THE POVERTY OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM.

The latest iteration of the unending Star Wars story spins out, to the discontent of those who would have you believe it introduces too many woke prejudices into that galaxy a long time ago, too far away, as well as to the discontent of those who would have you believe it's Triumph des Willens with a John Williams score.

Think I'm kidding?  Check out Tim Kreider's essay in the Newspaper of Record.  First, the naïve view thought to appeal to the kids of the era.

Now that it’s one franchise among many, “Star Wars" seems timeless, but the original is very much a product of the 1970s: Mr. Lucas began writing it while American troops were still in Vietnam and Nixon was being consumed by his dark side. It’s remembered now as a proto-Reaganesque, reactionary backlash against the morally ambiguous cinema of the ’70s, but it’s also a countercultural, anti-fascist fable about shaggy young outsiders fighting a revolution against the faceless, armored henchmen of a military technocracy. The Empire is comfortably identified with our favorite movie enemies, the Nazis, which helps disguise the fact that they are also, metaphorically, the imperialist invaders of Vietnam, confident in their devastating firepower to crush an ill-equipped insurgency. This subtext got a lot less subtextual in “Return of the Jedi,” in which the occupiers’ superweapons are thwarted by the guerrilla tactics and crude booby-traps of a pretechnological people.

He continues. (Let me enlighten you, deplorable, from my throne at the Cathedral.)

Lots of critics pointed out that the coda of “Star Wars,” when three heroes march up a corridor between columns of massed soldiers, is a visual quote of the wreath-laying at Nuremberg in “Triumph of the Will,” but everyone seems to assume this is a random allusion, devoid of historical context. It’s not as if Mr. Lucas was oblivious of the source. His film is full of fascist iconography — all, up until this moment, associated with the Empire. Assuming this final image is deployed intentionally, it might be most hopefully interpreted as a warning: Don’t become the thing you’ve fought against. The intimation of a hidden kinship between our hero and his enemy was right there in Darth Vader’s name all along — the dark father.

The ostensible moral of “Star Wars” is anti-technology, pro-“feelings” — a very ’70s sensibility. The Empire is a rigid, militaristic hierarchy, obsessed with its high-tech weaponry. But underlying it is an older tradition, represented by Darth Vader, that’s religious, mystic.

I recall a graduate school contemporary of mine raising the possibility that "Darth Vader" meant "dark father," and yes, that came to pass during Empire Strikes Back; and later we discover that somebody sliced Anakin's hand off the way Vader sliced Luke's hand off.

LET BERNIE SANDERS BE THE LAST INFLUENTIAL HIPPIE.

Please.

We Boomers have been maligned in the media and by politicians since back when we were wearing bell-bottom jeans, when women were putting flowers in their usually long or frizzed-out hair, and when any guy with the slightest facial hair grew a beard or at least a mustache (lately, it's that we're keeping jobs from young people by not retiring, or rthat we're hurting their retirement future by opposing any cuts in our own benefits!) More importantly we were marching against war, against nuclear weapons and arms spending, and condemning the empty consumerism of our parents. In obtaining our attire from thrift stores and traveling the roads by thumb, we were challenging the premise of capitalism itself, saying that it wasn't what you owned that defined you, it was what you stood for.

We were reading the Realist, R. Crumb Comix, New Times and Ramparts, as well as writers like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, Marshal McLuhan and Henry Thoreau for our worldview.

That's a Common Dreams (where else?) writer, Dave Lindorff, calling for one last wallow in Woodstock.

I repeat, because repeat I must: "Baby boomer" neither implies nor is implied by "hippie."  Considering what damage Marx and Trotsky did to lives all over the Third World (including the holders in due course of the Kievan Rus), what damage Marcuse did to the curriculum, what damage Friedan did to relations between the sexes, and what McLuhan did to coherent beliefs (I'm skipping over Malcom X and Thoreau as they're really outliers) maybe it's just as well the likes of Mr Lindorff have been maligned and pushed to the margins of serious thought.

We got married, raised families, bought oversized and over-priced cars and houses, got sucked into being investors in IRA and 401(k) plans (trusting in stock markets instead of labor unions), and became consumers instead of people. We became better-off versions of our own parents. Some of us even became Republicans or Neo-liberal Democrats, worried more about our own gain than about those who were being left behind or crushed by what we used to call the "System," and ignoring what our nation was and still is doing to the world.

During all these intervening years, as we've lost our way, Bernie Sanders has stayed the course. Four years too old to be officially a Baby Boomer, Sanders, born in 1941, hails from that demographic cohort that, during the Nixon years, to its undying disgrace, came to be known, and even to self identify, as the Silent Generation consisting of those born between the wars or during WWII. Sanders, though, has never been silent. He protested and faced arrest as a student defending the rights of American blacks and opposed both US apartheid and the Vietnam War. He then entered politics as a socialist, winning election as mayor of Burlington, VT (which under his leadership become known as "the People's Republic of Burlington" … and as one of the best US cities to live in). Later he moved on to Congress, first as a representative and then as the state's junior senator—a position he still holds.

Bernie Sanders, my fellow Boomers, is the person we were supposed to be as we grew older and wiser: An obstinate and outspoken defender of the downtrodden, a rejector of consumerism, and a defender of the notion that we all are better off when we demand that government help those who are the neediest, not those who are the most wealthy and powerful.

Put another way, many of the younger Boomers wanted nothing to do with the foolishness the main press lauded, and more than a few of Mr Lindorff's birth cohort grew up, and recognized that there were a few Silent Generation pied pipers, such as Mr Sanders and Ralph Nader, and more than a few vicars of vacillation, all about process over substance.  Never mind Mr Lindorff's conceit. "It's about saving the world."

There is never much good done by those who affect to trade for the public interest.

ENOUGH OF ORWELL'S FREAK MAGNET.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote a passage about the cultists that tend to attach themselves to socialism.  It gets even better as rewritten in Orwell's Revenge: "[O]ld Etonians, fruit-juice thinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, sex maniacs, Quakers, Nature Cure quacks, pacifists, and phesbian leminists."

I've never fully understood how every sort of exotic preference somehow attaches itself, or gets itself attached, to Marxian thinking.

Apparently the proletarians currently abiding in Sweden (the workers having no country, dear reader) are similarly perplexed.

Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are resigning. Instead, they plan establish a new workers' party that doesn't put as much emphasis on things like multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the staples and rallying calls of today's left.

Nils Littorin, one of the defectors, explained [in Swedish -- Ed.] to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has come to “dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic”. Littorin suggested that the left, as a movement, is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class warfare.

“They don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi sickness,” he explained to Lokaltidningen.

The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to “low-wage competition” and the “ghettoisation of communities”, a development that “only benefits major companies”.

According to Littorin, one of the underlying problems is a “chaotic” immigration policy that has led to cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities.

Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state ideologies that are “rammed down people's throats”. According to him, phenomena like LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and “other -isms” happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality.

“Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old,” Littorin explained.

Like every other faith tradition on the left, including Social Gospel Christianity, there is angry sectarianism.

Owing to its long-standing socialist traditions, Sweden currently has two active communist parties, the Communist Party and the Swedish Communist Party, both dating back to the 1970s. Despite formally remaining loyal to Marxism-Leninism, the two are not on speaking terms. Also, the Left Party, which unlike the two aforementioned ones has parliamentary representation, was called the Communist Party for several decades.

