THEY'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THE NEW RULES.

 It's been de rigueur, ever since George Floyd overdosed while resisting arrest, for university presidents to see in what might have been a restraint technique gone badly wrong a Symptom of Greater Social Ills.  Like this.  "Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber went through the woke 'anti-racist' rite of confession: he published a letter confessing the ongoing racism at his university under his leadership." His entire statistics faculty should have issued a vote of no confidence, as his statement takes any divergence of Princeton population from some broader population as evidence of malign intent.

Now he's got a more serious problem on his hands. “Based on its admitted racism, the U.S. Department of Education is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false."

That's right, the Secretary of Education is treating Mr Eisgruber's statement as a confession to receiving federal funds under false pretenses.  It's pitch-perfect trolling. "Eisgruber did not intend to confess to violating federal discrimination law. He meant to signal his virtue and convince people that America is institutionally racist in order to further his own political and ideological goals. That makes the Department of Education’s response brilliant — perhaps even hilarious."  Discriminating for equality has never been a good idea.  Trolling stuffy Ivy League administrators, pitch-perfect.  Here's Rod Dreher. "If mandarins like Chris Eisgruber really believed their cant about systemic racism, they would resign tomorrow to renounce their privilege. But these powerful white people never do. These fortunate sons and daughters just want to make less powerful white people, and their children, pay the cost of bearing their own liberal guilt."  Go check out his column, and enjoy some of the comments.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also approves.

Princeton is given 21 “calendar days” (includes weekends) to comply. That ought to keep Mr. Eisgruber’s subalterns in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion quite busy in the weeks ahead, a monumental Chinese fire drill that can only end badly for the university. Either they have to come up with proof that Mr. Eisgruber’s asseverations are true — that Princeton is indeed, and has been for a long time, a racist school — or that Mr. Eisgruber and his administrative colleagues have constructed a false narrative to please and mollify the “social justice” mob among its own faculty and student body. In the first case, they are strictly evil; in the second, they are lying cowards.

I lean toward the "lying cowards" explanation. One meets a lot of careerists and conformists in 35 years of labor in higher education.

VIRTUAL RAILWAY ARCHAEOLOGY.

Some years ago, I documented traces of the Chicago Great Western railroad, whose right of way is intertwined with the course of the Black Hawk War.

Modern farming methods obliterate hard-packed roadbeds, and if you build an airport on the site of an interchange, you can even hide the fact that two railroads crossed at different levels.

Once upon a time, the Chicago Great Western interchange office, and passenger station, should anybody want to detrain for Freeport and get a lift into town, looked like this.

Unattributed photograph purchased from Joiner Historical Collection, Sycamore Public Library.

That clump of trees has gotten bigger over the years, hasn't it?

To the west, the Chicago Great Western also jumped over The Milwaukee Road and Illinois Highway 26.

When I took that picture, I noticed the remnants of pilings in the creek and guessed that the two railroads crossed at grade.  In reality, the Chicago Great Western was on a pile trestle.  Recently, a commenter asked about an interchange with The Milwaukee Road at that location.  Look closely at this map, there clearly is a connecting track in the southeast quadrant of the intersecting railroads.  The comment also recommends an aerial photograph, there's a trace of the connecting track alongside the Chicago Great Western but that's mostly gone near the highway.

Unattributed photograph purchased from Joiner Historical Collection, Sycamore Public Library.

That's The Milwaukee Road in the foreground, facing southwest (fitting as it's the Racine and Southwestern line) with Highway 26 crossing the railroad and the creek, then the trestle.  That might be traces of the grade of the interchange track visible (change in color of the grass) on the other side of the trestle.

The mind boggles, though, at six-unit lashups of F units with over 100 cars going over that trestle once or twice a day.

PEAK 2020 IN SPORTS.

The Milwaukee Brewers had an opportunity to take the quarantine-shortened season series from the Cubs, and gain some ground toward making the playoffs.

They committed three errors, gave up twelve runs, and got themselves no-hit by "Alec Mills, who entered the game with a 4.74 earned run average."  That's after a Saturday night game where they took a two run lead into the ninth inning and Cub hitters solved closer Josh Hader.

In the Cities, the Packers gave up six points on two-point conversions.  Fortunately, both offensive platoons were sharper than the defenses (perhaps there is some value to those exhibition games) and the Packers won 43-34 (is garbage time in the fourth quarter now a thing?)  "Green Bay will play its home opener next Sunday against Detroit, which blew a big lead in a 27-23 loss to Chicago."

It could always be worse in Detroit, I suppose, after getting smacked 19-0 by the Brewers a few days ago, the Tigers gave up another fourteen runs or so to the White Sox.

Meanwhile, the poobahs of the Big Ten are looking for ways to start football sometime in October.

YES, DOUBLE DOWN ON THE AUTHENTICITY.

New York's Times gives a Mychal Denzel Smith a platform to grouse, "A Biden Win Won’t Cure My Trump-Era Depression." Sounds like he's a real fun guy, lets his mental state be defined by elections.  "I had to ask myself what it meant to live in a system that allowed for a proudly racist and sexist representative of the capitalist class to seize presidential power. I mourned for the younger version of myself that had cast his first vote for the first Black presidential candidate on a major party ticket and had his cynicism challenged when that candidate actually won."  But does he reflect on how the hopey-changey stuff didn't really work out so well, and that's how a guy who publicly pushed a theory that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii then succeeded him as president?  ("As if anyone in 1961 would have faked a Hawaiian birth certificate for a young man named Barack Hussein Obama with the hopes of making him eligible for the presidency.")

But he's not optimistic about the election, even if Uncle Sam says, "Donald, you're fired!"  Get a load of why.

No, I never assumed that in my lifetime we would defeat the entrenched forces of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. But I had come around to believing that a slow, frustrating but ultimately sustainable victory and all the jubilation that would come along with it was something my friends’ children might someday experience.

That sense of possibility has largely dissipated. I am afraid every single day — of wildfires in California, of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, of the police and ICE, of going to the grocery store in a pandemic, of Electoral College math.

Just once, I'd like to see some experimental prefigurative community of transformation modelling, in microcosm, modes of living that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters and disrupting that white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism, but in six decades I just haven't seen it.

Perhaps, though, he's really warning all and sundry that a change of families in the White House does not mean an end to the chaos in the cities.

I know I can’t rely on a President Biden to cure my Trump-era depression. If he wins, it will simply represent a return to the normalcy favored by Democrats and the lie of American unity. A Biden presidency would not bring with it the same level of incompetence-meets-evil that we have suffered under the Trump administration. But without an agenda aimed at radically transforming (or in some cases eliminating altogether) the institutions that have caused so much harm, the best we can hope for is four years of bipartisan compromises that leave us facing the same challenges. Electing Mr. Biden is, at this point, a necessary measure to beat back the worst of the Trump era, but it is hardly a balm in and of itself.

