TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

Rockford has long been a struggling city, and it's trying all the usual tricks to do something to make people interested in visiting and spending money.  That includes a Friday night public market on the riverfront, near a brewpub, and, at least before the house arrests, there were live concerts and merchants staying open late to induce people to do some shopping to go with their exotic snacks and expensive coffees.

Then came first the house arrests, with Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Chicago) doing what all the thickly settled state Democrats did, and after that came the civil rights protests that turned into a month of rioting.  Winnebago County State's Attorney M. H. Ross has worked to draw a distinction between peacefully calling attention to grievances and inconveniencing people to make a point: "it ceases to be a peaceful protest when it looks more like a riot."

It was probably in that spirit that the park district and Rockford police designated a protest zone near the city market.

Joe Marino Park, which is owned and operated by the Rockford Park District, will remain open and is the designated location for protesters. The expansion of the perimeter was made along with the Rockford Park District and Rockford Police Department.

East State Street will remain open and no one will be allowed to impede traffic, according to the Rockford Police Department.

“These perimeters are set up to ensure a safe environment for the community to convey their messages and those to patronize the vendors at the city market,” according to the Rockford Police Department. “Those who violate the law causing a breach of peace or infringing on other people’s rights, outside of the designated protest area, will be subject to arrest.”

I'm not a fan of free speech zones, as they've become a politically charged tactic by higher education administrators to control who gets to say what where, ostensibly to create an intellectually safe environment (and to tame foot traffic?) but in practice to create an intellectually sterile environment.  The designation of a park adjacent to the city market might have been the least bad option, given the tendency of the current crop of protesters to block traffic, holler at people through bullhorns, and otherwise behave obnoxiously.  So far, there are no reports of protesters bringing hockey sticks or fireworks with them, the way peaceful protests emerge along the west coast.

The State's Attorney, however, has provided a set of principles by which local authorities are enforcing the protest zone.

“The First Amendment encompasses rights that are applicable to everyone. Consequently, no one has the right to infringe on the rights of others while exercising their First Amendment Rights. On Friday August 7, 2020 parameters were established to provide a safe environment for all individuals who attended the City Market area. These parameters designated areas for “peaceful assembly” and also areas for the City Market vendors and patrons. Under the Fourth Amendment individuals have the right to the pursuit of happiness which encompasses conducting their businesses in a safe environment. Individuals who were arrested and charged on August 7, 2020 will have their cases adjudicated through the criminal justice process. All individuals charged with offenses are presumed innocent until or unless proven guilty in a court of law. Everyone must realize that we live in a law and order society and for the most part the more than 280,000 residents of Winnebago County understand this. I will continue to work with law enforcement to ensure that everyone has a safe environment in which to share their messages and conduct their businesses.”

You'd think the protesters would wise up.  Is it not possible to call attention to your grievances without intimidating shoppers and perhaps stepping on your own message?

THANKS ANOTHER MILLION.

 Cold Spring Shops started operating in September 2002.

I'm not sure how good the Google visit counters are; we recorded our millionth view in April 2016.

As of this afternoon, the Google visit counter had us at two million views.

Perhaps you've found intellectual ammunition.

Perhaps I've encouraged you to look at something differently. 

Perhaps you've resolved not to take risks crossing railroad tracks.

Perhaps I've rubbed you the wrong way.

Thanks again for looking in.  Enjoy.

NO OGLING THE CAPTAIN'S WOMAN.

Here's a lighter marching song as covered by a chorus of the former East German army.

I suspect that's been a lament of the Landser since at least the era of Frederick the Great.  Enjoy.

IT'S COST EFFECTIVE TO UPGRADE EXISTING RAILROADS.

Last Sunday, I wrote,

Let's keep in mind that Brightline started with Florida East Coast's racetrack, and that there are all sorts of possibilities to upgrade existing railroad lines for 110 mph running.  Do the math, dear reader: those upgrades are a whole lot cheaper than building those bullet train routes from scratch, and the additional construction doesn't shave off as much running time as you'd think.

Governing's Scott Beyer, however, sees the rent-seeking opportunities, or perhaps opportunities to further expand the scope of government, in building those faster lines.

Early railroads — including the first transcontinental one — were built with the help of federal land grants that provided contiguous right-of-way. Private companies then built and operated the lines, creating explosive service growth and making America a world leader in the industry.

When automobiles replaced railroads as the favorite passenger-transport option, the federal government facilitated this by funding interstate highways. The right-of-way clearance measures were often extreme — whole neighborhoods were destroyed — but while this episode is a stain on America's urban planning history, it did produce an efficient transport network that helped the country grow.

For high-speed rail, there could be just as much effort to provide right-of-way, and it wouldn't be nearly as disruptive. In fact, much of the right-of-way has already been cleared for the aforementioned roads and freight rail, and new passenger bullet trains could be built along these routes. It's just a matter of having private and public bureaucracies recognize this adjacent space and issue RFPs for it to be leased.

Brightline and XpressWest are early examples of how this could look, but they're just the start. Private investors have expressed interest in building high-speed rail between Baltimore and Washington, Portland, Ore., and Seattle, and D.C. and New York City. These projects could, theoretically, happen along highways that are already connecting the cities. It's time to make room for them.

The recent rediscovery of the urban condition has probably pushed awareness of what went wrong running the expressways through cities (and all the other planning conceits of the American High) front and center.  Those land grants for railroad construction might have been more about rent-seeking than about internal improvements.

As far as those specific projects:  there is currently work to replace the ancient Baltimore tunnels on the Washington side of the station.  Once clear of the tunnels, The Pennsylvania Railroad is pretty much good for 110 or 125 mph running to Ivy City just north of Union Station, which is at the foot of Capitol Hill.  The stations are 40 miles apart: how many seconds will German or Japanese style faster tracks shave off?  As far as New York to Washington in thirty minutes via a Hyperloop, will those pods make any stops at Philadelphia or Wilmington or Baltimore?

I know I repeat myself, but I'm just not seeing anything that would induce me to change my mind.  "Sure, let's explore public-private partnerships to improve railroads, and let's consider joint ventures of railroads and power companies, but let's not let enthusiasm for state-of-the-art or improvements thereon get in the way of more cost-effective improvements."

MINNESOTA IS WHAT DEMOCRATS WRECK.

Power Line's Scott Johnson finds an attack ad that identifies Minnesota's kakistocracy.

Enjoy, and pass it along.

TRUTH IS WHATEVER VERSION OF REALITY SUITS YOUR PURPOSE.

A person, or group of persons, are free to agree on whatever purposes they like.  But other people, or reality itself, also has something to say.

That's what's got me most irritated about the latest excursions into trendy teaching methodologies.  Apparently a working mathematician with a good instinct for provoking people teased, "2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values." The hair-splitting that anyone who has ever helped a faculty committee design a Platonically perfect bike shed is familiar with followed.  The provocative mathematician recognized as much.