Before the new year is over, it's likely that this comrade himself will stand accused of some sort of Nazi sickness.

TIME FOR A LONG WINTER'S NAP.

The halls are decked and the vintage trains are running.

Thanks to all for looking in. Cold Spring Shops will take a few days off at Christmas and New Year's.

WHY DO THE NATIONS SO FURIOUSLY RAGE TOGETHER?

The past year, heck, the past few years of the decade about to turn, have been years of rebellion against existing orders.  That brings out the Serious Thinkers, attempting to find Serious (and sometimes predictable) causes.  The Nation's Ben Ehrenreich doesn't quite say, the final coming of the collapse of late capitalism, but in characterizing events as a "global rebellion against neoliberalism," it's clear what outcome he would prefer.

Something is happening here. But what? And why now? In the last 12 weeks, protests have spanned five continents—most of the planet—from wealthy London and Hong Kong to hungry Tegucigalpa and Khartoum. They are so geographically disparate and apparently heterogeneous in cause and composition that I have not yet seen any serious attempt to view them as a unified phenomenon.

But of course, there is.

All of the countries recently experiencing popular revolts—and most of the rest of the planet—have for decades been ruled by a single economic model, in which the “growth” celebrated by the pedigreed few means immiseration for the many, and capital streams into American and European accounts as reliably as sewage flows downhill.

I'm not sure whether it's "immiseration" for many, or some formerly-favored people, industrial workers in the Western industrialized countries, losing income relative to formerly desperate people elsewhere, and I'm not sure how to put the freedom rallies in Hong Kong into this box: and the ongoing impeachment of Our President might be something done at the urging of the left wing of the Democrat caucus, and yet there are many members of the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment, including more than a few Republican-identifying individuals who might be going along secretly, who would not object to conviction and removal.

MORE EVIDENCE OF TOO MANY MID-MAJOR BASKETBALL TEAMS?

Hustle Belt columnist Zackery Vannieuwenhze discovers a disturbance in the Force.  "Did Oakland’s arrival to Division 1 change the trajectory of EMU hoops?"  Sorry, I exaggerate.

Prior to Oakland’s emergence, Eastern served as the school in the area for a lot of Metro Detroit’s top talent. Not only among players coming out of high school but talented players looking to return to the area as transfers. In recent years, OU has added numerous transfers from Power Five schools and many of those transfers come with ties to the Detroit area.

Oakland has another major benefit as well: the campus has been steadily growing.

EMU has famously seen their enrollment stagnate— then drop precipidously [c.q.]— as the school has struggled to stay out of debt. In contrast, Oakland’s enrollment is now just roughly two thousand students less than Eastern’s, and has recently announced an increase of students living on campus, while Eastern closes residence halls.

One reason why Oakland has such interest in their basketball program is that they do not sponsor a football program. Per the NCAA, Oakland reported 48,276 fans across 16 home games which is good for a 3,017 average. Eastern reported just 30,452 fans across 18 games which was good for a 1,692 average attendance.

Look, we're not exactly talking Kohl Center let alone Cameron Arena level attendances, and what are two rival one-bid conferences in an environment that is moving in the direction of the power conferences realigning in such a way as to render the current basketball tournament format superfluous?  That's going on independently of whatever shifts in academic reputation (and usable capacity) among Oakland and Eastern: that's something with a much longer history.

THE RENT SEEKING WILL SIMPLY TAKE DIFFERENT FORMS.

An advocate for the presidential campaign of Senator Sanders takes rival Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, to task for doing what candidates for high office do.

"It's very telling and concerning that one of the campaign's major bundlers would talk like that," the individual told Axios. "What would this suggest about the way he's going to interact with Silicon Valley if the implication is pay-for-play? If that's the way he's operating, it's in the public interest for people to know what's being said."

It gives the senator a chance to push his usual talking point.

Sanders pointed to the number of billionaires that have donated to Buttigieg's campaign and said, "This is why three people own more wealth than the bottom half."

"We need to get money out of politics," said Sanders. "We should run our campaigns on that basis."

Generate fewer rents, and you will have fewer opportunities for rent-seekers to traffic in influence.

Unfortunately, the gentleman from Vermont would like to have more politics.  If the money can't influence, something else will.

IV. ADVENT.

This week's meditation: what lessons do the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin provide about the nature of the permanent government, or the deep state if you will?

JACOB RIIS GOES TO MCDONALD'S.

Chris Arnade, who may have coined the phrase "front row kids," came from a hardscrabble neighborhood in Florida, earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, discovered that using his quantitative skills to value derivatives proved more rewarding than using them to get funding for some time on a particle accelerator.  Then the financial crash happened.  He subsequently became curious about addiction, and then about life more generally in the poorer quarters where the ragged people go.

It seems fitting with Christmas and the Feast of Stephen approaching to devote Book Review N^o. 13 to his Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.  Although Mr Arnade began by talking with, and photographing, addicted and homeless people in New York City, his travels took him all around the States.

His narrative focuses on place and faith, two dimensions of the human environment that are frequently discussed by the chattering classes, although sometimes that becomes an exercise in oversimplified aggregation.  Thus, in the most recent presidential election, the journals of opinion became a forum for "Should these places be abandoned?"  The exodus of the ambitious people, which Mr Arnade recognizes as part of his own experience, likely began long before the black swan events confounded the models of option pricing.  The people who remained, however, had their reasons for remaining, the despair of their existence notwithstanding.

Likewise, in the matter of faith, it's easy for members of the political class to create an aggregation of Others who believe in the literal truth of the Bible and the sinfulness of same-sex marriage and other secular delights.  That's not the sort of congregation Mr Arnade found: there might be such churches, just as there are the mega-churches in less downscale communities with their Prosperity Gospels, and there are the congregations of the World Council of Churches (that nobody goes to anymore?) preaching their Social Gospel that contemporary social democratic urges are simply what the Apostle Paul had written about.  The congregations he visits, however, worship in repurposed storefronts rather than high street edifices, and witness is are more about mutual support and recognizing one's frailties and seeking purpose, and they're not necessarily Christian, and the finer points of theology or political purpose are not in the message or the prayers.

What then, about the social science?  I invoked Jacob Riis for a reason:  Dignity, like How the Other Half Lives before it, is more likely to provoke other people to dig into the causes and cures.  Here it gets challenging, as Mr Arnade observes, "our nation's problems and differences are just too big, too structural, and too deep, to be solved by legislation and policy out of Washington."  Moreover, Mr Arnade sometimes refers to the people he meets as "back of the back row."  Another way of putting it is: people in desperate circumstances who, had they lived in the Roman Empire of Tiberius Caesar or the Bohemia of King Wenceslas, would be ... dead.  The back row problems he documents are what, two hundred years ago, we would understand as ... the ordinary challenges of life.

Likewise, the circumstances which induced Mr Arnade to leave are relatively recent.  "A community built on non-credentialed value -- place, faith, and race -- didn't work for me and excluded me."  That's always been the promise of the common schools and the bourgeois norms, isn't it?  It worked well enough for Mr Arnade, and applied globally, it has worked tolerably well for some people who, fifty years ago, might have confronted the same odds as the shepherds abiding in the fields and the peasant gathering winter fuel.  It's not clear now whether the gathering places of the back row kids were abandoned by the front row kids, or whether other forces were at work.  As institutions emerge and evolve only slightly faster than geologic time, there are likely to be plenty of research opportunities.  With the competition to get to the front row turning into a positional arms race, with accumulating evidence that on occasion, the meritocrats get things wrong, bigly, this might be the time to bet on emergence: new ways of recognizing talent whilst continuing to improve the odds for people born into the most difficult of circumstances.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

JUST DEVOLVE, ALREADY.