Read between the lines in his essay, dear reader: the "radical transformation" is that of the so-called progressive wing of the Democrats.  Sorry, I want no part of it, too bad there's no provision in government as we understand it to volunteer for a control group.

ROME'S GLADIATORS WERE NOT CITIZENS. FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE.

The 2020 National Football League season got under way Thursday evening.  No preseason games, just the Chiefs back to their old tricks of letting the opponents score first then going on a run.

Before kickoff, Rush Limbaugh, in the course of lamenting the in-your-face wokeness that he views as antagonizing the fans, recognized that without players, there's no game.  "[T]hey have destroyed the connection that a majority of their fans had with the teams. They’ve just destroyed it with all of this politicized social justice protesting — and the teams, the franchises have kind of been forced into it because without their players, they don’t have games."  Exactly, and if the labor pool is not the same labor pool as the general population, that's a problem.

The formalities before the game included some nods to the civil rights movements, past and present.  Those formalities did not sit well with some of the fans, Kansas City allowing parties of six to attend in their own clusters.

The booing means that some fans are sick of players displaying anything but their athletic skills during game time and just before. Players should have the right to try to do so, at least before the games starts, but fans have a right to show the players what they think of it.

The booing showed that. It probably presages a decline in NFL viewership if the players keep expressing themselves about the state of America.

In Friday's commentary, Rush Limbaugh again noted the political economy of the pro football labor market.

[Fans] want to watch greatness transpire before their eyes. They want their teams to win. They want their fantasy teams to excel. They don’t care about the politicization. They actively oppose it. How hard this to understand? And yet National Football League teams themselves — forget the sponsors for a moment. The National Football League teams themselves don’t seem to understand this.

Or if they do understand it, they have decided that it’s worth the risk because they’ve got a problem. Their players are 75% African-American, and without the players there is no National Football League, and so they’ve gotta keep the players happy. And if the players think that politicizing the game is something that has to happen or else they’re not gonna play, then the owners are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

So they have to make it look like they support what the players support. And they have to do it but hopefully in a way that’s gonna be as least damaging to their business as possible. But I don’t even see that taking place. I just… I’m literally amazed that the people in charge of understanding who the fan base is, who’s the audience…

This is the United States. Big Time Sports has to offer terms of employment that are acceptable to the players, and a level of play that is acceptable to the fans. There is no Scipio Africanus to bring fresh captives back from the latest pacification campaign in the territories.

Whether anyone in the sports establishment or sports policy recognizes that a better environment in the neighborhoods where the players grow up is the ultimate objective (the harsh policing of the slums being a symptom, not a cause, of the currently lousy environment) and that fans, players, and politically minded people of almost all persuasions might be able to come to some sort of understanding of what that environment might look like and how best to bring it about remains to be seen.  Successful athletes understand how to pass up a shot because a team-mate has a better look, or how not to jump off-side on a hard count.  That sort of self-discipline is something they learn, as are the same sorts of self discipline required for success in other ventures.

AN END TO THE PHONY AUTHENTICITY?

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill reacts to the fakery of Jessica Krug, playacting in various protected status games, with "All identity politics is arguably fake."

There is a symbiotic relationship, surely, between what the academy and the cultural elites expect of black or Latino intellectuals today and how Krug performed. She was able to get into woke publishing circles and to win the praise of privileged students because she gave them what they wanted: a performance of authenticity, a denunciation of whiteness, a marshalling of her identity (in this case a fake identity) to the end of titillating a cultural elite that now loves nothing more than to be told how foul and destructive whiteness and the West have been by people who have apparently experienced their ‘structural oppressions’. Krug played the game; the more important question is: who invented the game?

The invention is probably emergent, even with vanguardists of various types urging it along, and its organizing theme is "my transgressiveness is OK, yours is not."  It's not going to end well.  A bad outcome is more likely, the longer the practitioners of critical race theory (two lies for the price of one) keep racializing practices that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters.  What good does it do to "decolonize" education if students leave grade school without a grasp of counting, or of subject-verb agreement?

Perhaps the Krug episode (which is one of several recent attempts academicians have made to pass as a protected class) will get the gatekeepers of culture studies to act responsibly.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan found a statement from a Duke University Press editor who is angry.  "I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon."  It's often the case that the most recent converts are the most zealous congregants.  More importantly, though, those "gross racial stereotypes" are the very "authenticity" and "transgressiveness" that are OK when carried off by somebody with the right heredity.  It's instructive to note how easily that authenticity becomes ... the propaganda of centuries of white supremacy.

There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes. There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who labored to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.

Many of us who promoted her work in one way or another have also struggled in trying to consider the relationship between Krug’s scholarship and her wrongdoing. There are times when a scholar does harm that can be seen as unrelated to their scholarship. In this case, Krug leveraged her deception to enable and promote her work, in ways that are not quantifiable or always specific. As others have pointed out, Krug’s scholarship may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.

Ah, the zero-sum nature of set-asides: affirmative action, or the Klan, are two manifestations of the same error. Where Jim Crow rules, people will attempt to pass as white. Where diversity and inclusion rule, people will attempt to pass as whatever bundle of "as a ..." is currently being funded.  And turning a lack of impulse control, or restraint, into a status marker is a good way to lose the argument.

Stop the particularism.  Stop the set-asides.  Stop funding the epistemic closure.  When success in higher education involves "cultural and linguistic code-switching because of the dominant culture within the university" that's a feature.  Higher education is receptive to anyone who adopts the discourse practices and methods of inquiry.  If it is not, it will be displaced by other institutional arrangements that do.  Thus far, I haven't seen any promising developments along those lines.

NINETEEN YEARS AGO.

 

BUILD BACK BETTER IS SUCH A WEAK SLOGAN.

Oh, that's right, MAKE AMERICA GREAT(ER) AGAIN was already taken.

Perhaps the Biden campaign's weak slogan is one more manifestation of the Long Emergency.  "[Democrats] are finally so miserably contemptible that they just want to end it all."

That might be so, but their Illinois tax increase must be voted down first.

WHY SHOULD THE CONTINENT'S NARRATIVE BE SET ON AN ISLAND?

I asked this question back in April, when it was becoming clear that locking down the entire country because Democrat politicians in New York mishandled the initial outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus was causing unnecessary disruption.  Subsequently, though, the premature quarantines in places where there was not yet much community spread probably killed any chance of local restrictions when the contagion arrived, as local patience, and the local businesses' margins of safety, were already exhausted.