To elaborate, while the most popular assertion being made to counter “2+2=4” happens to be “2+2 can equal 5,” this coming from people including from self-described mathematicians and genuine math educators, among others, the Critical Social Justice activists’ point isn’t that 2+2=5 any more than it is that two and two represents any particular quantity. Their point is that 2+2 can equal 5, though it doesn’t have to. That is, their point is that the objectively true statement “2+2=4” can be deconstructed by means of claiming that it is possible that, in fact, other things can occur too. This allows them to sidestep accusations like that they’re denying that “2+2=4” even while they do it, and (we have to admit) fairly enough because their whole point has literally nothing to do with what two and two add to equal.

As with most other abstruse academic debates, it's one that might be worth having, although the audience who should be exposed to it matters.  Did "New Math" really accomplish much in introducing preadolescents to computations in bases other than ten, or set theory, while they were still struggling with adding and subtracting?  For that matter, did it help to learn that what I type as "four" a German might render as "vier" and a Frenchman as "quatre" and that the clock face has IIII instead of the canonical Roman IV?  Think about it this way, dear reader: the day the toddler in your life gets a Thomas the Tank Engine play set might not be the day you get into the intricacies of timetable and train order operation.

I think that's the point an applied statistician Popular Mechanics quoted is making.  “Our numbers, our quantitative measures, are abstractions of real underlying things in the universe and it's important to keep track of this when we use numbers to model the real world.”

Fine.  Let's make sure that young people understand the fundamentals of the discourse practices and conventions first, in order that they can understand the subtleties and limitations thereof as they grow.

A DRUG OVERDOSE GONE BADLY WRONG?

Recently, additional police body camera video preceding the notorious final nine minutes of George Floyd's life has become available to the public.  The American Conservative's Rod Dreher has a long analysis of the video and the commentary.  By all means read the whole thing.  One of the analyses he links to is by sports broadcaster Jason Whitlock, who might himself be a nonconformist.  It might be wise, dear reader, to read his full post to see what I mean.  Here's the key observation.  "The behavior of the police officers seems appropriate and restrained given Floyd’s level of resistance and bizarre conduct."

As far as I know, the police officers who initially stopped Mr Floyd were of the view that he was in distress from an overdose, and they summoned an ambulance, although that ambulance was a long time in coming.  Whether that will be enough for the Minneapolis officers' defense team to raise reasonable doubt on trial is beyond my pay grade.  National Review's Robert Verbruggen doesn't think so.  "The bottom line, I think, is that it’s going to be hard to acquit someone who knelt on a subdued suspect until the suspect apparently lost his pulse, and then kept kneeling for a little while longer. But the key questions hinge on the eight minutes we already knew about, not the eight additional minutes the Daily Mail uncovered."

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

Florida's Brightline have made available an excerpt from the latest Trains describing the construction of their Orlando extension, including the work required to bring the existing Florida East Coast tracks up to 110 mph standards.  Yes, dear reader, I encourage you to get a subscription to Trains (you can see my tributes to its style each time you click over to Cold Spring Shops) and perhaps the excerpt will convince you to give them a try.

THE SLOW MOTION DISASTER UNFOLDING IN CHICAGO.

Just over a year ago, the identity politics crowd were hailing the election of Lori Lightfoot as successor to various Daleys and Rahm Emanuel, if with cautions about the power struggles with the Combine to come.  By then, the identity politics types could tick so many boxes that they could tire of it.

Then came the Wuhan coronavirus, and sometimes it is not possible to benefit by a good crisis.

[The Chicago Board of Trade] and the Merc have been threatening to leave for years, especially if the Machine attempts to tax them by the trade or add some insane fee structure to transactions. There were more than a few rumors that they had built a trading floor just over the border in Indiana. In this digital day and age, with telecommuting and vastly improved virtual meeting software, this could very well be the "new normal" that drives the financial sector out of Chicago.

Conventions are gone for the foreseeable future. Airlines can't turn a profit. Professional sports are committing corporate suicide. The "Mag Mile" is a plywood forest and thousands of restaurants, shops and small businesses are gone, never to return.

The overreaction to a "disease" with a 99% survival rate may have just turned Chicago into Detroit in under a year.

The mayor would rather pick a fight with Our President, and unnamed other critics.

Democracy is “under siege from multiple directions” in America during a summer of violence, civil unrest and pandemic-fueled hardship that has left people disengaged from their government and intolerant of each other, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said [July 29].

Lightfoot unexpectedly turned the latest in a series of news conferences aimed at encouraging Chicagoans to participate in the 2020 U.S. Census into a rousing political address that, aides said, was triggered by the extraordinary moment facing Chicago and the nation.

The death of George Floyd and the civil unrest and racial reckoning it triggered. The coronavirus pandemic that has fallen hardest on Black and Hispanic communities and exacerbated racial inequities that existed long before COVID-19. The death of civil rights icon John Lewis. The spike in murders and shootings in Chicago and other major cities. The hyper-partisan political atmosphere created by, but not limited to President Donald Trump and his re-election bid.

Running her own mouth isn't hyper-partisan, is it?

WHAT WILL THEY DO IN 2022?

Former senator Bernie Sanders has never, and I emphasize never, understood the distinction between stocks and flows. "By taxing 60% of the wealth gains made by just 467 billionaires during this horrific pandemic, we could guarantee healthcare as a right for an entire year."  Nowhere in the diatribe does he mention the excessively long house arrests that are turning the yeomanry into paupers.

NEVER MIND GREATNESS. ALL I WANT IS A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

Bookworm comes out of his room to propose that instead of greatness, Our President concentrate on "normalcy."  There's been too much turmoil, and it's time for another American High, perhaps?

Thinking about it, the parallels between now and one hundred years ago are uncanny. As in 1920, we’re heading into an election in 2020 on the heels of war (two decades of it), one epidemic disease (that politicized decision-making turned into an economic disaster), and a series of anarchist riots and terrorist attacks across America. All of which gets me back to Harding and his slogan: A return to normalcy.

While everyone likes a bit of excitement now and then, people crave the normal, especially people who care for young children or who are elderly. At least, they crave normal when normal is virtuous. In North Korea, normal is awful.

For the majority of Americans, however, normal has been a good thing. When our troops came home from WWII they craved the American normal as much as their fathers had upon their return from the first European War.

I was a child of the WWII generation (meaning that I was born after the war, but every adult in my world had experienced it, sometimes with incredible brutality), so I saw firsthand how all these adults also embraced normal. They walked out of the camps and off the battlefields, got jobs, got married, had children, and lived normal lives.

It doesn’t mean that they were necessarily all normal people. Looking back, my parents and many of their peers were deeply damaged by their experiences — but they were still creating lives of studied American normality. We boomers benefitted from it, although most of the boomers have been anything but grateful.

I'm not sure how well that history lesson works. President Harding might have set a standard for twentieth century corruption, or at least that is how advocates of Good Government often describe his presidency. Between the Harding presidency and the return from the War (which was effectively over, 75 years ago today) came a brief deep recession during the Spanish flu pandemic, a Great Depression, and global thermonuclear war. As far as the boomers, yes, the hippies and the yuppies got most of the attention from 1965 or so until the mid-1990s, but each of those cohorts were not quite the majority of the boomers, although they might have been the most vocal and ultimately the most miserable.