I was combing out the bookmarks, and found this Liberty Unyielding post from 2017, when the self-styled progressives were still trying to figure out why the voters rejected their anointed president, rather than looking for a pretext to impeach the disruptor.

The ascendant progressive idea of government – what it’s supposed to be, the relation in which it should stand to us – is what makes Americans less and less interested in agreeing with each other.

The reason for that is that the progressive idea raises the stakes on agreement, to an unworkable level.

Once the concept of inherently interventionist government takes hold, actively trying to reorder everything in our lives with the force of the state, it is no longer possible to agree with political opponents on a host of things.  The cost of doing so is too high.  You’re signing up for too much.

The cost of agreement becomes extraordinary, when every tick in the agreement box means a new law, a new regulatory imposition, and a new reason to tax or “redistribute.”  Eventually, there’s no living left, in this model; it’s all government regulation, mandates, and confiscation.

We have gone such a long way down the path of progressive interventionism that many people younger than perhaps 60 or 70 today can’t even see what an astonishing amount of sheer government we have hovering over us.  We used to be able to simply have differing opinions on a whole lot of things, without those opinions incessantly triggering actions of the government.  But that is no longer the case.  Now, every opinion on everything is the basis for a new law or a lawsuit.

Under those conditions, it is far too costly to agree with people, or even to remain silent, on things we could once go our entire lives without commenting on as political issues at all.  Failing to speak out now too often means that the next thing you know, something that didn’t even matter is being made into a mandatory catechism for your children in the public schools, or is sucking more money out of your wallet in the form of taxes or regulation, or has become a condition of legal employment, unless your employer is willing to court endless lawsuits.

There is no compromising with this concept of government.  When every agreement triggers the same type of government mechanism, the only political option is disagreement, whether on facts, implications, or conclusions.  To avert the inevitable pouncing of the government juggernaut, one has to keep disagreement alive.

People on the left tend to favor the bigger, triggerable government, although it’s not all of them who do.  Many of them have a hazier vision – a Bernie Sanders-type vision – than the progressive activists who know exactly what the politics they favor lead to.

The Bernie Brigade has a lot of the starry-eyed folks who don’t especially want to know from mechanisms-of-government (and who definitely don’t).  You can represent to them until you’re blue in the face that confiscating the entire wealth of the “1 percent” wouldn’t pay for everyone to go to college now – or pay everyone’s medical bills – much less keep paying for it in the future, and they just don’t want to hear it.  They feel a certain way.

But it is perhaps more important about them that they can’t all be pigeon-holed as conscious fans of intrusive government.  Progressives by definition are such fans.  Progressivism is about bureaucratic statism.  Progressives were all in for Hillary, and a continuation of sprawling, bureaucratized, incessantly dysfunctional government.

Yes, and there are still a lot of people signing up for new Grand Plans.

Credentialed Elites plus Presidential Power plus Tax and Spend ... eventually collapses of its own weight.  Perhaps with the voting coalitions taking new forms along the way.

Here's how the Liberty Unyielding post concludes.  "Unless government is rolled back, the only way to maintain a form of liberty and opportunity is to split ourselves off from each other, elect unconventional public officials who don’t intend to keep doing the same old things, and be sure to keep disagreeing, lest an excess of careless agreement make the weight of government, willy-nilly, fatal."

IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD WARNED THEM.

Inside Higher Ed guest columnist Ryan Craig evaluates higher education's bitter harvest.  "What’s really new is the war on sense -- an inability or willful failure to draw correct conclusions from a set of facts -- which is a frontal assault on higher education’s value proposition."

It came to this, dear reader, because too much of higher education fell in love with the excessive relativism of some toxic currents in French philosophy, because that made subverting the dominant paradigm easier, and distorting "critical thinking" to mean "going along with trendy objections to the Way Things Are" something to dress up in wordnoise.  That worked, until it stopped.

If colleges and universities are unwilling to stand up for sense, I see three possible paths. The first is to give up the pretense of educating students and simply focus on preparing students for first jobs in growing sectors of the economy. Some are already heading down this good and honest (and ultimately faster and cheaper) road.

The second -- and this is really only available to SEC, Big 10 and Big 12 schools -- is to formalize their transmogrification into football and basketball sports franchises.

And the third is to do nothing and watch as millions of students -- appalled by insincerity and hypocrisy -- opt for alternative pathways.

In a country where sense is under attack like never before, colleges and universities need to put up or shut up. Because the evidence is in that higher education’s current deal is as sweet as a Cinnabon and as sickening as Facebook.

Dip into the bull session, and you discover at least one participant who pulls the mask off that critical thinking.

"Critical thinking" is a poorly defined concept and therefore an empty goal for higher education. I happen to fall largely, although not entirely, on the author's side of today's partisan divide, but we shouldn't simply expect that everyone will accept our own assumptions and conclusions by claiming that those who disagree with us aren't "thinking critically." Institutions of higher education can reclaim some of their authority by dedicating themselves to specific, well-defined goals: skills in languages and computation, training in formal logic, the ability to engage in skeptical scientific empiricism, and knowledge of the ideas and controversies in particular intellectual disciplines.

Yes, but that would mean turfing out all the purveyors of special education and all the other impedimenta that prompted me to say Enough.

WHEN SANTA CLAUS LEAVES TRICKS IN YOUR STOCKING.

Under the rules of contract bridge, a player must follow the suit led, unless he is void in the suit, in which case he may discard, or, if there is a trump suit declared, play a trump card.  There are penalties for improperly discarding or trumping.

This week's not-regular-Saturday bridge column will illustrate another consequence of the rules, which is that a player must play a card to each trick.  I got into this situation a few weeks ago.

I have twenty points, not quite enough for Two No-Trump, but it's a little strong for a short club.  Thus the conventional 2♣, "I've got some good stuff," eliciting the conventional 2♦, "I don't really have diamonds, tell me more about your hand."  I've got the distribution and high cards that almost anything will now be good for at least Two No-Trump.  The partner bot responds with 3♠, which the simulation kindly interprets as a "stronger minor."  There are eleven high card points over there, and I'm not sure exactly how to interpret the interpretation, so I offer a game on the cheapest terms, with Three No-Trump.  It's probably dangerous to go to a small slam on 31 high card points, but that's why we play them.

The opening lead is the ♥ Eight, in this case fifth-highest, but equal to third-highest in that hand.  Out comes the dummy, time to take stock:  four good Spades; a stopper in Hearts as well as a loser; only four Diamonds outstanding, but with the Queen and Jack both out against the Ace, King, Ten, and a bunch of little ones, that could be trouble; three good Clubs and a couple of extra winners in the dummy.

