2010 than they would have had the the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade scheme been adopted by Congress. The U.S. trend toward lower carbon dioxide emissions was helped along by the global financial crisis, a weak recovery, and the ongoing switch from coal to cheap natural gas for electricity generation."

Note also this: the carbon footprint of nuclear-steam electricity is smaller than that for coal or natural gas plants.  Bet on trade-tested betterments to make the automobiles more energy efficient, and expect the Wise Experts to be serious once you see a nuclear power plant put into operation.

Until then, well, Ed Driscoll found this.

Here’s my problem with climate change: everyone from “turn back the rising seas” Obama to the pastor of my local liberal church will eagerly assure me that Science has proved that the end is nigh; climate change isn’t just happening but is imminent. We or our children are about to witness the mother of all fiery crash-and-burns unless we repent and turn from our sinful ways. Time is running out. It was running out in 1989, then again in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015…

It’s as if we’re on the plane — eating our pretzels, pecking at our laptops, trying to keep our toddlers entertained — and periodically the stewardess announces that the plane is about to tumble to the ground in flames and we’re all going to die. Then she brings the drink cart around, starts the in-flight movie, and goes back to her argument with the other stewardess about who forgot to put toilet paper in the first-class loo, or whether a businessman should be able to have three olives in his complementary martini.

Heck, I was around for the first Earth Day in 1970, and we shouldn't even be alive to read this.

[I]f the world is going to end, the people who do know and claim to believe need to walk the walk their talk implies. I need to see some white knuckles and mumbled prayers. I need to see Al Gore arranging teleconferences from his yurt, not luxury Davos getaways from his beachfront mansion; I need to see the Democratic Party setting aside the issues that can only be important when and if the world is not about to end.

Let's see how much attention they pay to Professor Anderson.

PASS THE POPCORN.

You knew Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes would have something to say about the Grievance Studies hoaxes.

In a prank that is alternately hilarious, appalling, and disturbing, three puckish academics managed to place no fewer than seven “shoddy, absurd, unethical” articles in “respectable” academic journals that trafficked in the growing field of grievance studies—a field that includes gender and queer studies, critical race theory and a variety of post-modern constructivist theories now fashionable in the humanities and social sciences. If nothing else, they demonstrated that academic leftism is a target ripe for ridicule as well as outrage.

Harvard's Yascha Mounk reads the papers, so you and I don't have to.

Sokal Squared doesn’t just expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck, though. It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals. This tendency becomes most evident in an article that advocates extreme measures to redress the “privilege” of white students. Exhorting college professors to enact forms of “experiential reparations,” the paper suggests telling privileged students to stay silent, or even binding them to the floor in chains.

He goes on to suggest that there are still disciplines that don't test pc-positive.

There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense. While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race, gender, and identity, they have not penetrated the leading journals of more traditional disciplines. As a number of academics pointed out on Twitter, for example, all of the papers submitted to sociology journals were rejected. For now, it remains unlikely that the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review would have fallen for anything resembling “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” a paper modeled on the infamous book with a similar title.

That assertion is not totally true: I'm hoping to analyze how serious the hoax (it might be more accurate to say humor) articles in social science are in a subsequent post, and how flawed peer review in those disciplines might be.

But the fashionable nonsense is discrediting the academy.

If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating, they become deeply suspect. And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon, they are worsening the problems they purport to address.

What has the no-platforming of speakers and the hassling of public figures at meals been, if not rank cruelty presented in the right kind of progressive jargon? Bad ideas have consequences, and it's probably foolish to pick fights with people who own weapons and know how to use them.

As Steven Hayward quips, "[W]hen even Mother Jones can see through the fraud."  [Link added -- ed.]

What's that Insta Pundit line about how higher education will blame their reduced budgets on anti-intellectualism?

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

I don't know if anyone at the Northern Star reads Cold Spring Shops, but you don't need my background in political economy to recognize a troubling pair of stories.  First, there's the way the university serves the general population of students.

Located in various spaces throughout the Chick Evans Field House, the Huskie Food Pantry operates from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Thursdays throughout the academic year and twice a month during the summer. The service is open to all NIU students without meal plans.

Jennifer Van Ewyk, Huskie Food Pantry coordinator and assistant director for volunteerism through Student Involvement and Leadership Development, said recent changes within the Division of Student Affairs have prompted the food pantry to expand operations further.

“In the future, as space allows, we would love to have a more private space,” Van Ewyk said. “There’s a lot of stigma associated with using a pantry. One of our goals is to move into the Holmes Student Center once they’re done with renovations.”