I do want to call attention to a passage toward the end of that essay.

Trump promises peace by reinstating the normal, which is the rule of law. Biden promises peace by saying that, if we give the rioters, Marxists, and anarchists what they want, they’ll go away and leave us alone. He’s too demented, perhaps, to remember that appeasement has never worked in the history of all humankind, but the leftists surrounding him should and do know better. They don’t want peace. They want chaos because they see that as a path to power.

There is a school of thought among the commentariat that perhaps if Democrats get the presidency, and perhaps the Senate as well, the unrest will stop.  Jake Johnson of Common Dreams begs to differ. "If Biden wins, we'll be at his door on day one, demanding the kinds of structural reforms that advance racial, economic, and environmental justice," the statement continues. "But before that, it's clear what we have to do: This November, we have to #VoteTrumpOut in swing states."

The temper tantrums, whether the mission succeeds in the swing states, or not, will likely continue to take place in the states run by Democrats, simply adding to the pain the Wuhan coronavirus and the urban wilding has already brought.

A HETERODOX ECONOMIST PASSES.

University of London's A. S. Filho uses a tribute to John Weeks to take a shot at mainstream economics.

Radicalisation around opposition to the Vietnam war gave birth to a new wave of radical economics, and John Weeks definitely rode that wave, contributing to the founding of Union of Radical Political Economy (URPE) in the late 1960s. Hopes for a better world were dashed by monetarism, releasing the globalised, financialised, neoliberalised world of today, with an ineffectual mainstream economics as its counterpart.

Despite the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and the current pandemic in which the state has made an interventionist comeback of astonishing proportions, mainstream economics has become more dominant and increasingly intolerant of alternatives. For this reason, the lives and works of those who have stood out against the tide of orthodoxy, with Weeks a leading figure, must be respected for their commitments against establishment dismissal but, more importantly, remain invaluable as the basis for constructing alternatives for the future.

Let me rewrite one of those sentences:  Hopes for a communist world were dashed by the killing fields and the secular stagnation of the Brezhnev era, while free minds and free markets produced the single largest increase in global prosperity ever.

By all means, let practitioners of political economy debate all the ideas, including those of the late Professor Weeks, but debate them with proper regard for the evidence and the logic.

A LITTLE BIT OF SUMMER TRADITION.

Salena Zito pays a visit to the Pittsburgh Pirates' minor league park in Altoona, where the taxi squad for the major league club, rather than the Altoona Curve team, stays prepared.  Yes, there's a lot of railroad lore in Altoona.  "Peoples Natural Gas Field, purposely designed to resemble a roundhouse, a homage to this region's railroad past, is the home of the Altoona Curve team, itself a homage to the nearby railroad engineering marvel Horseshoe Curve."

It's possible for the locals to sneak a peek over the fences, or look on from a distance, and without having to buy a membership on a rooftop.

That, though, is not the best news in the column.  This is.  "As the scent of fresh-cut grass delicately fills the air, so do the aromas of hot dogs and hamburgers coming from the grill on the lower deck. Just past right field, there is an amusement park where you can hear the slow clink, clink, clink of the roller coaster as the carriage climbs its ancient wood scaffoldings. The kitschy music found at any ballpark in America echoes throughout."

That's right, dear reader, Lakemont Park is open for business, and the world's oldest roller coaster, Leap the Dips, is operating on a restricted, socially distanced schedule.

THERE ARE LIMITS TO BLOCKING ROADS AS PEACEFUL PROTEST.

The Constitution guarantees the right to peaceably assemble to request the redress of grievances.  I suspect there's easily a week, or a quarter, worth of contemplating in a law or political philosophy class the tradeoffs between calling attention to your complaint and turning off people who might be favorably disposed to your case.  Put simply, blocking traffic might inconvenience people who would otherwise not know about your grievance, but the people blocking the traffic might view that as an opportunity to let others know that a small inconvenience is in microcosm what the policy being protested is subjecting the people doing the protesting to every day.

In Rockford, though, local authorities are attempting to define the line between peaceable assembly and disrupting good order.  Red State's Nick Arama approves.

But perhaps the best thing was the statement of the prosecutor, Winnebago County State’s Attorney Marilyn Hite Ross, who schooled the radicals on what the Constitution allows and what it means to “peaceably assemble.” You can see it at the start of the video here.

“The First Amendment does not give you unbridled freedom to express your message and infringe on the rights of others,” she explained.

My gosh, thank you! Finally a public official willing to say it on behalf of all Americans! Your rights don’t give you the right to trample on those of others.

The prosecutor continued, calmly calling out the [black lives matter] marchers for infringing on the rights of others to have free passage on the roads within the county. That resulted in their arrest, not for exercising their right of freedom of expression, she said, but for their alleged criminal action. So simple, so true, yet so missing from public statements on the [marchers] tactics. Thank you, Marilyn Hite Ross!

It might not be that simple, as a higher court might have to codify the extent to which blocking roads is peaceable assembly. In Rockford, though, the authorities appear to be tiring of the unrest, which is getting in the way of summertime commerce with the summer season going away.

Rockford Police Chief Dan O’Shea said officers have showed restraint and have been “more than patient” during frequent protests throughout the city this summer. But he said recent actions have forced officers to act, including Friday night, when protesters formed a blockade to stop vehicles from passing through the intersection of State and Water streets.

“The citizens and the businesses of Rockford deserve to have the right to drive down the roads and conduct business and not have to worry about people coming in, just trying to scream and yell and cause chaos and incite riots,” O’Shea said. “It’s just not tolerated.”

Put another way, perhaps it ceases to be a peaceful protest when it looks more like a riot.

SISSIES AND THEIR SISSY AESTHETICS.

When all else fails, dump on people who drive big pickup trucks.  "Over the weekend a Wall Street Journal reporter, some fellow named Dan Neil who seems to think it is his holy duty to tell other people what to do with their money (see his lawsuit against LA Times owner Sam Zell), decided that you driving a large pickup is something that just shouldn’t be done."  At least it's Twitchy entertainment in troubled times.  Bellicose Woman Dana Loesch chimes in, noting that she has a big truck to go with her big guns.

Something there is about a certain type of Aesthetically Sensitive Metrofexual that doesn't like a pickup truck or a large sport utility vehicle.  Look, I'm as perplexed by the truck scrotum as any of those people.  On the other hand, Real Americans Buy What They Want.  Here's the way to tell anyone who thinks otherwise to pound sand.  "This is basically the 'no one needs 30 rounds' argument applied to trucks. You, Scooter, don’t get to vote on what I want and what I need. It is none of your business."

Exactly.

DID THE WUHAN CORONAVIRUS SIMPLY AMPLIFY THE CONTRADICTIONS?