Perhaps the question also applies to other supposedly National Affairs.  Dear readers, I give you Montana-based Charlie Warzel, a remote columnist for New York's Times.

Since I moved West, I’ve been preoccupied with this question: Would Americans feel a greater sense of alarm about our rapidly warming planet and the disastrous, perhaps irreversible effects of climate change if everyone could experience a fire season in person? Would cable news hosts devote the same nonstop coverage to fires as they do for hurricanes if more of their executives woke up each morning to falling ash? Would more lawmakers care if it looked like this outside the Capitol at high noon?

The American West does not have a monopoly on climate-related disasters. Hurricane seasons grow worse each year and devastating earthquakes loom. The flooding in the Midwest and storms like the recent derecho in Iowa are calamities that deserve equal attention. They’re also urgent alarm bells.

In the columnist's view, the "alarm bells" are for Climate Change (which they might be, or they might not be: did the road to Going-to-the-Sun Mountain ever open this summer?)

That noted, it is salutary for people in the Official Region to understand that if they don't see it from a first-class window of the Acela doesn't mean it didn't happen, whether it's the burning of forests where no brush-cutting has taken place in years, or the flattening of a lot of Iowa and Illinois corn.

HOW SEVERE IS THE INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION?

Severe enough that ... people passing themselves off as meriting a protected status they really don't have is a thing.  "Conversations about [George Washington historian and fake Caribbean black Jessica] Krug have resurrected other stories about faking racial identities in the academy."  It's a small sample.  It's also a sample in which all the fakery is adopting an identity that would be subject to a lot of opprobrium, should racism of the more conventional kind be as common as the High Priests of the Church of Intersectionality would have us believe.

A LITTLE UPSCALE PRIVILEGE IN MANHATTAN.

The New York metropolitan area is in economic collapse, with the productive people leaving, but even so, Good Intentions manifested as housing street people in vacant hotels turns out badly.  N.Y. Will Move Homeless Men From Liberal Neighborhood After Backlash.

No matter how many times I tell you, there's always somebody screws it up.

When people get tired of things being broken, they seek to restore a state of good repair.

The "backlash" language is simply the usual posturing among the usual suspects, some of whom understand that their neighborhood has become more like Scat Francisco, Good Intentions notwithstanding, whilst others are shocked and appalled at the deplorable attitudes of neighbors they Expected More of.  "The move disappointed many in the community, who said the men’s presence was not disruptive and the concerns had been largely overstated."

That's the same mind-set that sugar-coats a riot as a mostly peaceful protest.

A MISLEADING PITCH FOR RAISING THE STATE INCOME TAX.

There's one state referendum in Illinois this November, to amend section 3 of article IX of the Illinois constitution.

The General Assembly shall provide by law for the rate or rates of any tax on or measured by income imposed by the State.  A tax on or measured by income shall be at a non-graduated rate.  At any one time there may be no more than one such tax imposed by the State for State purposes on individuals and one such tax imposed on corporations.  In any such tax imposed on corporations the highest rate shall not exceed the highest rate imposed on individuals by more than a ratio of 8 to 5.

The underlined text will replace the struck text, with the second sentence allowing for high levels of corporate income to be taxed at rates higher than the highest levels of personal income, with a graduated income tax replacing the current proportional tax.

The amendment is, as you would suspect, the brainchild of long-serving legislative speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) and current governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Chicago).

By law, the state shall issue an explanation of the referendum, with arguments for and against its adoption.  Among the explanations we see the following two paragraphs.

Because of the way our current tax system is set up, the bottom fifth of Illinois taxpayers (those making below $21,800) contribute 14.4% of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 7.4% for the top 1 percent of Illinois taxpayers.

If this Amendment passes, the State has already enacted a new graduated tax structure where 97% of taxpayers will pay the same or less.

Note the conjuring tricks, dear reader.   The first paragraph rolls state sales taxes (and Illinois is one of the few states that taxes food: if you buy cheese in Wisconsin to eat in Illinois, the treasurer wants you to declare it in April and pay the 1% use tax on it) and local sales and property taxes, which is to say, taxes long understood to be regressive, with the proportional state income tax.

The second tax refers to a proposed change in state tax rates that has been rubber-stamped out of the Springfield Soviet, er, the Democrat-controlled legislature, with the assent of the governor, and "pay the same or less" refers to the lower brackets of the graduated income tax.  There's no property tax relief, or lowering of the sales taxes, contemplated.

I suspect there is a strong overlap between people who intend to vote NO on this amendment and Trump voters.  We'll see what the effect on turnout is in another two months.

A TRUMP FLAG AT A DOCK OF THE BAY?

There's a Republican Party chapter in California's Marin County, and at the end of August, they showed the flag under the Golden Gate Bridge, at the same time that some marchers on foot were headed into the lair of Lord Mayor London Breed and Princess Nancy Antoinette.  The video, which is heavy-handed in places, does not embed.  Go there and watch if you wish. 

KAREN CROW?

You'd expect madness out of Ann Arbor, but apparently it spreads easily enough to the branch campus at Dearborn. There's a "Non-POC (People of Color) Cafe" for "students who do not identify as persons of color to gather and to discuss their experience as students on campus and as non-POC in the world."

Twitchy writers are framing the story as if it's a segregated physical space, in the manner of the cool kids' table in high school or the black students' table in the food court.  It's more accurate to think of these virtual sessions as yet more Zooming, and the deanlets and deanlings of Morale Conditioning issued a clarification.

UM-Dearborn sincerely regrets the terms used to describe the "cafe" events held on September 8. The terms used to describe these virtual events and the descriptions themselves were not clear and not reflective of the university’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

University of Michigan-Dearborn is committed to fostering and maintaining an inclusive campus environment and encourages ongoing dialogue amongst our students, faculty and staff on challenging issues. As campus activities continue to operate in a predominantly remote capacity due to COVID-19, our Center for Social Justice and Inclusion has looked to develop virtual spaces that allow for these important conversations to continue.

The “cafes” were virtual open conversations developed to allow students the opportunity to connect to process current events, share their experiences related to race, share knowledge and resources and brainstorm solutions. The original intent was to provide students from marginalized communities a space that allowed for them to exist freely without having to normalize their lives and experiences, while also providing students that do not identify as persons of color the opportunity to deepen their understanding of race and racism without harming or relying on students of color to educate them.

To ensure that these spaces were kept safe and respectful, the “cafes” had a faculty/staff member as a facilitator.

The events were never intended to be exclusive or exclusionary for individuals of a certain race. Both events were open to all members of the UM-Dearborn campus community.