Van Ewyk said in order to streamline operations and continue operating independently from university funding, the Huskie Food Pantry hopes to promote monetary donations among students. The pantry is currently partnered with the Northern Illinois Food Bank, which helps local pantries buy food staples and produce at discounted prices. With monetary donations, the Huskie Food Pantry can get the most value for the items it buys.

Van Ewyk also said more universities nationwide are beginning to embrace on-campus food pantries. With NIU’s efforts to combat food insecurity, she said the push is in context with a national movement.

I'm not sure how to square that "operating independently from university funding" with operating out of university spaces, whether at the former fieldhouse, the student center, or a less visible location.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Reality began to dawn on Green Bay Packer fans.

As spring became summer and the team reported to St. Norbert for camp, fans saw nothing but familiar faces, grizzled veterans laden with championship jewelry, with a few empty fingers waiting for fresh bling.

Fact is, we didn't realize just how "grizzled" they truly were, and how they'd miss Lombardi's verbal whip. The coach went upstairs that previous winter, shedding his sideline duties to become a full-time general manager. The legend handed the reigns over to his defensive coordinator Phil Bengtson, quiet in demeanor but with fire in his face--literally, because it seemed there was always a cigarette smoldering in his head.

In part, the team was full of grizzled veterans returning (for one season too many?) because the Packers never found a successor to Jack Vainisi.

It was Vainisi, a scout from 1950 until his untimely death at 33 in 1960, who assembled the talent Lombardi would coach to five NFL titles. Vainisi also played an influential role in convincing the team’s executive committee to hire Lombardi in 1959.

In other words, without Vainisi there are no Glory Years. There is no Titletown, no Bart Starr to score the winning touchdown in the Ice Bowl, no Ron Wolf to resurrect the franchise in the 1990s – and get his name up on the façade – and no Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers to set records and win Super Bowls.

He had a pretty good run, in part because he was drafting toward the top of the board.

Consider the players Vainisi drafted: Jim Ringo in 1953, Forrest Gregg and Bart Starr in ‘56, Paul Hornung in ’57 and Jim Taylor and Ray Nitschke in ’58. He also signed Willie Wood as an undrafted free agent and facilitated trades for Willie Davis and Henry Jordan. All are in the Hall of Fame.

In addition, Vainisi drafted Max McGee, Bob Skoronski, Hank Gremminger, Ron Kramer, Dan Currie, Jerry Kramer, Boyd Dowler, Tom Brown and Bob Jeter, all of whom would start on championship teams.

Indeed, and Jerry Kramer recently donned the gold jacket.

INTERURBAN INTERLUDE.

Book Review N^o. 26 is Clemson historian H. Roger Grant's Electric Interurbans and the American People.  I'm tempted to marvel simply that the product of an academic press (Indiana, in this instance) doesn't have a sub-title.  Yes, it has pictures, but no, it is not a Central Electric Railfans' Association style corporate history with rosters and notes on the disposition of cars.  It's closer in organization and scope to Frank Rowsome's old Trolley Car Treasury: there's the emergence of the cars, the prosperous years, the decline and fall, and the preservation, this time limited to the interurban (as opposed to the city and suburban) services.

It's the social history and political economy of the interurbans that give Grant's book its structure.  The electric car came along at an inopportune time: yes, it could overcome the inflexibility of the steam train with lighter construction, more frequent schedules, and the possibility of covering costs in more thinly settled areas.  Thus, between the electric cars and the introduction of rural telephones, rural folk could arrange the delivery of stuff or go into town for church or a social event or interact with a greater range of people or otherwise be spared the centuries-old idiocy of rural life.  Likewise, they could bring their goods to market, loading milk cans on the baggage section of the cars, or bringing the eggs into town and being home in time to make supper.

The timing was inopportune, though, as the private automobile, sometimes using the same electric technology, later with the Otto cycle engine, gave people even more freedom of movement (once the taxpayers started picking up the tab for improved roads, that is) and the private automobile provided courting couples with even more opportunities to escape eyes on the front porch as well as a safe space, if you will, for women who might otherwise be hit on on the electric cars.  Thus, although the interurbans made efforts to improve service and retain passengers, they "ran out of time."

There are probably additional research opportunities for people looking into how the extent of the market affects the division of labor.  As consumers used the cars (and later their flivvers) to comparison shop, creative destruction took place.  For instance, the merchants of Elyria, Ohio, complained that interurbans led to store closings: was that because shoppers could now discover lower prices in Lorain?  The beat goes on today.

Likewise, the contemporary light rail transportation lines have a lot in common with the lighter interurbans.  Heck, the Shaker Heights lines east of Cleveland and the Sharon Hill and Media lines west of Philadelphia are lighter interurbans.  Whether they provide "commuters and other riders alternatives to congested roadways, automobile wear-and-tear, parking costs, and gyrating fuel prices" (page 151) remains to be seen.  Perhaps, though, there will be a second interurban era.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE CRAFT OF O SCALE.