I bookmarked Social Instability Lies Ahead, Researcher Says sometime in late 2016 or early 2017, part of a whole bunch of links I flagged in the immediate fallout of the surprise 2016 presidential election.  Most of those have been overtaken by events and will go into the memory hole.  This one is different.  The researcher is UConn's Peter Turchin, professor of ecology and environmental biology, and the university's press release riffs off a column he had offered to Bloomberg back in the heady days when Donald Trump was simply trolling Barack Obama for concealing his Kenyan birth.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

That dynamic has been with us well before the turn of the century: during the 1980s, the Deep Thinkers suggested that it was too many lawyers and too few engineers coming out of colleges that lead to deindustrialization and merger mania. That dynamic might still be at work although these days it might be more convenient to slag on gender studies majors.  The professor argues, however, that positional arms races are only part of the looming crisis.

The victory of Donald Trump changes nothing in this equation. The “social pump” creating new aspirants for political offices continues to operate at full strength. In addition to politically ambitious multi-millionaires, the second important source of such aspirants is U.S. law schools, which every year churn out twice as many law graduates as there are job openings for them – about 25,000 “surplus” lawyers, many of whom are in debt. It is emblematic that the 2016 election pitted a billionaire against a lawyer.

Another visible sign of increasing intra-elite competition and political polarization is the fragmentation of political parties. The Republican Party is in the process of splitting up into three factions: Traditional Republicans, Tea Party Republicans, and Trump Populists. These divisions run so deep that many Republicans refused to endorse Trump, and some even voted for Clinton. Similar disintegrative forces have also been at work within the Democratic Party, with a major fault line dividing Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialists from the Establishment Democrats of Obama and Clinton.

So far in this analysis I have emphasized elite overproduction. There are two reasons for it. First, as I mentioned before, other factors are much better understood, and have been discussed, by social scientists and political commentators. Secondly, cliodynamic research on past societies demonstrates that elite overproduction is by far the most important of the three main historical drivers of social instability and political violence (see Secular Cycles for this analysis).

But the other two factors in the model, popular immiseration (the stagnation and decline of living standards) and declining fiscal health of the state (resulting from falling state revenues and rising expenses) are also important contributors.

The public policy response to the Wuhan coronavirus, which seems to be widespread around the world, made popular immiserisation a matter of public policy.  It is no accident, dear reader, that when dissenters characterize it as "Mask up, shut up, and fort up on your government checks until there's a vaccine or the Rapture" there might be self-styled progressives and tech oligarchs are fine with it.  It's not so much neoliberalism at work, Joel Kotkin's characterization of the new reality as neofeudalism might be more to the point.

Millions of small businesses are near extinction, millions more losing their jobs and many others stuck into the status of a property-less serfs. The big winners have been the “expert” class of the clerisy and, most of all, the tech oligarchs, who benefit as people rely more on algorithms than human relationships.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism.

In a related essay, Professor Kotkin spells out a series of scenarios, none of them encouraging.

Without a greater and more dispersed expansion of democratic capitalism, the only alternative to constant disorder may be massive growth instead of the welfare state. This approach might take the form of “oligarchic socialism,” the kind of guaranteed income widely endorsed among the tech elite — who clearly benefited from the pandemic. This represents, in Marx’s phrase, “the proletarian alms bag” that can keep both destitution, and social revolution, at bay while allowing the ultrarich to maintain their dominance.

Certainly even the most blinkered geeks realize that scenes on the streets of places like San Francisco, where obscene wealth is surrounded by disorderly, malodorous and chaotic streets, cannot be sustained forever. Some massive injections of public money will be critical just to maintain basic order.

But this is not a call for renewed upward mobility. Indeed some on the Left, notably in the environmental community, see the lockdowns not as tragedy but as a “fire drill” for future actions to force people to reduce consumption and live as the privileged nomenklatura sees fit.

Such an approach all but guarantees a succession of new peasant rebellions, a predictable middle class backlash, and ever-escalating demands for ever-higher transfer payments, with some proposing $8000 monthly for families of four during the pandemic. This would make work hardly worthwhile for most, and turn politics into a game to satisfy poorer citizens with “bread and circuses,” as was the case in Rome.

Sadly, this approach will do little to encourage upward mobility. It will simply nurture and expand the serf class. These young people, and inner-city residents, deserve something more than cheap expressions of sympathy and solidarity from the affluent. They need to develop a new urban paradigm that boosts opportunities rather expanding serfdom. Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society.

Not to mention that Rome eventually ran out of resources to provide bread and circuses, and that the middle class "backlash" he's referring to is simply restoring a state of good repair, understood as upward mobility. I have to wonder, though, whether enough people have migrated upward that it's easier for them to work from home, tip generously for home delivery and curb-side pickup, and see the continued allowances for not working to continue rather than agitating more aggressively to reopen businesses.

In Professor Kotkin's own California, for instance, the state is growing poorer, with more income polarization, and growing older.  That's not likely to turn out well.

Until now, the alliance of the oligarchs with the progressive clerisy, almost unanimously supported by the media, has been all but immune from challenge. Yet there exist in this alliance what Marxists might call fundamental “contradictions” that could eventually undermine the cozy arrangement between the rapacious capitalists of the Valley and their militant progressive allies.

This can be seen in growing conflicts between the oligarchs and the state’s increasingly assertive Left. The youth activists now at the forefront of the anti–climate change movement may be less willing to tolerate the oligarchy’s personal excesses than previous generations of environmental advocates. After all, if the world is on the verge of a global apocalypse, how can the luxurious lifestyles of those flying their private jets to discuss this “crisis,” like Leonardo DiCaprio or the heads of Google, be tolerated?

That's something Professor Turchin misses, as he concludes hoping for yet another Expert Consensus.

What we need is a nonpolitical, indeed a fiercely non-partisan center/institute/think tank that would develop and refine a better scientific understanding of how we got into this mess; and then translate that science into policy to help us get out of it.

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst – perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.

Sorry. Emergence doesn't work that way. I'm skeptical that the Expertise that got enough people angry enough to put first Barack Obama and then Donald Trump in the White House, the Expertise that has spent the last four years invalidating Britain's exit from the European Union and undoing the Trump presidency, that has turned fifteen days to slow the spread into who knows how many years of house arrests, is going to do any better redesigning a rollercoaster than the proverbial committee designing a horse.

MILWAUKEE IS AN OPEN CITY FOR THE RAGE MOB.

In two weeks, give or take, there is supposed to be a Democrat convention in Milwaukee, with former vice president Joe Biden making his acceptance speech, and a running mate, who might be the heir apparent, or might also be a transitional figure while the traditional and communist wings of the party grapple for control.  By all means interpret that closing clause as a prediction: the urban unrest will not end should the Democrats claim the presidency.  If Our President wins, that will be business as usual.  If a Democrat (yes, you may interpret that as a hedge on whether it is the former vice president, the regent, or somebody else) wins, the rage mobs are reluctant Democrat voters who will push every point of advantage.

In fact, some of those rage mobs might take even an etiolated convention in Milwaukee, with no ethnic festivals, home baseball or basketball (!) games, or concerts in the park available as diversions, to stake some of those claims.  That's right in the middle of a power struggle among the rainbow coalition in the city's common council and fire and police commission. in which police reform means disarmament.