Sometimes you let the opposition take the tricks they are entitled to.  Sometimes you go for what you can and hope for the best.  Best thing to do when East plays the ♥ Jack is cover with the King, then do everything possible to avoid giving up the lead.  First the Spades: discard the ♥4 and the ♦2 from the dummy; East tosses the ♣2 under the ♠ Ace; now time to get to work on the Clubs.  That puts the defenders into what chessplayers call Zugzwang: on the second Club West discards the ♥ Ace: there is still a commanding Queen out there, so that's not as drastic as it seems; but that comes out on the third Club, and now it's between protecting a Heart winner, the ♥ Ten or shortening the Diamonds.  The ♣ Queen is last out of the dummy, with discards of the ♥5 from the closed hand and the ♦5 by West.  Lead the ♦4 toward the Ace, forcing out West's Queen, then lead the ♦3 toward the King, forcing out East's Jack.  Now mop up with the last two Diamonds, with the defenders compelled to discard their length in Hearts.  Plus one and time to call it an afternoon.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM.

This Francis Turner essay (via Sarah Hoyt at Insta Pundit) summarizes the discontents of voters with the behavior of the Permanent Government.

[Impeachment] has pretty much illustrated the complaints of both Trump and the Tea Party (remember the Tea Party?) about how the US is governed by a shady corrupt cabal of Washington insiders who put their own well being ahead of the country they are supposed to serve. We’ve seen a whole load of witnesses that look remarkably like “Deep State” come forward and bitch about how Trump is ignoring them and hurting their tender feelings and generally being a big meany. And we’ve had editorials from the NY Slimes and other similar MSM outlets that more or less say “The Deep State is good because it’s trying to stop Trump” as opposed to the denials of a year or two earlier that Deep State was a thing. In other words this impeachment is enabling Trump to go back to what he campaigned on in 2016 “Drain the Swamp” and have countless soundbites showing that he was right.

There are likely people who would discredit the essay in full for that "Slimes." Look, I could have gone full 1974 on you and used a [characterization omitted] there.  But the establishment press have likely abdicated any claim to respectability.

The paragraphs preceding the excerpt above are more instructive.

Secondly the way the proceedings have been conducted means that no one who has paid a small bit of attention and is not a NeverTrumper thinks it was in any way impartial. Even if Trump were as bad as he is claimed to be by the Dems, the way that due process and other similar bedrock parts of the anglospheric legal code have been ignored is far far worse. That famous Thomas More quote about tearing down the laws to get the devil does seem to be remarkably apt and that’s not a good thing. Just as with the way the Democrats in the Senate changed the rules to get Obama’s justices through without thinking what that meant when they weren’t in charge, this one is going to be bad for the next Dem president with a Republican House of Representatives. You can read / watch Jonathan Turley’s testimony to the impeachment hearing to see that I’m far from the only person who sees it this way. Combine this with the way that somehow the whole thing has become incredibly urgent and this looks even more like an attempt to ram through a conviction without properly evaluating the evidence. This looks particularly bad now as it is happening at the same time that the Horowitz report shows that the FBI was guilty of ‘suppressio veri’ and ‘suggestio falsi’ with respect to the Trump/Russia investigation and generally lying to the FISA Court. [Aside: For those of us paying attention the fact that the court itself has asked the FBI to explain why it should be believed on future FISA warrent applications is telling.]  Humans, on the whole, have a sense of fairness and get upset when they perceive others acting unfairly. It will be amazingly easy for Trump to play on this sense of fairness to get votes next year. Plus this weak impeachment thing has effectively inoculated Trump against any future impeachment because he can simply defend himself claiming that it is more of the same, even if that hypothetical one were actually justified in some way.

Moreover in the process of finding this molehill to impeach on, we have seen far greater coverage of the Biden family’s general sleaziness than we might otherwise have. In other words impeachment is helping Trump’s re-election campaign by focusing negative attention on his leading opponent, for precisely the reasons that caused the impeachment process to start. At this point it seems like the only way the senate will agree to judging impeachment is if Trump is allowed to call lots of witnesses about the Biden family’s behaviour so the Dems are now on the horns of a massive self-inflicted dilemma. Do they fail to pass the impeachment docs to the senate for consideration and thus avoid pesky things like witnesses being called and cross-examined or do they allow that and accept that Republican senators are going to ask repeatedly how a cokehead could justify such a large salary from Burisma.

That essay preceded the latest wrangle, between the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate over the conditions under which the articles of impeachment will be delivered to the Senate.  It's enough to make a postmodernist giggle.

THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND (DARE WE ASK) FREE REIN TO 110?

The Commonwealth of Virginia will take ownership of the Blue and Gray Line.

Virginia will send $525 million to CSX, based in Jacksonville, Fla., for right of way and existing track on three rail lines.

The agreement will allow the state to build and own track for high-speed passenger rail service, including expansion of Long Bridge, a 115-year-old railroad bridge across the Potomac River that is critical to passenger and freight service along the Eastern Seaboard but operating at near full capacity.

The purchase is of the former Richmond Fredericksburg and Potomac, now part of the CSX portfolio of railroads including the old Chesapeake and Ohio, Seaboard Air Line, and Atlantic Coast Line, all of which handed off trains for Washington City and points as far north as Boston to the Blue and Gray at Richmond.

Virginia also has an agreement with Amtrak, which would allow the addition of six regional trains for daily service between Richmond and Washington, including one next year, more than doubling capacity and allowing trains to depart almost every hour. The expanded capacity also would allow additional train service to Norfolk next year and Newport News by 2026.

Currently, five regional trains serve Staples Mill Road Station in Henrico County but only two stop at Main Street Station in Shockoe Bottom because of the current track layout. An additional four long-distance trains stop at Staples Mill in runs between the Northeast and Southeast. State officials say those trains also could serve Main Street Station with additional rail improvements.

The hope is that additional trains will entice some people to use them, rather than contribute to the congestion on Interstate 95.

State transportation officials say the project would relieve traffic gridlock on I-95 at one-third of the cost of adding a new lane to the interstate and allow a major expansion of commuter rail service in Northern Virginia, including additional trains through Manassas that would siphon rush-hour traffic from the heavily traveled Interstate 66 west of Washington.

One of these days the transportation departments will discover that those additional lanes won't alleviate congestion.  On the other hand, if they justify the rails as a way to spend less money, I'm not going to carp.

In contrast, a state study estimates that adding one lane to I-95 for 52 miles between Springfield in Fairfax County to Thornburg in Spotsylvania would cost $12.5 billion, but that by the day it would open it wouldn’t significantly relieve long-term rush-hour traffic congestion.

“We’ve just got to move away from a transportation system so heavily concentrated on adding asphalt — we can’t afford it,” said Trip Pollard, senior attorney for community and land planning at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

For "wouldn't significantly relieve" write "will have no effect on." But they're catching on.

The project will provide additional capacity for intermodal and expedited freight traffic, including the Tropicana train, if that's still running.  We'll see if that works out for CSX the way I'm hoping the upgraded Alton Route will for Union Pacific.  Apparently, though, the historic boulevard running, two tracks in the main street of Ashland, will continue.

On the other hand, read this, the deal includes "75 miles of right of way on the abandoned S-Line between Petersburg and Ridgeway, N.C., to eventually allow high-speed rail service to the Southeast." That's the former Seaboard Air Line, recall that in railroad jargon, an air line is straight track, and Seaboard had the faster, straighter, mostly single-track line between Richmond and Raleigh, but the population centers were mostly along the former Atlantic Coast Line with two main tracks and that's what the precursor companies to CSX kept.

But if they want a southern Neubaustrecke, I don't mind if they borrow my ideas.

DID NIKOLA TESLA ANTICIPATE THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE?