The latter part of August and the first part of September were good opportunities to observe developments in O Scale.  Yes, I did spend some money and buy some stuff, but mostly it was observing what others were doing.

We'll start in the Capitol District, where the 2018 O Scale National Convention took place in Rockville, Maryland, an easy walk from the elevated trains and not far from the Maryland commuter trains, which only run week-days.

The theme for layout tours is Exquisite Modeling of Railroads that Maybe Shouldn't Have Been Built.  There are lots of pictures below the jump.

NOW IT'S TIME TO ROLL THE BARREL.

In some quarters, beer is now a political statement.  Seriously.

Look, the Superintendent is pleased that Justice Kavanaugh has been sworn in.

He's more pleased that the Milwaukee Brewers are still playing, with at least two more games at Miller Park.  (The Brewers clinched a playoff spot at Busch Stadium and finished a sweep of the divisional round at Coors Field.)

While the Cubs were collapsing, Oktoberfest season was winding down in Milwaukee.

You'd expect the Freistadt Alte Kameraden to be able to play their eponymous march without a conductor, and you'd be correct.

Yes, this travel report is from the end of September.

Yes, there is still unfinished business involving the Capitol Limited and two O Scale shows.

Yes, there are still crazy things going on in politics and the academy.

The Brewers will next play on Friday.  Perhaps I'll work some of the backlog off commencing Monday.

First things first.

THE CHALLENGES OF RAILROAD PRESERVATION.

During the War, the War Production Board allowed the South Shore Line to lengthen existing interurban cars so as to better transport the hordes of steel workers participating in the Midwestern Arsenal of Democracy.

The first car so modernized was Car 15, and the Central Electric Railfans' Association evidently had a paper allotment to publish a Bulletin, "The Modernization of Car 15," which in reprint form occasionally turns up in swap meets.

Lots of images below the jump.

THE MARKET TEST IS TOO HARD. LET'S SKIP THE EXAM.

City Lab's Jonathan English makes a provocative observation.

At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies’ only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.

That's true up to a point: a full reckoning must consider both the PCC streetcar, an attempt to accelerate the modernization of the trolley to gain passengers, and the Pernambuco Tramway phenomenon, that bit of Progressive Era wishful thinking by which the fare must stay at a nickel because transportation is a fundamental right, or something.

Here's how it turns out.

Transit providers in the U.S. have continually cut basic local service in a vain effort to improve their finances. But they only succeeded in driving riders and revenue away. When the transit service that cities provide is not attractive, the demand from passengers that might “justify” its improvement will never materialize.

The rail transit crisis began, Mr English notes, with those Good Intentions.

By the 1920s, as the automobile became a fierce competitor, privately run transit struggled.

But public subsidy was politically challenging: There was a popular perception of transit as a business controlled by rapacious profiteers—as unpopular as cable companies and airlines are today. In 1920, the President’s Commission on Electric Railways described the entire industry as “virtually bankrupt,” thanks to rapid inflation in the World War I years and the nascent encroachment of the car.

The rent-seeking by the emergent highway lobby probably didn't help, either.  Mr English's next passage misses that.

The Depression crushed most transit companies, and the handful of major projects that moved forward in the 1930s were bankrolled by the New-Deal-era federal government: See the State and Milwaukee-Dearborn subways in Chicago, the South Broad Street subway in Philadelphia, and the Sixth Avenue subway in New York. But federal infrastructure investment would soon shift almost entirely to highways. A return to transit by Uncle Sam would not come for another three decades.

That shift didn't just happen. Yes, a military officer named Dwight Eisenhower had some logistics experience, and he was in a position to aid with the shift, but the automobile companies and the motor hobbyists had more than a little to do with it.

There's a lot more in the essay, and I'm only focusing on the absence of investment in fixed rail transit.  I conclude with one other foreseeable consequence.  When somebody in Washington noticed there wasn't much capital spending going on, the Wise Experts said, let's subsidize it and see if we can come up with a catchy acronym or long title for the bill.  But they didn't think through the incentives.

The big investments of the revival era were too little, too late. They also began the ominous pattern of relying on federal funding for capital construction and scarce local dollars for operations and maintenance. Today, many systems have limited frequency and severe maintenance issues due to funding shortfalls over the decades. From New York to San Francisco to Chicago to D.C., virtually every major American rapid transit system has had a service meltdown as a result of chronic deferred maintenance.

The same thing is true of the road network. It's the ribbon-cutting phenomenon, isn't it: the local politician can hand over the keys to the shiny new buses, or cut the ribbon opening the new road or bridge, but there's nothing sexy in patching potholes.