Officials with the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission are defending their directive to cease the use of tear gas and pepper spray as law enforcement agencies are withdrawing from agreements to send personnel to next month's Democratic National Convention.

The seven commissioners said in a statement Monday that the directive to Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales had been "shamelessly exploited and distorted."

The FPC statement did not provide examples of what had been distorted or fabricated, nor did it specify the target of its criticism, whether Morales, other department leaders or someone else.

That display of wokeness has induced police departments in saner parts of the state to withdraw from mutual aid compacts.

At least 100 law enforcement agencies have withdrawn agreements to send personnel to next month's Democratic National Convention, some of them citing orders to Milwaukee's police chief to cease the use of tear gas and pepper spray during demonstrations.

The withdrawals cast doubt on a program to bring about 1,000 police officers from outside agencies to help shore up security for the event, scheduled for the week of Aug 17.  Among the agencies confirmed to have withdrawn are police departments in Fond du Lac, Franklin, Greendale and West Allis.

Asked on Monday if the agreements were collapsing, Fond du Lac Police Chief William Lamb said, "Yes," adding that he expects other agencies from across the state to withdraw from the program.

Apparently, though, Chicago's idiot mayor Lori Lightfoot would like to offer assistance to her fellow travellers making a mess of Milwaukee.

[Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police] has come out solidly against volunteering for this short-notice detail in Milwaukee after approximately 100 different police agencies withdrew their offer to assist MPD at the democratic national convention.

The post also helpfully notes that there's currently a quarantine order in effect in Chicago, with people returning from Wisconsin being urged to go into voluntary house arrest for two weeks.  Never mind that there have been more Wuhan coronavirus infections in Cook County alone than in the whole state of Wisconsin.

IT'S A LOT EASIER SIMPLY TO ALLOW FREE REIN TO 110 ON THE EXISTING TRACKS.

All the same, it's a good day for ferroequinologists when USA Today calls attention to faster Passenger Rail that might have a fighting chance.

What do Miami's cruise ship port, Disney World and Las Vegas have in common?

Within a few years, they could be stops for America's newest passenger trains.

Other than Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, the United States has nothing that comes even close to what's considered high-speed rail in Europe, Japan and China. But it may be moving closer to what other countries have been doing for decades.

The article mentions a few other hero projects that are in the planning and politicking stages, as well as some of the wish lists for Passenger Rail advocates.

Potential future corridors under review for high-speed trains include Chicago-St. Louis; Atlanta-Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle-Portland, Oregon and the Texas Triangle, which includes Dallas-Houston.

[U. S. High Speed Rail Association president Andy] Kunz compared the long-range goal of high-speed rail in America to the Interstate Highway System, which took about 30 years to complete. While that was built with public money, Kunz said both private and public funds can build a new rail system.

"We can build this in 30 years," Kunz said. "That’s not too crazy for us."

That refers to building from scratch and using the median strips of Interstate highways.  Let's keep in mind that Brightline started with Florida East Coast's racetrack, and that there are all sorts of possibilities to upgrade existing railroad lines for 110 mph running.  Do the math, dear reader: those upgrades are a whole lot cheaper than building those bullet train routes from scratch, and the additional construction doesn't shave off as much running time as you'd think.

HANDICAPPING THE OPPRESSION OLYMPICS.

At Arizona State University, the deep thinkers have compiled a series of Privilege Checklists.  I've been of the view that the identity politics crowd long went beyond parody.  Apparently, though, even if circles of oppression have empty intersections,  it's possible to work out dot, cross, and Kronecker products for vectors of oppression.  For example, even black males have privileges to check.  I wonder, though, if the people who compiled the list weren't high on ganja, or perhaps Stormfront plants, when I read stuff like "I can be a part of a black liberation organization like the Black Panther Party where an 'out' rapist Eldridge Cleaver can assume [a] leadership position," or "I will make significantly more money as a professional athlete than members of the opposite sex will," or "I have the privilege of knowing men who are physically or sexually abusive to women and yet I still call them friends."

There's enough stuff at the Arizona State umbrella site, though, to suggest that a lot of Serious Thinkers were at work, coming up with Privilege Checklists for people of all races, creeds, colors, and conditions.

And what, dear reader, is this privilege?

It's about advantages you have that you think are normal. It's about you being normal, and others being the deviation from normal.

Almost everyone who is reading this had some form of privilege. If you’re a member of three marginalized groups, in ill health, and poor, you're still able to access and use the internet, both demonstrating and conferring privilege.

Some privileges are easy to demonstrate: Can you go into a random restaurant and order food? That's not something that those with food allergies, diabetics, celiacs, or a range of other conditions can count on. It's not something people whose religious convictions include following Kosher, Halal or other faith-based dietary restrictions can count on in western society either.

Some privileges are harder to demonstrate: If you get a job, to what extent was that based on the way you look, your gender, your accent, your connections? How can you tell?

Put another way, in a universe where there is no cosmic justice, there will be people who might have better chances, no matter how hard we work at ensuring everyone a fair go, and in a world where humans are free to associate or not, there will be insiders and outsiders.  Privilege-checking strikes me as the least effective way to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as it's just a big guilt trip, including for people who might be subject to multiple oppressions only to learn they are less oppressed than others.

How big is the guilt trip? "Privilege makes you blind. Privilege is a big bag of stuff you're not forced to think about."  If you don't have to think about it, that might be a good thing.  Although there might be a lot of job opportunities for hack scholars calling themselves Serious Thinkers if we have to rediscover ten thousand years of learning ab initio, over and over and over again.

DOES WALTER DURANTY APPROVE OF PACKING THE SUPREME COURT?

I get a daily briefing from New York's Times (an extra benefit for registering my Google account with them) and it's a window into what the woke scolds are thinking.  Here's a snippet from Thursday last.

Hungary’s governing party, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has undermined democracy by changing election rules, packing the courts with allies and insisting on uncritical media coverage. Orban has used the virus as an excuse to centralize authority even further.

Poland’s governing party, led by Jarosław Kaczynski, has taken a similar approach, mostly by neutralizing the judicial system.

When the E.U. expanded to include Hungary, Poland and six other countries in 2004, the bloc’s leaders made the mistake of assuming that Eastern and Central Europe were on a one-way path to democracy and the rule of law. (The naïveté bears some resemblance to American assumptions about how China would democratize after joining global trade treaties.)

Note how the final paragraph switches to U. S. naïveté about China, the better to divert attention from the way election rules get modified at short notice supposedly account the Wuhan coronavirus; the way some court intellectuals for the Democrats argue, including in the Times, for packing the courts; and the way the palace guard media carries water for Democrats.

JUST CONCENTRATE ON THE ACADEMICS, MARQUETTE.

I've already noted how at graduation time, officialdom at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee take a few digs at their basketball famous neighbor to the southwest.  Maybe coming up with a substantive academic profile will prove more productive than tone-policing the incoming students.  It wasn't enough for the Student Affairs types to unleash the Holy Inquisition on Samantha Pfefferle for daring to post a video that featured a Trump flag.  Then, John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams reports, the Student Affairs types also might have launched an investigation of possible conduct unbecoming by Erin Cook. the incoming student who thought flagging Incorrect Tik-Tokking was what ought to be done.  More recently, Marquette's College Republicans decided to thank their Administrative Overlords for doing the right thing.  Problem is, as Professor McAdams noted, it wasn't because the scales fell from anybody's eyes.  They had to be shot off.