Love me some double-speak just before supper.  These were not physically segregated spaces with assigned seating.  These were virtually segregated spaces in which people who did not identify as the type named could look in.  But the People of Color space was a virtual safe space to vent (presumably a non-POC observer could quietly observe) whilst the non-POC space was a virtual hectoring space where the re-education was done by the facilitator.  Got it?

PEOPLE WILL ONLY TOLERATE THE LOCKDOWNS FOR SO LONG.

I wrote that last April, by which time "fifteen days to slow the spread" had already gone on for at least two additional weeks.  Antony Davies and James Harrigan correctly describe the catastrophe that has followed.

It has been five months since the American people were told they would be under house arrest for three weeks to “flatten the curve.” Under the guise of protecting us from Covid-19, America’s politicians completed one of the greatest nonviolent power grabs in US history, pushing the lockdowns well beyond the initial three-week prediction, thereby taking control of 330 million lives.

To justify this, they shifted the goal posts from flattening the curve, to halting transmission of the coronavirus entirely. Some even talked about maintaining lockdowns, at least in part, until a vaccine is developed. That could take years.

Yes, that last is a serious policy posture with some people.

Ron Adair photograph retrieved from Reason.

It is past time to kick some tail and take some names, particularly of elected officials who couldn't say, "well done, people, now we'll ease off," let alone, "sorry, we screwed up."

They didn’t because politicians invariably feel the need to “do something.” Despite volumes of evidence from disparate fields like economics, social work, ecology, and medicine, it never seems to occur to politicians that sometimes doing less, or even doing nothing, is by far the better approach. Why should it occur to them? When politicians act and their actions do more harm than good, they always say the same thing: “Imagine how bad it would have been had we not acted.”

But this time, we have evidence. We can compare what happened where politicians reacted with a heavy hand to what happened where they reacted with a light touch. And the evidence we have so far points to the same conclusion: Our politicians destroyed our economy unnecessarily.

This won’t stop our politicians from congratulating themselves, of course. Nothing ever does. When the next crisis comes along they will land on the same sorts of heavy-handed solutions they did this time. The only thing that will chasten them is the anger of the American people. Politicians did far more harm to Americans than Covid-19 did, and that’s what the American people need to remember next time our politicians start down the same pointless road.

Put not your trust in experts might be Michael Barone's recommendation.  "Governments can sometimes channel, but never entirely control, nature. There is no way to eliminate risk entirely. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns."

It would seem, though, that the return of some students to in person school and to residing on campus is leading public officials, with the cheerleading of people with a stake in continuing the status quo, to double down on ... that failed status quo.

Remember the goal of flattening the curve? Ensuring that hospitals weren’t overrun? Well, what do you call a scenario where thousands of cases result in zero hospitalizations? I’d call it the ultimate flat curve – or downright flat line. Yet rather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic for no good reason.

If we had in place the strict eligibility threshold for COVID-19 testing that we had in March when tests were scarce, we quite literally would not know the “epidemic” of mild and asymptomatic cases on college campus even exists. After being open for weeks, college campuses have no reported deaths or even hospitalizations that I can find. You might say that’s because they’ve done such an amazing job preventing cases. Nope: They have tons of reported cases.

The real contagion, notes author Daniel Horowitz, might be mass psychosis, not the Wuhan coronavirus.

GOVERNMENT IS THE INSTITUTION THAT HAS A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE.

That monopoly ought have limited and enumerated powers, particularly when people who probably never read Critique of Pure Tolerance have the same sorts of repressive ideas.  "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, these conservatives say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices."  Sorry, no, forbidding something might be the hardest way to change minds.  Let people foul their own nests and limit the coercion to protecting people who don't want their nests fouled.

In the last few years, a major fault line has opened up on the American political right: Call it the Great Liberalism Schism. On one side are those of us who remain committed to classical liberal norms and values such as due process, free trade, and religious freedom. On the other side is an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us.

These "post-liberals" believe it's time for a conservative politics that stops worrying about protecting individual liberty and starts worrying about attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing "strong rule" by a government tasked, among other things, with "enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources," as the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it in a March essay for The Atlantic.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the common good. It's just that the self-named Common-Good Conservatives don't have a monopoly on the idea.

Just as there are many competing visions of the good life at an individual level, people frequently disagree about what a good society would look like. Most political leftists believe religiously affiliated employers should be required to pay for their workers' birth control—and the language they use in defense of that position and others like it is nothing if not moral. Yet most people on the political right see that understanding of the common good as utterly mistaken. In a democratic society, how do you ensure that only the correct vision is coercively enforced?

Put more simply, there is no such thing as the (singular noun) common good, although there might be overlapping areas of mutual interest, as well as areas where overlap is undesirable.

At a sufficiently high level, we can all agree the concept is tied to human flourishing. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily." The dispute, then, is about how to help people thrive. For many of us, protecting individual liberty is crucial as both a component of and a requirement for achieving that goal.

A free society is in itself a good thing. That doesn't mean freedom is the only good or even the highest good. But it is a good that must be included in any final accounting of the common good. To deny someone control over his own life is to assert your supremacy over him, violating his innate dignity as a person. The more coercion exercised, the greater the violation.

I suppose in that "sum total of social conditions" we have an instance of 1 + 1 ≠ 2: as there is no meaningful aggregation of your happiness with my happiness and the happiness of John Rawls or Thomas Hobbes. The devil (or perhaps that's the choir of angels) is in that "either as groups or as individuals."

Pretend that such an aggregation is possible, and you have the picking of ideas that have to be repressed in order that others be tolerated.

[W]hat would the Will-to-Power Conservatives do with state control once acquired? The specifics vary from person to person, but the policy agenda can be characterized as right-wing on social issues (blue laws; crackdowns on pornography) and left-wing on economics (industrial subsidies; generous unemployment insurance). At the nexus of the two are proposals to use the tax code to encourage larger families, in which women preferably work less outside the home.

Herbert Marcuse might disagree with the ends, but he cannot object to the means. "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, they say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices. In place of equal rights under the law, it's error has no rights."  Stephanie Slade concludes, "This is no way to achieve the common good."

I repeat: there is no such thing as the, singular noun, common good.  I submit, though, that letting emergence do its thing is likely to produce a less intolerable ordering of things than anything structured by a vanguard, whether the vanguard is working off Rosseau or the Letters of Paul.

SHOTS FIRED AT A SOCIALLY DISTANCED PARTY.

I'm not sure how much in-class instruction is going on at Northern Illinois University.  There are enough members of the marching band back in town to, weather permitting (we went from late summer to late fall in about a week over the weekend) conduct outdoor practices.  There are also enough students with time on their hands remaining on hand during the long weekend to ... get into a fight.