THE BEST CASE FOR LIMITED GOVERNMENT?

I have trouble being able to think anything about politics other than it is so toxic that the worst get on top by default.  Perhaps it is that bad, according to Salena Zito.

One of the most common complaints heard on the campaign trail in 2016 was this: Of all the inspiring, hardworking, bright men and women in this country, how did it come down to a choice between two people who were not exactly the paragons of virtue?

The answer two years ago was that people in this country had such a low viewpoint of government and institutions, it was hard to get good people to be willing to be involved because they lacked faith to get involved. In retrospect, two years ago may seem like a kinder, gentler time. Today, given that character assassination comes first, and facts come later, why would any good person jump in?

Perhaps, though, the brawlers are there because the voters have been hard done by.  That's Michael Graham's claim, in Boston's Herald.

When picking a Supreme Court nominee devolves into investigating his high school yearbook; determining when he lost his virginity; and a porn star’s attorney with last-second accusations of a gang-rape club 34 years ago — when you turn politics into the WWE, can you be surprised when voters want the “Manhattan Mauler” on their side?

Now do you understand why people like my evangelical parents and longtime “principled conservatives” tossed their principles and backed a rude, foul-mouthed fighter­ like Donald Trump? They knew how ugly the fight was going to get.

Yes, call voters "deplorable" and then use every point of leverage to get your way, Constitutionality be hanged: it's not the American Way to just sit and take it.  "Democrats turned politics into a bare-knuckle, blood-letting cage match — so the GOP went out and got themselves a fighter."

Rich Lowry reinforces.

The attempted political assassination of Brett Kavanaugh is bad for the country, but good for a Trumpian attitude toward American politics.

The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become.

But while the Democrats and their allies in the academic-entertainment-media complex change the rules to suit themselves and antagonize Normals, there are people who might be tempted to vote Democratic who are also displeased.

There is not, and has never been, a unified, hierarchical resistance in the United States – nor should there be. There are simply millions of Americans who know they deserve better. It is less a resistance than an insistence that privileged impunity will no longer stand. If there is a unifying theme, it is against corruption – a rallying cry for white-collar crime to finally be punished, a repudiation of policies that steal from the poor to line the pockets of predators. There are those who rage at senators who wish to promote a man repeatedly accused of sexual assault to the highest court in the country. That is not normal, and the resistance – regular people who ask for simple checks and balances on power – won’t stop fighting against it.

Perhaps it's simply rage that the Credentialed Elite runs things so poorly.  Author Sarah Kendzior sees a more general institutional failure, but on whose watch did that failure occur?

In 2017, democracy was defenestrated through the Overton window, as an administration run on alternative facts attacked the very concept of truth. The brazen lawlessness and audacious corruption of the Trump administration shocked many, but less so the residents in my state of Missouri, where decades of dark money and dramatic political strife had long prepared citizens for the worst.

Eventually, we'll come to regret the day putting truth in air quotes got out of the philosophy workshop.  But although she's of the left, this observation could be straight out of Pajamas Media.

Every time I leave St. Louis for a wealthy coastal city, I feel like Katniss in The Hunger Games leaving District 12 for the Capitol. It’s not a feeling I had much before 2008, but the recession had created such an enormously unequal recovery that it was noticeable in ways beyond sticker shock. “Your billboards sell things,” I said in wonder to an L.A. friend driving me down the busy Sunset Strip, where products and TV shows were advertised instead of drug rehabs or Jesus or simply blank space.

Yes, and there are tensions between the Democrat elites and the Democrat base.

The audiences in Los Angeles and New York were as concerned about the decline of democracy and erosion of rights as people back in St Louis. They had their own economic plight, better hidden; gentrification instead of abandonment; debt instead of deprivation. They had their own sleazy politicians. Their perception of progressivism was skewed by living in solidly blue states, where the question was not whether politics would move to the left but how far to the left it could go, but they organized in much the same way activists in Missouri did, and their efforts received similarly little attention from the national media. Once again, the bulk of activists I met were women.

She concludes, though, with a remark that might not be out of place in Reason.

But when you look at the landscape of 2018, what you are left with is a seemingly consolidating autocracy, steadily eroding checks on its power – having captured the executive and legislative branches, it now threatens to devour the judiciary – while facing off against millions of opponents waging small, local battles against corruption and cruelty. There is no unifying figure; nor is it wise to seek one. There is no easy solution; nor is it wise to feign one. There are only people who deserve better, and people fighting on their behalf.