This is quite a good statement, and “schoolyard bullies” is the perfect description of the mob that wanted Pfefferle cancelled.

We, however, would not have “commended” Marquette. Marquette did not really come down on the side of free expression and intellectual diversity. Marquette backed off because Pfefferle was willing to fight, and the issue had gotten considerable attention.

There is no reason to believe that the basic instinct of university bureaucrats — to pander to politically correct leftists — has changed at all.

But statements like this one — as well as the massive public relations fiasco Marquette brought on itself — will hopefully temper the expression of that instinct.

It's simply necessary to keep calling out the manifestations of so-called liberating tolerance, wherever and whenever they take place.

MAX, IF YOU CAN FIND SOMETHING THAT'S WORTH $1000 TO SNEAK OUT FOR ...

Vince Lombardi might have understood the temptation of players to sneak out for some, er, physical therapy.  In those days, though, the risk was of a tired player messing up at practice, or perhaps something calling for a penicillin shot.  With the Wuhan coronavirus, there's a different hazard to the locker room.  People still respond to incentives, notes Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen.

You may have read that a number of early games in the season have been cancelled due to many of the players testing positive for Covid-19.  There is talk of the season being unsustainable, but it seems a simple remedy has not yet been tried — dock a player 30 percent of his salary if he tests positive.  That should limit the degree of nightclubbing and carousing, keeping in mind that the already-infected are probably some of the worst offenders and they have been “taken care of.”  Furthermore, the players would have a strong incentive to monitor each other, not wanting to be on the receiving end of an infection from a teammate.

He's also anticipated some objections.

If need be, the fines can be redistributed to the players who never test positive, thus keeping total compensation constant.

Incentives don’t always work, but if you haven’t even tried them something is amiss.  Do I hear “35 percent”?  “Forty”?  “Thirty-seven percent and three lashes”?

Yes, or the players who want to have something resembling a proper season might set up their own good behavior pool, and bribe the social butterflies.  It's going to be challenging, though, with baseball teams travelling, the players being young men, some with young families, some with one in every port, and there might be a few players with young families AND one in every port.

THIRTY DAYS TO SLOW THE SPREAD.

Via Mark "Carpe Diem" Perry, some insurgent wisdom from the Free Thinker Project.

It might take more than thirty days. The good news is, there's still a fair amount of herd immunity to Communism and related follies in the United States.

LOTS OF TIME TO WORK ON THE RAILROAD.

I've cut in the radio command control, and here are some of the trains getting a workout.

There's a lot of tweaking and planning work going on right now, and there might be new features to show off by Christmas.

RED! ... BLACK!

That's a call and response routine by Northern Illinois University's cheer squad, getting one side of Huskie Stadium calling out one color with the other side responding.  (It works pretty well when there are a lot of people in attendance.)

Our neighbors to the north, however, have their own reasons for that color scheme.  "'UW Athletics uniforms will include a university crest logo with a black ‘W,’ a show of support, inclusion and unity from Badger student-athletes, the UW Athletic Department and UW-Madison as a whole,' states a news release from the university.'" OK, whatever, it's Wisconsin, where they virtue-signal.  If they were serious, perhaps they would take a look at the gladiator model by which muscular young people sometimes of dubious academic potential sign up with the development leagues that call themselves power conferences, Wisconsin being less egregious than some of its counterparts notwithstanding.  The university likely still has to alert incoming students that asking a fellow student of African extraction, "what sport do you play?" is a microaggression.

GOING BACK TO COLLEGE IS NOT GOING TO BE FUN.

The late August move-in day at Northern Illinois is ordinarily quite a production, with driving routes to the dorms laid out as if the Normandy invasion is to take place, and senior administrators showing off their student-friendliness by directing traffic and driving golf carts to schlep the stuff, and after the students are nestled all snug in their dorms, there are assorted opportunities to mix and mingle.

Not in the era of house arrests.  "Students are required to be tested [for Wuhan coronavirus] no sooner than seven days prior to their scheduled move-in date. Students are also required to share their results with NIU no later than 24 hours prior to their move-in date."

Mixing and mingling is apparently hazardous to your health.

First-year students can choose to move into residence halls on Aug. 19, 20 or 21, while returning students can choose between Aug. 21, 22 or 23.

Northern View residents can move into apartments via an appointment from Aug. 10 to 14, with limited appointments available after Aug. 14.

Students can bring up to two family members to help during the move-in process. Everyone is required to wear a face covering and practice physical distancing.

There will be no NIU volunteers to assist during the move-in process.

Housing will also offer early drop-and-go options on Aug. 6, 7, 8, 13, 14 and 16. Students can schedule a one hour time slot to take items to their room where it’ll be locked until students return later in August.

Whether anybody is going to want to mix and mingle, or even bother bringing stuff to DeKalb under these conditions, remains to be seen.

THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE STILL HOLDS.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg rewrites a popular shaming point to include it. “If you’re not part of the solution I’m demanding, you’re part of the problem that’s in my way."  He continues,  "It’s incumbent on you to convince me – everyone – that your solution isn’t worse than the problem."  Precisely.

YOU'D THINK EVERYBODY WOULD KNOW THIS ALREADY.

The dean of Yale University's Public Health Department, one Sten Vermund, does the work the regular faculty will not do.   "My role as Dean is not to suppress the work of the faculty, but rather, to support the academic freedom of our faculty, whether it is in the mainstream of thinking or is contrarian."  He's not taking that stance in response to the faux-philosophers who dress up intellectual incoherence in polysyllables.  No, one of his colleagues published an article in a peer-reviewed journal.  "The dean flagged [Yale epidemiologist Harvey] Risch’s article in May in the American Journal of Epidemiology that cites evidence to support Risch’s belief that hydroxychloroquine is good to 'use for out-patient infection with SARS-CoV-2.'"  Controversies are what academic inquiry is supposed to be all about, and questioning the validity of a paper based on where it appears is not unknown, just ask any economist about "Harvard-controlled" or "Chicago-controlled" journals.  But any journal including American Journal in its title is likely to be one of the older and more highly-regarded journals.

Given the nasty politics that has come to surround hydroxychloroquine ever since Our President said good things about it, unfavorable peer review (in the sense of petulant middle-schoolers) is likely, and that's almost guaranteed once Professor Risch talks to the Wrong People.

I repeat, what the dean also says ought to be obvious.  "Vermund noted that if 'persons disagree with Dr. Risch’s review of the literature, it would be advisable to disseminate the alternative scientific interpretations, perhaps through letters or other publications with alternative viewpoints to the American Journal of Epidemiology, Newsweek, or other outlets.'"  Yes, and those sorts of activities generate minimum publishable units, or notes and comments, or Other Public Service when merit raise time rolls around.