I found this (unverified) collection of Nikola Tesla quotes, among which is "If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world."

But if it were possible to turn that hate into electricity, couldn't you also use it to zap people who bother you?

On the other hand, if it were possible to channel electricity, wouldn't also be possible to capture it?

Perhaps (it's science fiction, after all) with a small resonant transformer in the handle of the light-saber?

NO. NEXT QUESTION.

Roger Simon asks, "Don’t we have enough gridlock already?"

It's bothering him that the national Democrats appear to be fracturing into "center-left" and "purely socialist" components.  Meanwhile, there are national Republicans aligning with Our President, who defies easy ideological characterization, as well as the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republicans who aren't quite as me-too as they were during the Eisenhower era, but yet put off by what might best be understood as a hostile takeover of the party machinery by a businessman with a lot of F. U. money.

At root, his fear is apparently that the devolution of the two national parties is going to make it harder for the Governing Classes to Get Things Done.  "Legislation can be passed, progress made, without having to appeal to and compromise with a half-dozen or more warring constituencies."

In a country of several hundred million people of varying ancestries and religious persuasions (those being protected and in part encouraged by the founding documents) perhaps it is better that the national government do fewer things and do those well.

IST'S NICHT DER WEIHNACHTSMANN?

Sing along with Mitch:  Must Be Santa.

Complete with an animated version of a Schnitzelbank poster to keep track of where you are in the song.

Enjoy.

UNLESS THE PEOPLE RELINQUISH THE RIGHT OF REPRESENTATION.

Sometimes, that seems to be the path national Democrats are taking, despite the attempts to conceal their motives with the theories of political science.  The People are not going to relinquish their rights willingly.

You cannot target half the country for three years and then be upset when you are targeted.  We can’t set politics aside because you and your party have injected politics into everything we do from the sports we watch to the bathrooms we use.  We are preparing for our first holiday season with the man we voted for as President having been illegitimately impeached. You accused Republicans of shirking their constitutional duties and you smiled and cheered as you nullified 63 million votes you are too scared to fight at the ballot box -- bringing 63 million hard working, loyal Americans down in a way you can never imagine.  Their only transgression was to elect their candidate and not yours.  Your hurtful words and deplorable actions and those of your Democrat colleagues over the last three years, just made any healing much harder.

Yes, that's over the top, and yes, there is such a thing as a separation of powers, and, no, an impeachment is not a nullification of an election.  An impeachment as part of a long campaign of condescending and deplorable-shaming and trotting out experts who can make the case that the National Government as Framed is not platonic perfection, however, sure looks more like a nullification, or perhaps, making enough noise that the people will relinquish their right of representation.

SECOND SECTION.  Related thoughts from Victory Girl Darleen Click.  "Democracy is a word that means entirely different things to American citizens and the Democrats who don’t trust them."

With respect to the articles of impeachment, it's straightforward.

The impeachment document is nothing more than a declaration by Democrats that they are changing the Constitution. Their first charge is that the office of the President is no longer a co-equal branch of government, but must submit to the House, akin to a Parliamentary system where the Prime Minister can be removed on any majority vote of Parliament. Their second charge also kicks the courts to the curb, alleging that the President has no right to go to the court to rule on a dispute between the Legislative and Executive branches.

Peter Rodino and John Sirica could not be reached for comment.

THE PUMPKINS HAVE LONG SUCCUMBED TO THE FROST, BUT THE FODDER IS NOT YET ALL IN THE SHOCK.

The day after Hallowe'en, the pumpkins usefulness was mostly over, anyway, apart from those canned for pie filling, and at the time only fifteen percent of the local crop was in the bins.

There have been a few good weeks for catching up on getting the harvest in, and, as I feared, a dwindling chance of that snow on the ground at Christmas.

That's the view from the back deck, between the Hallowe'en snow and the Armistice Day snow.  Those fields have been combined, and, judging from the mud tracked out of the fields on the mile roads, the work is getting done, but it's slow work.

DeKalb County Farm Bureau Director of Information Mariam Wassmann said wet soil leads to soil compaction. Soil compaction is when the equipment presses down on the soil and is harder to avoid with the softer soil the rain created. It also can affect the yield.

“The yields were reduced in the compacted areas,” Wassmann said. “They’ll see a yield loss where they tore up the ends of the fields. They’re not getting as good a crop as the rest of the field that didn’t get torn up.”She said in a normal year, farmers can wait for the soil to dry, but this year has made that difficult.

“The farmers are at that point where they’ve got to get [the crops] out,” Wassmann said.

Wassmann said the trucks used to haul grain could not go into the fields because they’ve been drenched in rain. Instead the trucks were loading the grain in the road.

Better to get something for what you have raised than to take a total loss, I suppose.  The efforts to get the harvest in have stressed the drying sheds.  At the moment, everyone involved is hoping for a more normal growing season, with April planting and October harvesting, in 2020.  A normal market might be too much to hope for.

I'm not going to claim that the section of track alluded to in this post was installed and powered up by harvest time. I have installed it and applied power, but winning that race on a technicality doesn't appeal.

THE MEME DIFFUSES.

The prime minister of Australia decides to pass on a Christmas break to cope with the summer forest fires.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who denies the human-caused climate emergency, initially thought this would be a good time for a vacation in Hawaii, but a public outcry made him cut his trip short. I guess the attitude of Anglo-Saxon ruling classes is that as long as they can fly off in private jets to some place less unpleasant, let the poor saps at the bottom take the heat waves, wildfires, and floods on the chin.

So far, that sounds like standard Pajamas Media fare, sending up some environmentalist wacko.

This time, though, it's Juan Cole in Common Dreams, and the motive of the rulers is different.  "The profits from hydrocarbons that feather their nests are more important than the welfare of the mere people, I suppose." Australia export coal to much of the old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, including Red China.  Never mind that being able to power the computers or travel to work or, I don't know, run an air conditioner in Perth might epitomize the welfare of the mere people.

WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS.

Some of Her Majesty's subjects in Sussex object to the erection of New Offices.

The petition was launched on the Brighton & Hove City Council website by Charles Ross on July 1 and argues that the titles the Duke and Duchess of Sussex received from Queen Elizabeth on their wedding day were "arbitrarily and unfairly acquired" and thus should be omitted.

The petition characterizes the appointments as "non democratic and symbolic of the oppression of the general public by the wealthy elite."  Not exactly a light and transient Cause that.

There's a prototype for throwing off these shackles, should Sussex republicans care to use it.

THE MONORAIL TRAINS OF CHRISTMAS TIME.

Perhaps we have online shopping and all those parcel deliveries because going shopping is no longer the family ritual cum social event it once was.  There used to be a time when the department stores would give the kids a look at all the possible toys from up above.

Some time after World War II, monorails that carried children over the toy displays in department stores began to appear. A friend told me about riding in one at Meier Frank's department store in Portland, Oregon, when he was a kid. Web searches uncovered newspaper reports about this monorail (see below), where it was called it the "Louden Supertrack monorail." Other webpages also mentioned Louden. However, when questioned, some ex-employees who had worked at Louden in the 1940s and 1950s said that they did not remember any passenger-carrying monorails being built by Louden, raising the question of the accuracy of the newspaper reports.

I wonder if, up among the utilities on the top floor of the former Boston Store building in downtown Milwaukee, the I-beam track on which such a monorail train ran (I forget if that was a free attraction for any kid who wanted a ride, or if there was a nominal fare of a nickel or dime) is still there.