[University spokesman] Joe King responded to police investigating shots fired outside Grant Residence Hall.

“At about midnight Sunday, Sept. 6, NIU Police were in Parking Lot O breaking up a fight and dispersing a crowd when an apparent gun shot was heard. There is no evidence that anyone was injured by the gun shot. NIU Police continue to investigate the matter,” King said.

The NIU Police Department announced it is investigating a report of shots fired at 11:45 P.M. Saturday at NIU Parking Lot O outside of Grant Residence Hall, according to an alert sent by the NIU Safe app.

Prior to shots being fired, NIU Police Department and DeKalb Police Department were blocking entrances to New Hall and Grant parking lots in order to contain the amount [c.q.] of people and stop the entrance of more people joining the party happening in Parking Lot O.

The city's newspaper adds no additional information, asks people who might know something to call the tip line.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, MORE OR LESS.

I'm referring to Labor Day, 1990, which means this post is on the "more" side of history.  I had been sailing on Geneva Lake and hanging out with other sailors, and then had to head home to get squared away for the resumption of classes, Northern Illinois University having this perverse by-law that starts instruction on the fourth Monday of August, thus you start up for a week or two, then stand down for a long weekend.  At the time I was still listening to the university's public radio station for the long-hair music, their propensity occasionally to play excerpts rather than full works and too many soporific guitar pieces notwithstanding.  That meant I got home to All Things Considered.

To set the context, dear reader, understand that the summer and fall of 1989 featured a continuing drama called As Communism Crumbles: Hungarian border opened.  Genuine elections in Poland. A few days after the anniversary of the founding of East Germany, the Berlin Wall came down.  (Find yourself a video of the anniversary celebration, dear reader, and check out the VIPs at the show:  Yasir Arafat, Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, representatives from North Korea and Iraq, a regular rogue's gallery of lefty heroes.)  At Thanksgiving the Czechoslovakian communists threw in the towel.  The partition of the country into Czech and Slovak parts came a few years later.  There was coal in their stockings at Christmas for the ruling Ceaucescu clan of Romania.

Because All Things Considered presented itself as a news show, their correspondents had to cover those events.  You could hear the dejection in their voices.  It's so much more fun to run long, droning pieces with native music about communism in Central America, and those guys just got defunded.  Come Labor Day, though, there was a great opportunity to wallow in the past, signing off with Pete Seeger strumming the guitar and singing a less militaristic version of The Internationale.  "Letting Mr Seeger close the Labor Day broadcast epitomized denial. That's why radios come with tuners. Adios, All Things Considered."

I'm still not listening, and apparently public radio can still appease their internal Commie with riffs on "property is theft."  Somebody explain to me why public radio still is on the federal payroll.

COLD SPRING SHOPS GETS RESULTS.

Was it the end of August that I suggested the United States Senate would be more effective if Amendment XVII were repealed?

Look, it doesn't matter if Nebraska's senator Ben Sasse, an academic administrator who has been mugged by reality, didn't read me.  "He also recommended abolishing standing committees, requiring senators to show up for debates, implementing 12-year term limits, and requiring senators to live together in dorms when in Washington."

He'd also rather be rid of live television coverage of Congress.  Perhaps C-Span served a purpose getting political messages out, back in the day: with social media it's possible for politicians, career or otherwise, to bypass the Democrat operatives with bylines gatekeepers.

WE DON'T LET HATERS KEEP US DOWN.

The video appears to have been professionally produced, it's not exactly the cancel culture in action that its title, referencing a "BLM Riot" hints at. 

Note, though, Power Line's John Hinderaker, in linking to the video. "It nicely contrasts the happy exuberance of the right with the vicious hatred that emanates from the left every day."

Yes!  The happy warriors in this election are the Trump loyalists, something that's as evident in the M-A-G-A song as it is in the boat parades, which took to the waters from sea to shining sea and on the rivers and inland lakes, all weekend.

REALITY HAS NO RESPECT FOR THE OVERTON WINDOW!

Southern Utah's David "Voluntary Xchange" Tufte asks, "What is a simple economist supposed to do when the right answer isn’t even on the table?"

Sometimes, all one can do is stay clear of the crack-up that is to come.

NOW OF VOTING AGE.

Cold Spring Shops got going on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 2002.

I find myself writing about many of the same things, along similar themes, as I did back in the day.

Decide for yourself, dear reader, do I post about stuff I'm comfortable arguing about, or am I a slow learner.

Thanks for your continued interest.

A WAY TO MAKE RETAIL RAILROADING MORE PRODUCTIVE?

Loose-car railroading is a technology that fractures freight, with the adding, setting off, and classifying of cars, and it's labor intensive, in that somebody has to connect all the air hoses (in North America) and go between the cars to secure or release the coupling links to the draw hooks (in Europe and much of the rest of the world.)  Those buffers are between cars in part to protect the yard man from being crushed.

Now, the Germans are experimenting with a freight car coupler that simultaneously joins the cars and connects the brake and possibly the telemetry lines.  Here's the Railway Age take.

European railroads have never universally adopted semi-automatic knuckle couplers, a technology that revolutionized operations and improved safety on North America railroads generations ago. We take them for granted. But if you think about it, our system is still labor-intensive, as air brake hoses must be manually connected, and uncoupling is lever-activated, manually. Now it seems as though our European counterparts may leapfrog us, with a technology called DAC, for “Digital Automatic Coupling.”

You might ask, aren't the Germans over a hundred years late to the party?

That's a Chicago Aurora and Elgin car built in 1908 and equipped with Van Dorn couplers, one of several styles of coupler in use on interurban and rapid transit rolling stock, and some of the fancier versions made the air brake line and multiple unit control line connections as the cars were coupled.  Those applications could be non-standard with respect to other railroads, and more than one kind could be used on a railroad: for instance, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin steel cars have Tomlinson couplers, thus, you will never see the Illinois Railway Museum run a mixed steel and wood car train, as the couplers and control systems are completely different.

Clearly, no retail freight operation, where a German car might be loaded at a factory here and sent to a receiving dock there, where there might be in Germany, or it might be anywhere in the European Union running standard gauge cars fitting the continental loading gauge.  So you won't be sending coals to Newcastle any time soon.

The challenge, though, is in having enough freight cars fitted with this system in order that any economies in marshalling trains and setting out or picking up individual cars can be shared by everybody.  At the moment, it's still proof of concept.

Over the next few months, 12 freight wagons will be fitted with coupling types from four manufacturers, with one type set to be selected following technical tests. A test train with 24 cars will make its way through Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as other European Union (EU) countries, for several months. The [coupler] is also being tested through daily use in the shunting yards.