Sometimes, though, even the most educated among us could benefit from a modicum of repetition.

A TRAIN SET FOR CHRISTMAS IN JULY.

Burlington Route's Mark Twain Zephyr set has been handed down from one dinner train or excursion operator to another, mostly to no effect (other than the stripping of the furniture and the scrapping of the prime mover.)  The Budd patent shot-welded stainless steel coaches are the closest thing on rails to indestructible, though, and an excursion railroad called Wisconsin and Great Northern, which run a rolling bed and breakfast train during tourist season, have purchased the train and are moving it north for repairs.  It will take an augmented form in Wisconsin, with shovel nosed power unit 9903 Injun Joe (think of how they say "engine" in the Ozarks), full baggage car Becky Thatcher, dinette coach Huckleberry Finn, and coach-parlor observation Tom Sawyer being joined by 1938 dinette coach Effie Dean (ordered by Burlington to replace a straight coach in the 9900 Pioneer Zephyr set; that coach went from one Zephyr to another but was back in the 9900 set at the time that train went to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, where there was no room in the inn for a four car train.)  I have found no references to that car running on Burlington as Effie Dean.

On Wisconsin and Great Northern, the Mark Twain Zephyr will feature an older General Motors 600 horsepower diesel engine borrowed from an SW600 switch engine in Injun Joe; Becky Thatcher will become a rolling museum gallery to familiarize visitors with the Zephyr fleet; Huckleberry Finn will become a full-length dining car "with the interior modeled after the 1936 Denver Zephyr" (Wisconsin and Great Northern primarily operating dinner trains to go with that rolling bed and breakfast);  Effie Dean will become a tavern lounge (useful if there are multiple seatings in the dining car, what happens if it takes on aspects of a Tip Top Tap or a northwoods supper club?) and first class seating will be on offer in the tail end of Tom Sawyer.

Let's hope this project works.  After all the bad weird things that have taken place so far this year, another Zephyr that could still show today's high speed trains how it's done entertaining passengers would be a good weird thing.

A DEATH OF DESPAIR?

Mike Adams was a criminologist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (motto: Fort Fisher is Taken) who over the years came to have little patience for trendy victim studies stuff or for students who showed up unprepared.  When you take a stance that includes "[E]njoy the reading. You know, like the kind they used to assign in college when English professors taught English instead of homosexuality and feminism" and "If you act like an adolescent in my class, I will do my part to see that you don’t carry those traits into the real world." Apparently his outspokenness on social media during the spring and summer idiocies that higher education succumbed to did not sit well with potential students or donors, not to mention the woke scolds in charge of the university.  "Earlier this year, Adams faced an onslaught of opposition from UNCW students in response to his social media posts, which criticized North Carolina’s coronavirus lockdown policies and the validity of women’s studies departments. He was also a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement."  The powers that be at the university offered him the kind of buyout offered on other campuses to losing basketball or football coaches to step out of line and disappear.  He accepted it, announced his retirement, then, just before his retirement began, took his own life.  Legal Insurrection contributor Stacey Matthews compiled a sample of the tolerant and compassionate woke mob's reaction.

David French, who was of counsel to Professor Adams during one of his tenure fights, comments.

If Mike wanted to fight, he could stay. That tweet was constitutionally protected speech. The happy warrior could ride again.

But he chose not to fight. He negotiated a buyout. He decided to retire early, at age 55. If I had been more aware—if we hadn’t lost touch a bit as the years went by and our careers diverged—I would have been more alarmed. I would have remembered day two of the trial, when he thought he would lose his career and his good name in one fell swoop. I would have remembered how the light went out of his eyes.

The news reports of his death are heartbreaking. A friend called 911 reporting he’d been “erratic,” “under a lot of stress,” that his car had been in his driveway for days. Friends arrived at his house, pounding on the door and yelling, “Mike! Mike!” The police came. Minutes later, they removed his body from his house. The police dispatch records state that he suffered from a gunshot wound.

Mark Steyn, yes, the radio and television pundit, suggests that the professor was not that happy a warrior.

You will generally see him described in the media as "Controversial Professor Mike Adams", as if it's the subject he teaches: Mike Adams, Head of the Department of Controversy. It wasn't always so. A two-time "Faculty Member of the Year" winner at the turn of the century, Adams grew more "controversial" as the university got more "woke".

Yes, listing a Regnery book under "Other Writings" and mentioning interviews with Rush Limbaugh as "community service" will make deanlets' heads explode. That's the nature of the academic life, and it might well be that the Peanut Hill campuses such as Wilmington have more aggressive wokesters than the Ivies or the establishment press simply because they can.

The American academy is bonkers and has reared monsters - so that we now have a "black liberation movement" staffed almost entirely by college-educated white women (including a remarkable number of angry trans-women) from the over-undergraduated permanent-varsity Class of Whenever. We are assured that out in "the real world" there is a soi-disant "silent majority" whose voices will resound around the world on November 3rd. For what it's worth, I don't believe in the existence of this "silent majority", and a political party that has won the popular vote only once in the last thirty years (2004) ought to be chary about over-investing in it.

But either way, if you're doing the heavy lifting on an otherwise abandoned front of the culture war, what you mostly hear, as Mike Adams did, is the silent majority's silence - month in, month out.

Andrew Sullivan, the man who did more than anyone to overturn the millennia-old definition of marriage, discovered nevertheless that he was insufficiently woke for his colleagues at New York magazine, and so got canceled. Bari Weiss, a bisexual Jewess, found that the former did not compensate for the latter at a New York Times whose young staffers are openly sneering of Jews, and so she self-canceled. Barbara Kay at my old home The National Post has just done something similar, exhausted by the battle to say things that offend against the insipid yet totalitarian pieties. Newspapers have turned into colleges. Boardrooms have turned into colleges. Graceless corporate pseudo-macho American sports have turned into colleges.

When it comes to higher education, it's not about achieving greatness, it ought to be about restoring a state of good repair.  A professor of English (!) called R. O. Lopez suggests some strategies.

We need President Trump to form a commission to study and address the persecution of conservatives in education. As someone who taught college students for twenty years, I say this with heartfelt urgency. I’ve told the horror stories of my own journey through academia. But no individual’s story can match the larger calamity that has occurred. Education is the key to transmitting civilization. How can we leave it imprisoned by one side of the political spectrum?

William F. Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale sixty-nine years ago. The right wing has spent seventy years freaking out about it contents. After seven decades to see if we could fix this, we’ve failed. And the country is in danger because of it.

This may sound like a speech from Alcoholics Anonymous, but it is time to admit that we need help. As a conservative movement, we cannot correct the problem of education. We’ve tried to keep our dignity. We didn’t want to whine or play the victim.

Let it start with the common schools. City officials and teacher unions are doing everything they can to continue to draw paychecks for maintaining safe spaces that are free of any inconvenient students, and parents are contemplating parochial schools or homeschooling collectives.  With higher education also doing everything possible to avoid welcoming students to campus (the absence of television revenues for football notwithstanding) the opportunity might be there.  What does Our President have to lose?

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM.