Apparently the Please Touch children's museum in Philadelphia have conserved one of those trains.

PETER RODINO IS DEAD.

But following regular order and letting Judge Sirica and the Supreme Court determine the bounds of executive privilege in a Congressional investigation is evidently too slow for the current Democrat caucus.  "The House could have held off on impeaching President Trump while seeking these forms of evidence in court. However, House Democrats were in a hurry."

Now, the wrangling over whether the articles of impeachment will be delivered to the Senate and what the Senate'r rules for the trial will be commences.

Senate Democrats undercut the House Dems and their primary impeachment article by moaning that they need more facts. What they want is a smoking gun, something that might turn public opinion around. (They wouldn’t get it from the witnesses they want to have testify at trial or from Mueller grand jury testimony).

Mitch McConnell dismissed the whining of Schumer and other Senate Democrats with this comment: “The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury, to hear a trial, not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rush sloppily through it.”

The manufactured crisis is now likely to crowd out the early presidential primaries. Perhaps that's deliberate, with some of the hopefuls holding off until the rash of primaries in March.

THERE IS STILL LIFE IN RETAIL RAILROADING.

Most people think of the Strasburg Rail Road as that tourist attraction in Pennsylvania Dutch country with the steam trains.  They are a common carrier rail road (that antebellum technology is deliberate, as it might antedate Union Pacific) serving a couple of businesses on the outskirts of Strasburg, and they're expanding their team track in Paradise.

In September, the railroad purchased 4.1 acres adjacent to Amtrak's Keystone line, at the far end of the railroad's interchange track with Norfolk Southern, which handles freight on the Amtrak line. Initial construction will include a couple of team tracks, with more to follow in phases, [vice-president of roadway Stephen] Weaver said.

An additional three acres has been leased by Capital Forest Products, a shingle manufacturer expected to become a major customer. The railroad will also lease a strip of land from Amtrak to access the new yard. Work is expected to begin in in the spring.

Weaver said the new yard will allow the railroad to shift some of its freight business away from the current freight delivery yard across the main track from its shops at East Strasburg, away from the tourist train operations that are its bread and butter. The new yard, however, will allow the railroad to triple its freight business from the current 500 cars annually. Current traffic includes grain, lumber and agricultural products.

The challenge for short-line railroads lies in obtaining reliable car deliveries from the trunk lines, which have revealed a stronger preference of late for hauling trainload lots.  Sometimes, notes my distinguished colleague David Foster, the short lines are spun off from the trunk lines, and perhaps in that division of effort there is an incentive for the trunk carriers to put their connections in a position to succeed.

IF YOU DIDN'T WANT TO GO TO MINNEAPOLIS, WHY DID YOU GET ON THE TRAIN?

Inside Higher Ed gives space to an anonymous "Junior Prof" who suggests "Academe should value research and publication outside of peer-review metrics."  No.  Seriously.

Many researchers, me included, find the idea that you should only publish in certain venues limiting, frustrating and fraught with problems. The claims listed above are oversimplifications that erase the nuance of peer-review publication truths. Individuals in our profession would like to claim that if someone has good ideas and research that supports them, they will get their ideas published, but many of us know it isn’t that simple.

The peer-review process leaves the fate of someone’s research findings subject to the whims of two or three people who, like all of us, are influenced by variables including their own natural preferences for certain kinds of work.

He's not totally wrong, academic research, like any other human endeavor, is subject to fads and preference cascades, and there is nothing quite so draining as interviewing for an area specialist to hear the same set of au courant phrases, e.g. "Lucas critique" or "unit root" from eight straight job candidates (that's the four hours before lunch ...): and I bet there's an awful lot of brain-power squandered going through the solicitations for grants and the lists of grants awarded in the previous quarter, in order that a scholar's research might be sold more along the lines of what gets funded, rather than along the lines of what that scholar might actually be able to add to the conversation, for that's what the world of scholarly publication is, a conversation.

In any discipline, there is no lack of interesting and profound questions, but the publish-or-perish mentality does skew research efforts, why else is the expression "minimal publishable unit" a term of art? In any discipline, there are also journals people read, and journals that exist solely to provide solace. But even before improved database management made possible the daily updating of journal, article, and researcher impact factors, departmental promotion committees understood what a strong contribution was, and what vita padding was, and at the college or university level, everybody understood the way a case might be spun, and establishing the requisite regional or national or international reputation couldn't rest on a list of publications in the journals that provide solace.

But if you want to be a public intellectual first, maybe find yourself an opportunity to write opinion columns for the local newspaper and pray for syndication, or get yourself a web journal and build up a following.

Perhaps the most important argument in favor of varying publication venues: peer-reviewed publications are simply not the only place where intellectual conversations are happening and where a researcher might want to share their ideas. In fact, non-peer-reviewed publications, especially the ones that don’t have paywalls, have the potential to reach far more people and result in a much more stimulating dialogue. Researchers concerned with social justice will also rightfully point out the elitism that peer-reviewed publication tends to reinforce. These publication venues reify notions of membership within intellectual communities and keep cutting-edge research in the hands of relatively few people.

My personal commitment to increased acceptance of non-peer-reviewed publication venues stems from a desire to engage the university -- often regarded both as a presence in a community and separate from it -- in a larger, more inclusive conversation. I also find writing for different groups of people, including my students, personally fulfilling. The peer-review pipeline can be disheartening, and writing for other audiences is a source of meaning making when your research might otherwise feel too niche or siloed to create a larger impact.

My students are more likely to engage with newspaper articles, YouTube videos or op-ed pieces that are related to course material than a peer-reviewed alternative. I publish in non-peer-reviewed venues and will continue to do so for the duration of my career for a whole host of reasons, and I imagine that many of you elect to do so for an even broader set of rationales.

Fine.  The point of having venues for specialist conversation is to provide a forum for testing the best arguments against the best counter-arguments.  That's no different from, say, a grandmaster chess tournament or the April golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia.  (Or, for that matter, my just-for-fun bridge columns.  I'm neither Oswald Jacoby nor have any aspirations to be one.)

What intrigues is that the aspiring public intellectual intends to use his informal writings to contribute to the specialist conversation.

I asked my chair if I could prepare a narrative describing why such non-peer-reviewed publication venues were important to me as a researcher and also made sense for my research objectives. I described the caliber, audience and potential impact of research that was made available in another format and persuaded him that this kind of work demonstrated similar levels of achievement as many peer-reviewed venues. I asked my chair to help me find a way to get this work in my tenure dossier and to be my ally in opening up a conversation with our dean about crediting alternatives to peer-reviewed publications. We put the agreement in writing, and I asked my chair and dean each to sign it.

Is our understanding bulletproof? Of course not. Will it help me to feel comfortable engaging multiple audiences and publication methods on the path toward tenure? Absolutely.

Ultimately, though, it will be the area specialists who review the tenure dossier who will help this professor's colleagues determine whether he has advanced the specialist conversation in a meaningful way.

GO WHERE NOBODY ELSE HAS, AND LEAVE A TRAIL.

Washington Post columnist Arthur C. Brooks suggests that Beethoven's loss of hearing liberated him from the shackles of composing convention.

Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears. Perhaps therein lies a lesson for each of us. I know, I know: You’re no Beethoven. But as you read the lines above, maybe you could relate to the great composer’s loss in some small way. Have you lost something that defined your identity? Maybe it involves your looks. Or your social prestige. Or your professional relevance.

How might this loss set you free? You might finally define yourself in new ways, free from the boundaries you set for yourself based on the expectations of others.

Better late than never, dear reader, although, subject to a proper respect for the conventions of mannerly interaction, there's no reason not to be contrarian, simply persuade by changing minds, even if it's at odds with convention.

THE FORCE REBALANCES.

The Green Bay Packers return to the playoffs.

There's a new coach, who is the first Packer head coach to guide a team to the playoffs in his first season.

The standard is still five championships in six championship games in eight seasons.

First qualify, then keep working for seedings.

A QUARTER-MILLENNIUM OF BEETHOVEN.

The Avalon String Quartet closed out the fall semester with a recital of three Beethoven quartets: the Opus 18, No. 1, the Opus 95, and the Opus 130 with the revised ending.

The quartet will be presenting the entire cycle of Beethoven quartets over the next two years.  That marks the third time in my time in DeKalb that a quartet in residence, either the Avalon or their predecessors, the Vermeer Quartet, have offered the cycle.

Chicago residents will have an opportunity to enjoy the cycle, as Roosevelt University, in the South Michigan college town part of Chicago, will also be hosting the quartet, on Sunday afternoons.  The first such recital will be January 12.  The Bears will not be playing.

III.ADVENT.

This week's meditation: one of the Ten Commandments prohibits stealing.

Arguably, coveting precedes stealing, but doesn't always lead to stealing.

Why, then, a separate, specific prohibition on coveting?

TODAY'S STAKHANOVITES ARE THE ONE-PERCENTERS.

Four months ago, I professed to be less than impressed with Yale's Daniel Markovits, who apparently clawed his way to the top of the status hierarchy only to complain about the struggles to get there.  I've subsequently acquired and read his The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.  I don't have much reason to change my impressions (based, as they were, on a shorter article) but will use Book Review N^o. 12 partially as social science and partially as reminiscence.

Mr Markovits divides his argument into three parts: Meritocracy and its Discontents, where he focuses on the striving and the positional jockeying, rather than the failures of the Best and the Brightest; How Meritocracy Works, where, again, he does more to lament the culture of overwork than to consider the possibility that the worst people are thus incentivized to get on top, and a concluding The New Aristocracy, suggesting that the ways of getting on top rely more on heredity than on effort.

A WORKING CLUB CAR WOULD BE USEFUL AS A REGULAR FEATURE.

Apparently, there is a regular crowd of commuters returning to Milwaukee on the 5.08 Hiawatha departure from Chicago.  The carrier and the crew are not opposed to an occasional party.

Earlier this week, a group of Milwaukee commuters rang in the December holidays while riding home on the train with their annual party. The soiree took place on "the 5:08" in the cafe car where 35-50 riders were eating, drinking and laughing before the train even left Chicago's Union Station.

The story mentions a "cafe" car and the photos clearly show one of the Amdinette cars.  But the train does not offer food or beverage service.  It's bring your own.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from On Milwaukee.

Ordinarily, customers working behind the bar on an Amfleet car would be cause for all sorts of investigations.  Don't let the killjoys in Washington know what's going on.

During the party, Sandy Ross, a commuter who lives in Downtown Milwaukee, collected signatures and donations for the conductors' holiday cards. Every year, the group gives a cash-filled envelope to the 13 conductors – as well as to their favorite gate agent, Chris, in Chicago.

Because the bar car is simply along for extra seating space on a perpetually oversold train (even with reservations) and the rake turns back to return to Chicago within an hour of arrival, policing up is in order.

Toward the end of the line – maybe just north of Racine – riders switched modes from partiers to helpers and started cleaning up the red plastic cups, taco dip containers, thick-crust pizza boxes and homemade cookie and bread containers. Within minutes, the space was pristine again.

The riders are regulars, and they'd like more frequencies, not longer trains. Sorry, Glenview, you're being foolish.

A few mentioned they wanted more routes to-and-from Milwaukee, especially after work.

"If you miss the 5 (p.m.), you're stuck here until the 8," says [West Allis resident Todd] Allen.

Most of the Milwaukee-Chicago commuters have 14-hour work days, so do they consider moving to Chicago? The answer for most is no.

"It's way too expensive to live in Chicago," says Shea Royal. "And Milwaukee has been good to me. I went to college there and I was able to buy a home right after I graduated. Milwaukee has everything Chicago has. It's just smaller and easier to get around."

There might be some system to these parties, and strengthening that formation with a table car and letting self-organization emerge is not a bad thing.

All the same, the 4.20 Milwaukee Express (train 23 on the old Milwaukee Road) had a working lunch-lounge car right to Amtrak day, and Amtrak kept the lunch-lounge car on, and a working cafeteria car on the replacement French turbotrains.  The 5.08 departure is better timed for commuters such as the people in the story.  But why not put the lunch-lounge car back on?

THE INTEGRITY OF THE DIALECTIC MUST BE PRESERVED.

We begin with a general lament by Max Boot.

Kids, don’t become like Donald Trump. Study history. The fact that so many Americans know so little about the past means that we as a society are vulnerable to demagogues. “Don’t know much about history” is a catchy song lyric but a dangerous motto for a democracy.

Historians may not want to admit it, but they bear some blame for the increasing irrelevance of their discipline. As historians Hal Brands and Francis Gavin argue in War on the Rocks, since the 1960s, history professors have retreated from public debate into their own esoteric pursuits. The push to emphasize “cultural, social and gender history,” and to pay “greater attention to the experiences of underrepresented and oppressed groups,” they write, has been a welcome corrective to an older historiography that focused almost entirely on powerful white men. But like many revolutions, this one has gone too far, leading to the neglect of political, diplomatic and military history — subjects that students need to study and, as enrollment figures indicate, students want to study but that universities perversely neglect. Historian Jill Lepore notes that we have ditched an outdated national narrative without creating a new one to take its place, leaving a vacuum to be filled by tribalists.

Put another way, democracy dies in a darkness brought about by, inter alia, writers at influential newspapers. Consider, for instance, the 1619 Project from New York's Times, which somehow wrote about slavery and secession and emancipation without asking any history professors.

YOUR MISAPPROPRIATED TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

Doesn't Stephen Limbaugh know that "great works" are probably socially constructed, hegemonic, and chauvinistic?

The [National Endowment for the Arts’s] process for cultivating art is informed by standards set by universities and critical theorists. Those standards of what qualify as “acceptable” contemporary art seem to be any phenomena that offends an individual’s inherent aesthetic disposition. Preferential treatment is given to those works that 1) are able to evoke the most unpleasant reaction and 2) are created with the least amount of discernible purpose.

I wonder, though, if the money is less inefficiently wasted than the public money on stadium subsidies.

Another aspect of this decline is that the [endowment] has been largely unsuccessful in fostering new interest in existing masterpieces. One example of this is evidenced by a 1977 survey showing that in the top ten metropolitan areas, more people attended the opera than football games. Think about that for a second. Of course these days you could combine opera attendance with symphony and publicly financed modern-art museum attendance all together and it would barely register against football. That decline is the result of misguided policies by a select few cultural elites at universities, in the press, and of course at the NEA.