That should make for more interesting reading than the latest progression of the Wuhan coronavirus across national boundaries.

ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS, AND TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR.

You'd think that equipping little kids with the ability to count is a different order of intellectual effort than equipping older kids with the understanding that a record player cannot play the sounds that would shake the record player to pieces (no matter how hard some heavy metal bands try.)

Apparently, though, the splitting of theoretical hairs is sufficiently important that Cathy Young, more generally a Reason writer, devotes a lengthy column to "The culture wars come to math and reach a new low."  After a link-rich wade into the social media kerfuffle, she quotes a friendly neighborhood mathematician.

In mathematics, operations on numbers or any other kind of mathematical objects are done under certain axioms. The axioms we introduce into mathematics are the foundation of all the discussions in math. Under the axioms introduced by [Giuseppe] Peano, we built up the entire theory of natural numbers. As a result of the axioms, we have 1+1=2. The variation of axioms may lead to a different theory. For certain mathematical purposes, we might need to create a new theory, in which 1+1=3. However, either the 1, or the 3 (or both) has a completely different meaning than the ones we know in daily life.

Yeah, duh. Complex numbers and nonstandard analysis come to mind. But, dog-gone-it, don't leave the kids with no foundation to go shopping or trade Pokemon cards just because you get your jollies subverting the dominant paradigm.

When Stanford mathematician and science writer Keith Devlin weighed in on this dispute on the blog of the Mathematical Association of America, the title of his post began with, “Of course 2+2=4 is cultural” — which some took as a defense of “2+2≠4.” But the second part of the title was, “That doesn’t mean the sum could be anything else.” What he means by “cultural,” Devlin explains, is that math is a creation of human culture as well as discovery of universal principles.

Indeed, Devlin notes that “2+2=4” has often served as a paradigm of “obvious truth” because it’s “noncontroversial in all human cultures that have counting numbers and arithmetic up to 4,” i.e. “pretty well all cultures today.”

Ms Young concludes, "Social justice math is gibberish. This gibberish is especially damaging to kids whose socioeconomic background puts them at risk of academic failure." Exactly. Deconstruct the institutions of prosperity at your peril, particularly if you hope to have more people sharing in that prosperity.

AND THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS LIMPED UP TO EXPLAIN IT ONCE MORE.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan is conversant enough with the discourse practices and woke poses of her colleagues at George Washington's history department to call b.s. on their reaction to the revelation of the mother of all woke poseurs in their midst.

The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past.

Mes petites. I know most of you don’t believe that hidebound shit about the graspability of truth. I mean, you don’t lie, like Jessica; but you certainly don’t think history truth-tells. History is about perspective and point of view and which power regimes happen to control discourse; and truth is a mobile army of metaphors…

Until you’re cornered; and then big bad Truth with a capital T comes lumbering back into the picture to paddle Krug on her black, brown, Algerian, Tuaregian behind and leave you looking on, in the innocent light of moral astonishment.

I don’t think you should be allowed to rest in that posture. I think you should get together, pronto, and begin a punishingly honest reckoning with what you have done – to your students and to the school.

Indeed.

OUR GARBAGE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENTS, PLURAL.

In mid-summer, George Will suggested that Republicans who support Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the party be subjected to a wipeout of Goldwater proportions in the general election, the better to clear the battle space for ... George Will, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, the next generation of Bushes, and the John McCain Fan Club? “The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal.”  Plus  "Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what?"

Don Surber is having none of it.

[C]onservatives already purged the Republican Party of most of its two-faced, double-crossing, lying phonies with the nomination and election of Donald Trump as president. Phonies like John Kasich are now working to elect Biden who would turn the nation into the United States of California.

2016 exposed the flocks of albatrosses hanging around the neck of the Republican Party, dragging it down. A bunch of political consultants from losing Republican campaigns joined CNN and MSNBC as fake conservatives who hate President Trump to balance out the liberals on the panels who hate President Trump.

My history-of-political-economy mind has trouble thinking of Our President as "conservative" in any intellectually consistent sense of the word; I also fear a "liberal" movement that embraces illiberalism.  That, though, might be Mr Surber's point: the choice is not between some synthesis of Burke and Buckley as opposed to Croly and Moynihan,   We're likely stuck with maximum differentiation, rather than median voter manifestoes, all the efforts of the Democrats to have their Biden and Bernie too notwithstanding.  Here's Rod Dreher, extending the argument.

Biden is a weak old man who does not represent the elites of his party, and does not represent the activist base that’s driving this train. People see, and people hear. Despite its many sins and failings, the Republican Party does not have to suffer its elected leaders of major cities calling for monuments to the Founding Fathers to be taken down. This is a massive symbolic issue, and I think Democrats are insane not to see its power.

He preceded that with an observation that ought give the Democrat establishment (if there is one: I'm of the view that the Biden-Harris ticket is an attempt to paper over the schism for now, it will be resolved, win or lose, in the next few years) pause. "Americans know that the Democratic Party elite (which includes the media) is in the grip of extremists to whom proposals like [contextualizing the Washington Monument] are within the realm of the discussable."

ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed reports on his son's return to college.  Some of it involves developments in classroom management.  "It’s still early, obviously, but he surprised me (and himself) when he reported that a couple of features of Zoom are actually more helpful than sitting in a classroom lecture." The first feature is one that I believe David Friedman once wished for in a traditional classroom.

In a large classroom lecture, it can be hard and/or disruptive to get the professor’s attention. But with the raise-hand function, students can show interest in a nonintrusive way. He reports that the professor stops lecturing every so often to call on the students whose hands are raised. It’s easy because they’re right there, all in a row.

Professor Friedman argued that students are risk-averse about asking questions in class. Perhaps they've had a bad experience or so with professors or instructors having trouble distinguishing a clueless question from an ill-posed profound question. I can claim no expertise in carrying that off, the best to do is always answer politely, and be humble.  Perhaps they're risk averse about appearing to be ignorant in front of their peers.  (Nerd tip: you're in that class in order to overcome that ignorance.)  Thus, when the professor asks if there are questions, nobody raises a hand.  It doesn't do much good for the professor to react to a visual cue, "puzzled," as the student might be puzzling out the logistics of the evening's social activity ...

His solution was to equip each seat with a foot pedal under the seat in front.  (Front Row Kids, by definition, will get involved.)  Then, any time a student has trouble following a point, he steps on his pedal, and the professor can look at a model board in the back of the room, and, when sufficiently many lights are illuminated (that could be as few as one light) stop and take questions.  The odds are that several of the students who depressed the pedal have the same question.