John Stossel brings the smack.

I laughed when I saw The Washington Post headline: "Minneapolis had progressive policies, but its economy still left black families behind."

The media are so clueless. Instead of "but," the headline should have said, "therefore," or "so, obviously."

Of course, progressive policies failed! They almost always do.

Unfortunately, True Believers, like any other faith-based community, will resist engaging the counterexamples and counter-arguments. Read the article to get a sense of the epistemic closure in the latest incarnation of Detroit. "'When socialism fails,' says [Minnesota Republican senate hopeful Jason] Lewis, 'the apologists always say, 'We just didn't do it enough, just didn't do it the right way.' (But) it's always failed.'"  All have sinned, and all have fallen short of the glory that is Social Engineering Realized.

BOYCOTT RUTGERS JOB FAIRS.

It's bad enough when universities treat composition as some sort of cost center, and they staff the courses in ways that would make the late Hunter "Precision Scheduled Downsizing" Harrison jealous.  The latest fad, though, is making the work of editing and grading easier by declaring standards to be optional.  "Students of all backgrounds managed to get admitted to Rutgers. But It would be absolutely insane and racist to actually expect them to write a grammatically correct sentence!"  Yes, that's Victory Girl Lisa Carr venting, and yet, she's on to something important.

Woke white, upper-middle-class, tenured professors in our university system honestly do not believe that Blacks, Hispanics and non-white populations entering their classrooms are capable of using proper grammar? That is insulting. That should cost them their jobs. But alas, their jobs will remain intact while they will continue to pump college students with this utter nonsense. This is coming from the same people who say President Trump is illiterate and cannot string a sentence together and because of this, we, as Americans look dumb.

But, what the hell? Why not change the English language so it’s not so raaaaaacist? We’ve already thrown out proper gender pronouns because they were not inclusive enough.

It's the latest manifestation of the soft bigotry of low expectations, notes Richard L. Cravatts, guest posting at Minding the Campus.

When did it become necessary for an English department in a public university to make as a central feature of its teaching social issues? This is not a social justice department, or a black studies department, or an institute or program that focuses on race, social issues, and activism. So the letter’s stated intention that the English Department will “stand with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement . . . create and promote an anti-racist environment . . . and . . . contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community” seems wildly inconsistent with what is, and should be, the role of an English department.

Not content with making a course in African-American literature a requirement in the English curriculum, every aspect of the pedagogy and instruction must be suffused with layers of obsessive victimology and racism, including sponsorship of workshops that seek to “cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice.”

Particularly because we'd hope the professors and instructors of composition ought be conversant with topics such as close reading or point of view, and that might get in the way of getting the kind of deep understanding of political economy or sociology or even the martial arts.  Students will have even more reason to think of composition as simply another meeting of compulsory chapel to read from the Gospel of Intersectionality, and their understanding of Holy Writ might well be that of Tom Sawyer's knowledge of the apostles.  Take us home, Lisa Carr.

So much for getting your kids to dig in their heels and work hard. Meanwhile, Rutgers will provide more reading to upper-level writing classes on the subjects of racism, sexism, homophobia, and related forms of “systemic discrimination.” Don’t worry. Papers written on the subject matter in these classes will not be graded based on grammar. That would be racist. Subject? Predicate? Syntax? Agreement? They don’t mean a thing. Just axe Rutgers.

Amen.

THE COLLAPSE OF GOVERNMENT LEGITIMACY IS COMPLETE.

By their fruits shall ye know them.  Heather Mac Donald has the details.  "Our present leaders, the products of a politicized and failing education system, seem to know nothing of those truths. Pulling the country back from the abyss will require a recalling of our civilizational inheritance."

Never mind a Long Train of Abufes and Ufurpations, all it took was four months of unprecedented malfeasance.  Go, read, understand, get angry.

NUANCE THIS.

Crime-ridden big cities ruled by Democrats have long been a thing.  Ducking the question is what Foreign Service types do for a living.  Put 'em together and you get Marie Harf, one of the Obama voices on Fox News.  "Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner challenged Marie Harf to name one Republican-led city where widespread violence was as bad as in a number of Democrat-led cities."  It gets better, read on.

Harf responded by saying that it was “unfair” to say that those mayors did not care about their citizens and claiming that President Donald Trump was targeting Democrat-led cities for political reasons rather than because they were the only ones who warranted intervention.

“For many people, that he keeps saying he’s going after Democratic cities and Democrats feels like he is making a law enforcement issue a political one, which we should not be doing in this country,” Harf continued.

Faulkner pushed back then, challenging Harf to name a Republican-led city that was facing similar levels of unrest and violence. “Marie, is there another Republican-led city that is having the kinds of problems that we are seeing in a Democratic-led city? Let me let you answer that. Is there?”

“Well, look, Democrats have been in charge of the big cities in our country for a long time,” Harf replied.

“It’s a yes or no question,” Faulkner pressed again.

“It’s more complicated. It’s not binary, Harris,” Harf attempted to clarify her point. “The issue is the Democrats are in charge of —”

Faulkner laid the challenge out again, asking once more directly, “Is there a Republican-led city that is having the same type of violence and unrest on it streets the way a Democratic-led trail of cities is right now that we continue to talk about?”

Harf argued that there were “many parts of this country led by Republicans that have a very high level of violence.”

“Do they look like the streets of Portland in Chicago right now, with the current unrest?” Faulkner pushed back once more.

Harf responded by attempting to turn the blame to President Trump, arguing that the presence of federal troops in places like Portland had led to the uptick in violence.

“The streets of Portland didn’t look like this. The streets of Portland didn’t look like this until President Trump sent in federal troops who were anonymous. They don’t have their names on, that’s what anonymous means. He has them arresting them with no Due Process in rented vans,” Harf insisted.

The unrest in Portland has been going on, mostly after midnight, for almost two months, with nobody paying much attention (because The Narrative?) until Our President directed Homeland Security to protect Federal courthouses (which is lawful) and that allowed the Democrats and their paid scribes to push a new Narrative, that is, until polling shows that drawing attention to Federal employees arresting protesters draws attention to the kind of people who argue with, but will probably vote for, Democrats.

Erick Erickson, who is no fan of Our President, is also no fan of sending the Federal enforcement into the woke cities, but for a different reason.

If we allow Portland, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities to fester as they want, they will either figure out they must change or live with the consequences.

When people move out, the tax base collapses and crime goes up, the people will either change their behavior or be democratically marginalized in their voting power. If life goes on as normal, or more people move in to embrace what is happening, then they've chosen it, or the problems have been exaggerated by conservatives, as they claim. Let the market decide by letting the actions of a free people control their fate.

The President should withdraw from Oregon and not send supplemental help to these other cities. Instead, he can campaign on their descent to chaos at the hands of Democratic mayors.

That would be consistent, dear reader, with no disaster relief for cities damaged by rioting and the renewed spreading of Wuhan coronavirus that followed. Or perhaps the coalition of the Normals could take a page from Reconstruction and the Marshall Plan, and condition relief on the election of a coalition government loyal to the United States first.