Over and over, I have heard from people whose lives were turned upside down by the Trump administration in horrific ways, as well as those who have turned their own lives upside down to help them. That is the chaos of a country forced to surrender its delusions, but refusing to surrender its soul. We will never be the same America; none of us are the same people we were before November, 2016. All we can do is choose to be better. Unlike in so many other things, at least in that we have a choice.

Yes, and note that whatever consolidations the Trump style Republicans accomplish will be consolidations available to any other style of Republicans, or any style of Democrats.

Let's note, though, that any attempt to identify consensus on what "be better" looks like is probably futile.

DOWNSIZING IS A FALSE ECONOMY.

They're learning that the hard way at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  "Some new faculty members have been hired to replace others who left, but more lower-paid adjunct instructors who don't do research also are now teaching classes, arguably diluting the expertise at a university that has a dual academic mission of research and access."  That's long been the challenge in Milwaukee, and for that matter, at any other university that simultaneously calls the U.S. News rankings fake yet hails any improvement in its placement.

JUST TAKE THE BOURGEOIS CONVENTIONS SERIOUSLY.

Kurt Schlichter asks, So, What Are The Rules Anyway?

His summation: "I think there actually are no rules anymore. I think the elite is so terrified it is losing its power that it is tossing out the foundations of the society it is supposed to organize and manage, that is, the rules. I think our elite actually does not believe in rules, that their attempts at enforcing the rules are merely a grift designed to jam up Normals and provide a way to keep them in line."

That's not going to end well.

Jill Richardson, who probably would not get along with Kurt Schlichter on anything, observes, "If we taught men better ways of 'being a man,' we wouldn't have to teach women to cover their drinks."

Yes, her notion of "better ways" is laced with soy, and yet, her conclusion reads, "Maybe if we raised men to feel their full range of emotions, to feel confident in their manhood without violating women, and to respect the boundaries of others, we wouldn’t have to teach women to use the buddy system and watch their drinks."

The essence of the bourgeois norm is "respect the boundaries of others."

Fifty years of tearing the boundaries down and calling it social progress gets high school yearbook entries read into the Congressional Record, and not in a good way.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

The general population of Northern Illinois University students have a food pantry.

Student athletes, whether on scholarship or as walk-ons, have nutrition coaches.

The latest project includes multiple enhancements to the current weight room along with the construction of the Nutrition Center, which will serve all 400 Huskie student-athletes. The changes will include renovation and adjustments within the existing space on the east end of the Yordon Center and Barsema Hall of Champions. Jay Anderson, President of Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital, said the gift is the latest example of the company's commitment to DeKalb and to its ongoing partnership with Northern Illinois University.

"We are excited to partner with NIU, and provide their student-athletes with access to world-class care," said Jay Anderson, president of Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital. "We are looking forward to building a premiere comprehensive athletic health and wellness program with the enhancement of the performance center and opening of the Nutrition Center."

Support for the project includes both nutritional products for the student-athletes, and staffing of the Nutrition Center, both of which are critical elements to the development of current and future Huskies, according to NIU Director of Sports Performance Brad Ohrt.

I fully expect the university's Morale Conditioners to note that it's all donated money.

With all the virtue-signalling talk about access and student moms and veterans and illegal aliens, will there be a campaign to provide to the development of current and future Huskies who aren't passing, shooting, jumping, or batting their way through college?

I NEVER EXPECTED THE INSURGENCY TO CATCH ON.

It's not enough that the political elites, and the people running higher education, have so neglected what goes on outside of their bubbles that Donald Trump becomes president and the militias await.

That, alone, is refreshing.

Now, though, the Kavanaugh nomination has turned into a nasty faction fight among the elites generally.

Here's Ross Douthat, one of the many Tories with reservations about confirming the nomination.

But people also need to recognize that the “profile” we’re being given of Kavanaugh — a creature of privilege who drank a lot in college and sometimes struck other people as a jerk — isn’t the narrow profile of a rapist, and isn’t even the somewhat more expansive profile of a particular kind of arrogant preppy. It’s a profile that fits many of the same people attacking him today — and so part of what we’re watching is one group of meritocrats returning to their undergraduate resentments and trying to pin on Georgetown Prep graduates the vices that define our entire depressing class.

If I had known Brett Kavanaugh casually freshman year of college, I probably would have disliked him. But across four years at Harvard I watched the freshman-fall patterns of the preppiest students get imitated, adopted and reproduced by, well, most of us. And I often found that the worst people in that elite culture — including myself on my worst days — weren’t the most privileged kids but the hyper-ambitious ones obsessed with vaulting over them.

So if his critics want to deny Brett Kavanaugh the highest office in our meritocracy on the grounds that he’s in denial or dishonest about the person he was at 18 or 22 — well, I just hope that those critics will save some of that cup of condemnation for themselves.