The in-class clickers of a few years ago had some potential for giving the professor real-time feedback on students not grasping the idea, and taking a time out.  Whether the question button in a Zoom conference is sufficient to offset all the other drawbacks of college by video conference remains to be seen.

YOU MIGHT HAVE YOUR BAD-ASS MOMENTS.

Will they ever be as bad-ass as performing Rule Britannia in front of Frederick the Great's palace?

Cheers, Prosit, whatever! Just enjoy.

MORE SELF-DESPISING FRAUDS IN CULTURE STUDIES.

Neo-Neocon discovers "the strange case of Jessica Krug."  She's been passing as several sorts of protected-status minority for an entire academic career, not bad for having been raised Jewish in Kansas City.

Krug’s photo points out the difficulty of racial classification by phenotype, because it turns out that Jessica is Jewish by birth (certainly not by practice; leftism seems to be her religion). I can see how she could pass for mixed race or Hispanic (she claimed to be of Caribbean origin), and this is true of a lot of basically white people.

It’s been true of me, too, although it never occurred to me to even try.

Krug remains an unrepentant and deeply committed leftist, and as such is also a person who has bought every single bit of the “anti-racism” anti-white line of the left. For all I know, she’s anti-Semitic too; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least, although she doesn’t say anything about that. But she’s what one might call a “self-hating white” – and my guess (and it’s only a guess) is that her hatred of herself as a white person caused her to flee into blackness, even more than the history of early personal trauma to which she refers, or even a desire to advance her career (which was probably also operating, although she doesn’t mention it).

Her affiliation is with (the not yet contextualized) history department at George Washington University, and her colleague Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan is all over the story.  "History really knows how to pick 'em."  Go here.  (If she's on faculty at George Washington, why live in Harlem rather than Anacostia?)  History department head seeing if he can go to the bench.  Professor Soltan did the university a solid during a hitch on the tenure committee.  "Krug is not George Washington University’s first professor to fabricate their [c.q.]  identity."  Oy, indeed, nicht wahr?  Plus a lament for higher education more generally.  "What the fuck are we missing that we allow people like Krug to rampage through our institutions – not to mention through our hearts and our souls?"

There are a few more posts at the link, and I expect more will be forthcoming.

The people running higher education, though, ought come up with a thoughtful answer to that W-T-F question.  I suspect, though, that the path of least resistance will be to issue some anodyne statement, vow to even more assiduously work on diversity, inclusion, and equity, and lay off as anti-intellectualism any statements by donors, or, in the case of the state-funded institutions, legislatures, that the money is no longer forthcoming.

HAB ICH DOCH DAS WORT VERGESSEN!

The things you learn ... the Paul Dukas tone poem and the Fantasia animation thereof featuring Mickey Mouse as the not-quite-Entered Apprentice both build on Goethe's Der Zauberlehrling.

According to The New Neo, in German political writing, Goethe's text influenced more than a few people you might have heard of.  "Goethe’s poem was so famous that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Germans both) referenced it in The Communist Manifesto, 'comparing modern bourgeois society to ‘the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.''"

More recently, the Democrat establishment might be finding themselves in the same spot.

The message is that we are not wise enough to know what the result of our efforts will ultimately be. When we call forth any powerful forces—inventions, weaponry, politics, laws, theories, artistic creations – they can be used for good or evil and everything in between, and we don’t necessarily have any say in the matter. The same is true if we call forth powerful destructive forces such as mobs, for ends we think we are achieving.

Right now, the “we” is the left (books, the press, the education system, the Democratic Party), and the force that’s been called forth is the Antifa BLM mob. Elected politicians such as a mayor like Ted Wheeler of Portland or Jenny Durkan of Seattle have already glimpsed the army of broomsticks coming towards them to trample them. But this is no cartoon.

Power Line's John Hinderaker has a different metaphor for summoning the destructive forces, "The Democrats sowed the wind, and now they are reaping the whirlwind," which is a less apposite parable with the same caution, namely, be careful what you wish for.

[T]he story is not just about magic. It’s an admonition. And the subject—the theme for which those spells and charms stand as tokens—is the notion of telling falsehoods in public discourse. You may start this process with good intentions, the narrator tells us, but they will quickly overtake you. The lies have a habit of taking on a life of their own, like those dancing brooms. They will in the end work mischief.

Perhaps it's the Noble Lie. Perhaps it's hubris. Perhaps it's overweening confidence in your own persuasive abilities.

DOESN'T THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL CONTEXTUALIZE THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT?

A committee of public safety woke-scolds in Washington, D. C. are of the view that certain of the monuments, including those properly belonging to These United States in the aggregate, excessively honor people who owned slaves or otherwise "supported oppression."  That committee recommended that such monuments be removed, relocated, or contextualized.  Sort of like how Stalin decided to remove the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow, a deed that a subsequent generation of Russians spent a lot of money undoing.

I wonder, though, if that committee is really confessing what a half-century of "inclusive" education has achieved.  At the time of the (first?) Civil War, the Washington Monument was still under construction, and in the middle of that war, President Lincoln issued an emancipation proclamation (codifying what was going on in the states in rebellion) and gave a speech at Gettysburg that you might have noted or remembered.

It is possible, dear reader, to view the Gettysburg Address, pivot, and look toward the Washington Monument.

Washington, D.C., 19 October 2014

The World War II victory memorial now is at the east end of the Reflecting Pool.  It's possible to get a picture of the east front of the Lincoln Memorial in full sunlight in the morning.

It ought not be that difficult to get the chronology straight: first there was Independence, then a series of compromises, including between feudal slave-holding and commercial abolition-minded states established the constitutional republic, then it took a "great civil war" to secure that new birth of freedom.

Power Line's John Hinderaker fears that the current crop of Democrats might be letting loose the forces that would produce another civil war, if unchecked.

The interesting question, to me, is whether there is a single Democratic Party politician who will object to de-platforming Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, George Mason, John Tyler, Alexander Graham Bell and the rest. I’m not holding my breath. If you vote for a Democratic candidate for any office in any state or on a national ticket, this is what you are voting for.

And all for the lack of a proper history in the common schools?

THE STUPIDEST OBSERVATION OF THE ACADEMIC YEAR.

That's pretty bold on my part, as we're not yet to Labor Day, and yet, South Carolina's David G. Martinez has already taken the honor for "Poverty is not endemic to any culture or any society."  It's another in a long line of posts by people whose salary depends on keeping the ignorant ignorant to do anything, anything, to avoid inculcating bourgeois habits among people whose ancestors didn't discover them.

Here's the reality: poverty is endemic, anywhere and everywhere, and from among all the possible palliatives, only the emergence of a bourgeois commercial order ever put a dent in it.  I put one, and only one, question, to Professor Martinez.  "[H]ow would Messrs. Marx and Engels view the McDonalding of the developing world?"  The extension to a standardized form of education is straightforward.