There might be some truth to that. I am no fan of tenure music, but then, perhaps, the people in the visual and performing arts world are correct to think about more casual settings for their product.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Komsomolskaya Pravda says so. "Ilhan Omar Joins Sanders in Drawing 1,300 People to Largest New Hampshire Rally of 2020 Primary So Far."  No, not the Babylon Bee or The Onion.

"The political revolution is strong in New Hampshire," said Sanders campaign New Hampshire state director Shannon Jackson. "We are seeing incredible enthusiasm from voters across the state. Sanders and Omar represent a vision for the future of economic, racial, environmental, and social justice, and the voters of New Hampshire are on board. The multiethnic working class coalition we are building was on display today and will ultimately lead us to victory on February 11th."

The event was so relevant that Our President couldn't even be moved to tweet about how that turnout is smaller than the line of people who couldn't get in to one of his rallies.

HAVE A CAFFEINATED CHRISTMAS.

It's not hard, when your Starbucks has a few Huskies around, to deck the hall in a Christmas mode.

A few hibernating bears would not be out of place, either, as final exams are done, the commencement exercises scheduled, and the next couple of weeks will likely be less busy.

WAIT TIL THE TYKES FIGURE OUT HOW TO SWITCH UP THE MINE.

Pajamas Media's Ed Driscoll marvels at the latest way to combine information technology and railroading.

Intelino is a new endeavor, by Innokind, a California start-up, to bring kids’ love of trains into the 21st century and add some extra magic. It’s also a sly way to teach them the basics of computer programming. But more about that later.

The basic set ships in an attractive 10.7 x 5.6 x 4.5-inch box. Inside are: twenty pieces of track, including straights, curves, and switches; colorful “action tabs” that program what the trains will do; a locomotive and a passenger car; plus stickers to apply colorful stripes to the rolling stock; and a USB charging cable for the locomotive’s built-in Lithium Polymer battery. The overall feel is bright and colorful. More a futuristic light-rail commuter train than a nostalgic early 20^th century Thomas the Tank approach to make railroading accessible to modern young tikes.

The existence of new-style train toys makes me less pessimistic about the future of the model railroading hobby. Between 3-D printing and computer programming in this manner and dead rail, I suspect we'll be OK.

As far as the computer magic on the rails, it's more mid-20th century than you'd suspect.

For older kids (and adults), there is also a free downloadable app for the iPad, iPhone, and Android, that can also control the locomotive via Bluetooth, overriding the action tabs and allowing users to play the locomotive’s whistle and bell, along with a speedometer and other features.

But the app isn’t necessary to get started as the action tabs, read by an optical sensor at the bottom of the locomotive, program the train to speed up, slow down, stop, reverse, and decouple, depending on the combination and order of the tiles. It’s almost like magic.

For example, if you put a white tile and two green tiles on the track, the train will speed up. If you put a white tile and three green tiles, the train goes even faster (and what kid isn’t going to do that?) But if you reverse the train’s direction so the optical reader sees green-green-white… nothing happens. And like magic, a three-year-old not only learns the commands faster, but also that you have to put your commands on the track in the right order.

Yes, exactly like the attempts at remotely controlling the speed and the routing of rapid transit trains in the years after the War, but you no longer have to put a large magnetized key near the motorman's cab to set the routing.

As the Intelino rolling stock will couple with the traditional Brio cars, it is just a matter of time until some kid, or perhaps some kid's parent, will figure out that the programming can include stopping, changing directions, and switching.  (The website makes reference to "steering.") Not only that, somebody researching improvements on those applications will discover that the same sort of Bluetooth technology, I think it's called Blue Rail, can be used to control more traditional model railroad locomotives moving what look more like freight or passenger cars.

THE METHODS OF MEANS TESTING AND WEALTH TAXATION ARE PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS.

That is, a Medicare recipient still pays premiums even after he's no longer working and paying payroll tax.  For many people, that's invisible, as their Part B and Part D premiums come out of their "Social" "Security" benefits.  Show any kind of prudence, though, and you, too, will find out about the Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount.

Let me quote from the notification the welfare state sends.

Each year to decide if you must pay IRMAAs, we use your Federal income tax information for the most recent tax year that is available.  However, we do not use any information that is more than three years old. We ask the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for your tax filing status, your adjusted gross income, and your tax-exempt interest income.  We then add your adjusted gross income together with your tax-exempt interest income to get an amount that we call modified adjusted gross income (MAGI).  We compare your MAGI with the income thresholds set by Medicare law.

MAGI may include one-time only income, such as capital gains, the sale of property, withdrawals from an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) or conversion from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.  One-time income will affect your Medicare premium for only one year.

Of course it will, because there might be additional capital gains distributions or municipal bond interest for them to get their hands on next year.

That might make for a fun question at some presidential forum.  (With the Iowa caucus almost upon us, I might start paying closer attention.)  "Senator Sanders, what changes to the formula for calculating Modified Adjusted Gross Income and the Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount do you include in your Universal Medicare plans?"

PASS THE POPCORN.

Stanley Fish got de-platformed, and Paul Mirengoff of Power Line finds the whole thing schadenfreudelicious.

Fish wasn’t pleased about being disinvited. However, he’s staying true to his dismissive view of the First Amendment, insisting that there is no free speech issue here. Fish says “I have no right to speak at Seton Hall, and I have not been silenced because I was disinvited.”

That’s true. But members of the Seton Hall community have been deprived of the opportunity to hear Fish’s views. And if professors were to be required to put race front and center in literature courses, many would be unable to express themselves freely.

Fish casts his grievances in non-free speech terms. He uses the words “anti-educational” and “anti-intellectual.” His critics on the left, if they want to borrow from Fish’s playbook, might respond that these phrases are the first refuge of scoundrels.

Yes, and as Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds quips, when the legislators and high-rolling donors stop funding higher ed's shenanigans, the poobahs in administration will likely call THAT anti-intellectual.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SET THEORY?

I used to include in my graduate price theory problem sets questions in the form of "Explain why each of the suggested answers to this (multiple choice) question, from a widely-used text bank, is correct."

A few days ago, I started leafing through a game theory text, in which I found the following question:

Consider the set P of all persons currently living in your city.  Determine which rules from the following define functions.

(a) For each person x, let f(x) be the father of person x.
(b) For each person x, let g(x) be the son of person x.
(c) For each person x, let h(x) be the height of person x.
(d) For each person x, let w(x) be the weight of person x.

Here goes: in (a), are we discussing a mapping from P to P?  Abstracting, for the moment, from sperm donors, cloning, or surrogacy or adoption, we're still dealing with the possibility that the father of person x doesn't live in your city.  In (b), clearly we can't assign a unique image of x in the range, as there will be persons x with more than one son, and, again, those sons might live in different cities.  But the chapter, and as far as I can tell, the book, has not introduced the generalization of a function that we call a correspondence (the image of a vector in the domain is a set in the range.)

Then, we get into the game-theoretic version of rivet counting for (c) and (d): although at any moment of time (at this point in time, for you Watergate buffs) there is a unique real number representing a person's height or weight, we're still in a world where h(x,t) differs from h(x, t').

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH.

Neo-Neocon: "The Democrats want to define Trump being president as a high crime and misdemeanor."

Trump is president, and many people find that unconscionable. Some of those people sit in positions of power and are not at all averse to using that power in any way they can to make sure he does not continue to be president.

The House will vote on articles of impeachment next week, and it's unlikely that any minds will be changed.