The good news is there are enough matriculants and graduates of the land-grants, mid-majors, and apprenticeships that the Republic would do just fine, thank you very much, if all the legacies and credential-whores went on a permanent vacation.

Jim Geraghty, himself of the Insiders, expands.

We’ve learned over the years that high-level, white-collar Washington, D.C. — including the realms of journalism, politics, academia, and law — includes a lot of creeps. Over the past year, the city’s professional class learned that a bunch of their colleagues, mentors, role models, and industry leaders were a bunch of sexual predators or otherwise sleazy. Sure, there were the politicians such as Al Franken, and Tim Murphy, and Blake Fahrenthold, and John Conyers Jr., and Trent Franks, and Patrick Meehan.

But the media world saw one establishment, center-left to left, often self-proclaimed-feminist man after another suddenly resigning or suffering some other career consequence after horrific stories and allegations of patterns of abuse: Mark Halperin. Charlie Rose. Leon Wieseltier, formerly an editor at The New Republic. Hamilton Fish, publisher of The New Republic. Michael Oreskes, a top editor at NPR. Glenn Thrush, political reporter for the New York Times. Garrison Keillor. In each case, peers and colleagues wondered — who knew? Who witnessed something odd or weird but pretended not to notice? Who turned a blind eye to the behavior? Did anybody ever confront these guys? If not, why didn’t anybody ever confront these guys?

Even if some members of Washington’s white-collar community never encountered sexual harassment or assault, a lot of people — mostly men, but also women — look back on their teen years and their early twenties and cringe. Hopefully their youthful indiscretions never got anywhere near sexual assault. But the college scene of past decades included lots of people getting hammered, having drunken hookups, sleeping with people and then regretting it, sleeping with people whose names they don’t remember and never really learned, dumb things said, dumb reactions to things said, and macho challenges to take it outside.

And now the falsity of their Credentials and their Preparation comes down to ... a party that may or may not have happened in Bethesda around 1982? What I mostly remember about the fall of 1982 was a pennant push by the Milwaukee Brewers.  Plus some research projects begun, and some ambitious projects never finished (and never did I fake my data.)

Unfortunately, it often takes an existential crisis for the careerists to be pushed aside and the competent to take their place:  George Marshall firing officers in the War Department, Grant coming east, Craig Counsell managing the Brewers.  We're not currently in a war, and yet, Mr Geraghty would put voters on a war footing.

Almost everyone in America has been wrongfully accused of something sometime, and they’re rightfully terrified and outraged at the suggestion that the new standard should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

But we’ve got at least three GOP senators who seem nervous. They’re used to being considered the “nice” Republicans, who are used to being praised in contrast to their colleagues, heralded as reasonable, and sensible, and centrist. They’re not used to being demonized in the press, and they’re certainly not used to activists yelling at them that they support rape.

Senators, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there is never going to be enough political cover to stop activists from yelling at you. The only thing that will stop the Left from hating you is total capitulation. There is another option of course, which is to teach them the hard lesson that everything they tried against you did not work in its intended goal, which is to get you to vote against Kavanaugh. All of this is to sway you, frighten you, intimidate you, and bend you to their will.

Perhaps that's why Our President is mocking the judge's accusers. If he won't be intimidated, Normals don't have to be, either.

Less than four weeks to the vote counts.

THE DEADLY COMBINATION OF HYPERTHEORY AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

That's Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan on the latest packaging of fashionable nonsense to survive peer review.

Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” They claim that, although their scholarship may seem incomprehensible, this is because they are like mathematicians or physicists: they express profound truths in a way that cannot be understood without training. [Mathematician James] Lindsay, [philosopher Peter] Boghossian, and [Areo editor Helen] Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding.

Put my way, recondite bordering on incoherent. But the anonymous referees evidently can't call nonsense nonsense. And Theory without testable implications is nonsense with fancy verbiage.

THEY'D BETTER START THINKING ABOUT THE SUCCESSION.

Might be time for Green Bay Packer president Mike Murphy to have a "come to Jesus" moment between head coach Mike McCarthy and Danica Patrick's buddy Aaron Rodgers.

There aren’t two people in the organization who hold the fate of the 2018 season in their hands more than Rodgers and McCarthy. If there is more between them than a simple disagreement, if there is a rift, then Murphy should step in.

Rodgers just might have been speaking out of frustration Sunday after the game when he called the offensive performance in a 22-0 victory over Buffalo “terrible” and questioned the game plan. But it appeared he was also sending a message through the media to McCarthy that things aren’t right.

Defensive ineffectiveness in the Minnesota and Washington games, offensive ineffectiveness in the Minnesota and Buffalo games, both in Green Bay: yes there is a problem.

