I'M GOING TO HAVE TO BUY MORE BEER.

The communist on corporatist fratricide among the self-styled progressives attempting to maintain a governing coalition is shaping up to be epic.

Start with the complaining, and not from Pajamas Media types, about the fawning treatment the establishment press is giving White House press secretary (and hard-four hedgehog) Jen Psaki.

For all the calm Psaki is bringing into the White House press room after a four-year circus, as State Department spokesperson it was her job to justify the most imperial aspects of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Now she’s standing between the press and a president who previously served in that same administration as second-in-command.

The fawning coverage of Psaki’s performance suggests some in the press have forgotten that press secretaries at the highest levels of government are not friends of free discourse. They are meant to deflect questions and use ambiguity to provide quotable snippets to fill newspaper pages, but that don’t actually inform the public about the inner workings of the government. Whether they serve a president, a governor or a mayor, executive press secretaries are not servants of the press or the public. Instead, they serve to protect their employer from bad news and to promote their employer’s initiatives in a positive light. Reporters, in a press secretary’s eyes, are either to be manipulated or deceived. “Spin doctor” is not meant to be a compliment.

Good, and the coot hasn't even been in office a month yet.

Then, aging commissar and senator Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in Moscow, is giving identity politics mascot Neera Tanden a hard time.

While Republicans have worked to focus a sizeable portion of budget office nominee Neera Tanden's confirmation process on her past tweets condemning GOP lawmakers, Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday was sure to make note of the Center for American Progress [c.q.] president's long history of attacking progressives—including himself and his supporters.

"There were vicious attacks made against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally," Sanders (I-Vt.) said during Tanden's appearance before the Senate budget panel on Wednesday for the second hearing on her nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a crucial agency particularly during a time of economic calamity.

Sanders did not cite specific examples, but Tanden—a longtime loyalist to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—became notorious during the 2016 presidential race for disparaging the Vermont senator, his staff, and the progressive ideas he champions, including raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a proposal that is now well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Tanden's left-punching became an issue once more during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary after ThinkProgress, CAP's now-defunct news site, published an article and video criticizing then-candidate Sanders' appearance and book income and accusing him of being hypocritical in his denunciations of income inequality.

"Center for American Progress leader Neera Tanden repeatedly calls for unity while simultaneously maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas," Sanders wrote in a letter to CAP's board in April of 2019. "This counterproductive negative campaigning needs to stop. The Democratic primary must be a campaign of ideas, not of bad faith smears."

Silly me, here I thought the senator stopped using the expression "millionaires and billionaires" because the Fox News crew were quoting that along with the information about the money he was making on book sales, and showing pictures of the various dachas he owns, although, interestly, none along the Golden Ring towns around Moscow.

A BUST TO THE PRACTITIONERS OF LIBERATING TOLERANCE.

Karl Popper had it all figured out.  "A tolerant society should only suppress the intolerant when they refuse to debate and instead answer arguments with violence."

Marcuse, you magnificent bastard, we read your book!

“This is exactly what the woke do,” [James] Lindsay said. “They are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument but begin by denouncing all argument,” he quoted. This hearkens back to something Lindsay wrote earlier about why the woke won’t debate you. I wrote about it here.

That has the potential to turn out badly.

Woke-scold says "words are violence."  Bust his jaw.

Woke-scold says "silence is violence."  Bust his jaw.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but don't say I didn't warn you.

FOOTBALL COACHES ENJOY A FORM OF TENURE.

Green Bay Packer defensive coordinator Mike Pettine became the Accountable Subordinate for the team's most recent exit from the playoffs.  He has a new gig, in Chicago.  "Pettine gave the Bears all kinds of problems as Packers defensive coordinator. Now he’s with the Bears to help Sean Desai."  Perhaps if the Bears don't suck, the Packers will have to work harder to win their division, and home field, and that might serve them well  in the playoffs.  That his defenses had to work against Aaron Rodgers and the Packer receivers in practice is a plus, but at the margin, argues Chicago sports pundit Hub Arkush, it's an epsilon plus.

Make no mistake Bears fans, any knowledge Pettine might bring on how to handle Aaron Rodgers and the Packers may be gravy but has nothing to do with why he was hired.

In addition to possibly needing a veteran hand to avoid as many rookie mistakes as possible, Desai and Pettine will now jointly oversee the Bears defense with their number one focus on improving the pass rush and creating more takeaways.

Packer spokesman Wes Hodkiewicz concurs.

Mike from White House, TN

The Bears just hired Mike Pettine as their senior defensive advisor. In cases like this who has the upper hand, Pettine knowing what the weaknesses of the Packers' offense or LaFleur knowing Pettine's defensive tendencies?

Neither. I think these things are overblown. Pettine might know a thing or two about the interworking of LaFleur's scheme but the Packers have played more than 2,000 offensive snaps with LaFleur as the play-caller. The film is out there and NFL teams constantly are taking notes. Conversely, who's to say how much the Bears adopt Pettine's philosophies. It's Sean Desai's defense, after all.

There's an argument in labor economics over whether the opportunity to gain tenure protects people whose skills might otherwise be rendered obsolete rather quickly and lowers their salaries relative to those of people who bear all the risk of immediate discharge in case of obsolescence, or failure.  But if failed coaches can still land another job, perhaps as a position coach or platoon coordinator, rather than as a head coach, or as an assistant to a coordinator, might some of that risk premium argument break down?

DAN DREZNER BURIES THE LEDE.