WHEN ONE POINT OF VIEW PREVAILS.

Three score and fifteen years ago, representatives of the Empire of Japan formally surrendered, ending World War II.

USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay
Unattributed photograph retrieved from Ace of Spades.

Five years ago, I suggested that fundamental transformation on this scale, if there would be any, would be emergent.  I'm still not sure what Overarching Vision, if any, there is, even with as much attention on electoral politics and pandemic as there is.

AN UNSURPRISING FLOTILLA IN THE LAKE DISTRICT.

The Trump Boat Parade comes to Okauchee Lake.  This one was organized by the Waukesha County chapter of the Republican party, featuring prominent Republicans, and looks like a gathering at the Golden Mast restaurant and bar.

GOVERNMENT IS A PROTECTION RACKET.

Former vice president Joe Biden said as much.  "Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?"  Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg is one of a few commentators to suggest he was really channeling his inner mobster.  Nice country you got there ...  The threat, as Rod Dreher notes, is implicit in the bundle that comprises contemporary Democrat manifestoes.

Joe Biden can and does condemn this violence, but it rings hollow with many people, because the Dems made themselves inseparable from [the rage mobs]. I’m not sure how the Democrats can shake the rioters off as a political albatross.

He's riffing off a Policy Tensor essay that will also reward careful study.

Note, though, that if Mr Biden becomes president, and if he attempts to unbundle the old Bipartisan Consensus from the rage mob, the rage mob is ready to keep on raging.

That’s why, in recent weeks, the two of us have helped launch a campaign to “#VoteTrumpOut (in Swing States) / Then Challenge Biden from Day One

An encouraging reality is that the progressive movement is much stronger today—online, in the streets and on election ballots—than four years ago. We’re better organized, better funded, better networked and more astute about the need to challenge corporate Democrats.

Large numbers of progressives are ready, willing and able to battle a Biden-Harris administration on behalf of transformational reforms like a Green New Deal, major criminal justice reform to counter racism and establish true public safety, Medicare for All, affordable housing, free college, increased taxes on corporations and the rich, and big cuts in Pentagon spending.

I don't see in a subsequent sentence any hope that a second term for Our President will mean an end to the temper tantrums. "While a Biden-Harris administration could be pressured toward reforms benefiting poor and working-class people, Trump is immune to progressive pressure and protest."  In that sentence, I think "immune" means "will not give in, and his voters will be OK with it."  It does not strike me as "if our side loses, we'll go back to our cubicles and think of a new strategy."

LET'S MAKE EXXON HUMBLE AGAIN.

At the time Exxon (formerly known as Standard Oil) sought to merge with Mobil (formerly know as Standard Oil Company of New York) I cracked wise to my antitrust students, "why not just tell the truth and call the new company Standard Oil Company of New Jersey?" as in the oil trust that came a cropper in 1911.

Another component of the Rockefeller trust was a company called Humble Oil, which, years ago, had critics of Big Oil proposing to make Exxon Humble.  It was that wisecrack in mind when I built this tank car.

Lionel two-dome tank car body, scratchbuilt frame, decals might be for a somewhat larger tank.  There's a learning curve in model railroading, and in thirty years I've gotten more proficient.

Meanwhile, creative destruction comes for Humble, er, Exxon.  "The once mighty Exxon suffered the corporate humiliation of being booted out of the highly influential Dow Jones Industrial Index."

One reason the major market indices have been doing so well despite the continued real and government-inflicted pandemic effects on economic activity is that the indices skew toward current favorites.  Information technology companies and companies that make good use of information technologies have done well as people seek to do commerce at a safe distance, and those companies merit inclusion, but if there are only thirty industrials or a Standard and Poor 500, somebody has to go.  Three companies got voted off the Dow island at the end of August.  Exxon Mobil might have been the most visible.  "Twenty one years ago, in 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged, it not only created the world’s largest private oil company, but for many years, Exxon Mobil was the world’s largest publicly traded company."  Yes, and prior to that, the Bell System held that honor.

I'm not sure, though, why a writer with a bent for environmental advocacy would view as a "humiliation" a development that might better be understood as what happens when improved energy technologies pass their market tests.  Problem is, there's no Green New Dealer in charge.

THE PROVERBIAL BAND-AID ON A CANCER.

National Review's George Weigel suggests that professional basketball players share the wealth.

Tens of millions of dollars would become instantly available if every professional athlete who declined to play last week would donate a boycotted game’s or games’ salary to league-managed funds in support of scholarship assistance to the parents of underprivileged children. The leagues would then partner with the local Catholic diocese in a given team’s geographic area to make those scholarship funds available to parents through the schools, which would be required to use the funds for scholarships and scholarships only. The leagues would donate their collection and distribution services, and the dioceses would pledge to make all monies received from the leagues and the athletes flow to the schools through their diocesan scholarship programs, or parish-based scholarship programs. No funds would be skimmed on the path between the athletes and children in need; all the donating athletes would know that they had actually helped someone who badly needed their support.

And for a year at last, the unjust playing field in American elementary education would be leveled a bit, and thus made more just.

What inspires Mr Weigel's post is his understanding that the government high schools in low-income areas are dropout factories, or, to use the Illinois language, comprehensive schools.  And why limit the scholarships to enrollment opportunities in the diocesan schools?  He might hold a think-tank gig as a "Catholic Studies" boffin, but he's limiting his thinking.  In Rockford, to continue the Illinois theme, that would mean one or a few lucky kids might get a full ride at Rockford Boylan.  (In the odd world of Rockford sports coverage, that's what makes the Rockford television stations the only television stations in Illinois that pay attention to the Green Bay Packers.  Not because their signals carry into Monroe or Beloit or Janesville or Delavan.  Rather, a Boylan graduate currently plays for the Packers.  Change that and the Packers might be as invisible as the Chicago Bulls.)  Arguably, we could extend the charity to potential matriculants at Rockford Lutheran (in the upper Midwest, if you ask "are you Catholic or Lutheran?" are you microaggressing against Baptists?)  There's also the more ecumenical (or is it catholic in the original sense of the word) Rockford Christian, and, if you want to be somewhat non-sectarian, there's Keith Country Day.

The charitable efforts from professional basketball might give a few kids a chance at learning something.  In neighborhoods where the government high schools are doing everything but inculcating bourgeois habits, though, those efforts might still be in vain.  The lucky few students might still be collateral damage standing on the corner waiting for a school bus when the local cartels determine control of the opposite corner, or just at the wrong party at the wrong time.  That's the real systemic injustice.