Read to the end of the article.

Rodgers must hold up his end of the bargain, too. He’s 34 years old and whether he admits it or not, his physical skills are diminishing. Significant injuries each of the last two seasons have limited his impact during that span. He has missed more easy throws this year than any time in recent memory.

Yup. We went through the same thing a half century ago with Bart Starr.

TAKING THE TRAIN TO THE GAME.

Yesterday, Milwaukee radio station WTMJ was quoting Brewer fans as thanking Amtrak for "adding trains" to get them to and from Game 163.  The Superintendent has not yet been able to confirm either relief trains (a second section) or strengthening the formations from the usual six car rakes.  Baseball fans did ride the trains, in sufficent numbers to crowd the streets of Wrigleyville with that deeper shade of blue, and they did make enough noise that the (beer-swilling widebody) Cub fans couldn't drown them out.

The trains that got to Chicago before and back to Milwaukee after a day baseball game are also the most heavily patronized trains on ordinary business days.

J'ACCUSE!

Columnist S. E. Cupp suggests the Jacobins of #MeToo are overplaying their hand.

As I’ve said all along, the allegations against [Judge Brett] Kavanaugh are serious and should be investigated to their conclusions.

But the left’s sudden aversion to a long-standing pillar of democracy is culturally corrosive and could jeopardize the credibility of #MeToo for a long time to come.

It's not a "sudden aversion," rather, it's democracy properly understood.

You can call it "general will," or you can call it "liberating tolerance."

IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE A QUARTERBACK CONTROVERSY.

The Green Bay Packers enlarged the kind of bunting you'd display for a patriotic speech, or perhaps they're anticipating a merger of the coastal states with France, for the flag ceremony before shutting out the Buffalo Bills.

The Victory Girls are having none of it.

Green Bay’s owners are the season ticket holders. They are the only team with a public form of ownership. That team is beholden to it’s ticket owners on a major scale. So I have to wonder, how many of the Green Bay Packers owners approve of the message that was sent yesterday?

I certainly hope the majority of Packer ownership does NOT approve and is ripping the team management a new one for this idiocy. Because right now, the Green Bay Packers organization screwed the pooch on this one.

"Not new," according to Green Bay's Press-Gazette.

“The banner used during Sunday’s pregame ceremony supplemented the three U.S. flags on the roof of the stadium and the flag carried by the color guard on the field," [Packer spokesman Aaron] Popkey said.

"We've used such displays from time to time in the past when other pregame elements take up a significant portion of the field. To avoid causing confusion, we will not be using such displays in the future.”

The "other pregame elements" included the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, on longtime Michael Leckrone's retirement tour. The Band were available account the Badger football team having their bye week.

A LAMENT FOR HIGHER EDUCATION.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds quips,  "The more celebrity-focused an academic field is, the less substance in its work." He's reacting to Minding the Campus noticing systems of privilege, domination, and oppression within the world of victim studies.

Of course, in institutions putatively founded on intellectual criteria, status fixations are a sign of decadence. When they grow too strong, we know that the disciplinary grounds of the field have deteriorated. To call the leaders of the field “stars” is to assume a star system operating within it, a competition for prestige and renown that always threatens to slide into the wrong kinds of rivalry. A star system shifts the focus from the objects in a discipline, the artworks and such, to the subjects, the practitioners of it. Ideas rank less than who is who and who is where.

The adjustment is heightened when jobs are scarce. If there are 100 tenure-track openings in Medieval literature each year, the plum positions at Berkeley and Chicago don’t draw as much covetousness as they do when there are only 15 openings across the nation. The precious few who win those elite posts don’t evoke as much envy from people who end up at Arizona State and Colorado College. In fact, when the job possibilities are multiple, they may not envy that Princeton hire at all, knowing that she faces six years of pressure and, perhaps, dim chances of tenure.

I'd be more persuaded if the institutions lower in the U.S. News league tables viewed themselves as being in the same business as Harvard and challenging students and faculty accordingly, but I'm not optimistic about ever seeing that.

The house organ for Business as Usual gets to the heart of the matter. The full text is behind a paywall, but the money quote reflects the steep grading curve of a market test.   "The system that gave rise to the celebrity scholar confronts the reality of the shrinking job market." Good.

Perhaps, as part of the continued call for restoration of the bourgeois virtues, let's apply them to the academy as well as to the country-club set.

The institution has two choices when faced with political radicals: Ax them, especially if they are graduate students, or promote them. Make them successful, give them awards, power, enormous salaries. That way, when the next scandal comes along — and it will — they will have a vested interest in playing defense.

This is how institutionality reproduces. Even the call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen. There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean “rules I shouldn’t have to follow.” “If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues,” wrote Duggan. This was code. It meant, “You can talk about structural issues all you want, so long as you don’t use examples of people we know.”

What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.

What happens in the common room stays in the common room.

Sorry, no.

TO CALL IT A CIRCUS IS A DISSERVICE TO CLOWNS.

Thus does Peter Van Buren characterize the ongoing confirmation hearings for Judge Kavanaugh.  "The goal wasn’t to show the nominee was unqualified as a jurist, but that he was unqualified as a human being."

Well, perhaps there is a circus interlude after all.

Laura "11D" McKenna elaborates.

It should have never happened like that. That inquiry should have happened behind closed doors and been buttressed by an independent investigation. Instead, two individuals, and their families, were publicly destroyed and humiliated.

And everybody has their own experiences that sway their interpretation of events. As a woman who grew up in the 1980s, I had bad experiences with the popular, sporty boys, as well as my own stories of beer filled parties. And a guy tweeted me his own story about how he was falsely accused of a crime when he was in college. Also, I’ve talked with a lot of women who aren’t sympathetic with Blasey Ford. They tell me that guys did this stuff all the time back then and it never stuck with them.

Yes, and the recriminations about whether Mrs Ford wasn't aware of the committee's offer to interview her in confidence are likely to be part of the next act.  We can also look forward to a "Hey, Rube!" of monumental proportions between now and the November elections.

TURF. THEM. OUT.

Rick Moran:

Clearly, Democrats have miscalculated.  They were hoping not only to energize their own voters with the Kavanaugh smears, but also to depress Republican turnout.  Instead, they have energized voters from both parties, negating much of the "enthusiasm gap" they had hoped would allow them to pick off a couple of Republicans in red states, giving them control of the Senate.

Two other races featuring Democratic incumbents – Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Joe Manchin in West Virginia – are also showing signs of the Kavanaugh effect.  McCaskill is running neck and neck with attorney general Josh Hawley, while Manchin's lead has dwindled from 12 points to 8 since the attacks on Kavanaugh began.

The common denominator among all three Democrats is that they need GOP votes to win.  With Republicans in red states strongly supporting Kavanaugh, the Democrats' tactics appear to have backfired.

Time for the Normals to get militant!

Four weeks until the votes are counted.

THERE'S NO MONEY. LET'S HIRE ANOTHER DEANLET.

A Dean of Students requires a supporting cast.

After facing some vacancies due to staff departures in the last academic year, Dean of Students Kelly Wesener-Michael said she hopes to refill empty positions and create others to serve student needs. A national search is ongoing for an Associate Dean of Students.

A position for Coordinator for Signature Programs and Event Administration will be added. The individual to be appointed will oversee student safety, implement scheduling and registration and uphold division policy for all on- and-off-campus events.

“We’ve taken the opportunity to use these vacancies to reinvent or transition them to be able to align the needs of the students with those of the staffing structure,” Wesener-Michael said.

Translation: the staffing structure dictates what the students need. I wonder if that includes the free speech zones.

POUR THE SPRECHER!!

It took 163 games, and the final regular season flag hoist at Wrigley Field is the Blue Lima.

The Cubs will host the wild-card game tomorrow, and they may not be happy about the Brewers celebrating their division title on Wrigley Field after celebrating their playoff clinching win in St. Louis.

That said, as long as Milwaukee wins and keeps playing, they have home field for the divisional and league series.

This morning, WTMJ reported a lot of Brewer fans on the trains.  There will likely be a lot of happy riders returning home.  The radio report notes a lot of Brewer fans still in the stadium, hope they know the last train out is relatively early in the evening.

This is the first time in my memory that I recall WTMJ moving coverage of a Packer game to their FM affiliate in order to cover a Game 162 of the baseball season.  The Packers defeated Buffalo, 22-0, but two touchdowns, a missed conversion, and three field goals mean a quarterback controversy -- in Titletown??

TAKE THE TRAIN TO THE GAME.

A Milwaukee Brewer win Sunday clinched no worse than a tie for the Central Division regular season.  The Cubs also won, thus there's extra regular season baseball in Chicago at noon today.

At stake: winner has home field advantage in any series going forward; loser hosts the one-game wild-card playoff.

The announcers on flagship station WTMJ were advising fans that the 8.05 Hiawatha ex-Milwaukee (8.15 at the airport station, which is conveniently close to the expressways) would get fans to Union Station with plenty of time to get to Wrigleyville.

Sorry, there's no Traveler with a lunch-lounge car on the service.  I'm showing my age, that's the historic 7.40 departure of train 24, an 80 Minute Train that was one of the last two corridor trains on The Milwaukee Road with a bar car.

Enjoy the game, but bring your own adult beverages along.