He concludes a column on the glaring failure of technocracy that "fifteen days to slow the spread" has become with the lament of the fellow-travellers who were on board with shutting everything down until an electoral outcome they could live with arrived.

Technically there are just six more weeks of winter. As it warms up in the northern half of the country, habitable spaces will expand significantly. The vaccination of the general population is almost here. Until then, however, the strategic reserves of the affluent class are being depleted. It is nothing compared to the deprivations that the working class has felt since last spring. That does not make the pain feel any less real.

Gosh, we were only pointing those deprivations out ... last spring.  It's not that the professor and pundit didn't see it.

The pandemic has bifurcated Americans in multiple ways. For half of the country — heck, maybe closer to 60 percent — the pandemic has led to mass unemployment, or massive food lines or greater risks that come with having to work outside the home.

The rest of the country has had the ability to work from home. They are in the upper half of the K-shaped recovery. And yet it sure seems like those loudly complaining about hitting the pandemic wall right now are coming from this more affluent group. Why is that?

In part the answer is that the affluent usually have the bigger megaphone and better access to mainstream media outlets. But I would like to proffer an additional hypothesis: The pandemic wall reflects the different ways that the professional class and working class have responded to the pandemic. Blue-collar types have responded with more resiliency; white-collar types have responded with more robustness.

Where "robustness" includes measures such as stockpiling, or hiring other people to assume the risks.  It's possible to stockpile for fifteen days or a month (hence those runs on toilet paper last spring) but all the money in the world doesn't buy you resilience. "At the same time, there are tantalizing images of a post-pandemic world on the horizon, so maybe switching to resiliency now is unnecessary if folks can hold out for just a few more months. Any hint of a slowdown in vaccinations or the emergence of more virulent strains, however, makes that pandemic wall feel more concrete."  Or perhaps, just perhaps, the symbolic analysts will come to the conclusion that the Expert Class isn't as Expert as they all think they are, and end the shutdown theater.

THE DERIVED DEMAND DEFLATES AS THE COLLEGE BUBBLE DOES.

In addition to the university-supported bookstore in the student center, the Village Commons Bookstore has provided textbooks, Northern Illinois University themed clothing and pledge paraphernalia, including paddles for students and townies alike.  Until Governor Pritzker killed the state economy.

[Store manager Jody] Boardman said the rise of digital textbook usage had been impacting store book sales for a couple of years but said the closure is mostly due to the current business climate in DeKalb.

“You can’t pin it all on [COVID-19], but most of our traffic was the students,” Boardman said. “The entire campus is empty. [Huskie] football was always huge for us too and there isn’t even a football season.”

It's likely that items will be closed out through March. "The majority of the store’s shelves are filled with NIU themed goods and merchandise, would-be souvenirs and mementos for a student body whose college experience is now largely transmitted from a computer screen miles away from the DeKalb campus."

There's a good deal of vacant retail space around DeKalb, including away from the university.  It's not quite "will the last person to leave Illinois turn out the lights," although the exodus of people is likely to continue even after the ineffective mitigation measures end.

SLIPPING AND SLIDING, CRASHING AND COLLIDING.

Strong Towns correspondent Daniel Herriges takes a hard look at "The Banal Horror of the Afternoon Traffic Report."

Of course, they're not going to tell you that they're nonchalantly listing off places where someone may have just died. You're not going to learn the name of anyone who was rushed to the hospital. You won't know the story of the woman on foot just trying to cross the road to the bus stop, the name of the bicyclist on the way from their retail job to their evening shift at a restaurant, the outcome of the emergency surgery performed on the father whose teenage daughter, his passenger, will suffer neck pain for years as a result of the crash, along with a feeling of terror that wells back up whenever she crosses a bridge.

In the Tampa area, apparently the station he listens to has the regular host reading the report, and the crashes are predictably on the stroads. There might be other stations with dedicated "traffic reporters" (sometimes in an airplane or a helicopter) and in the bigger metro it's all you can do to enumerate troubles on the expressways, e.g. "Forty from Thorndale to the Ryan, 30 back to Mannheim, an hour from O'Hare to the Byrne, it's a parking lot from the Ohio Feeder to the Junction" and there's almost always something gone wrong with the semis along 80-94 for or from Indiana.  Call the roll.

The list of traffic jams the upbeat DJ wants to inform you about over a techno beat as you plan your commute is, in some measure, a list of places that people have just been injured or killed. In the five Tampa Bay Area counties covered by our local radio market, 562 people died in traffic collisions in 2019, or an average of three people every two days. That's out of a total of 68,652 crashes, from which there were 47,655 injuries. That’s 130 injuries per day.

He amuses himself by keeping track of where the congestion and crashing hot spots are.

There's almost never snow to make getting there even more challenging where he's listening.

PRAGMATIC LIBERTARIAN POPULISM.

We'll start at home, with an effort my Congressman is mounting to root Trumpism, or perhaps it's conspiracy theorizing, out of the Republican Party, or something. "[Adam] Kinzinger said the Wednesday House GOP member meeting will probably be 'the opening salvo in the fight for the party. Are we going to be a party of dark conspiracies, of lies or are we going to be a party of optimism and hope?'”

There's more than a party at stake, and there's a lot that a positively populist Republican party, or a coalition that includes Republicans could do, to undo, and there's more than a little bipartisan swamp-draining for effect.

This is also going to be a mini-dissertation, continuing after the jump.

YOUR INDOCTRINATION COMES WITH DISCLAIMERS.

One of the most enjoyable parts of being out of higher education is watching the morale conditioners self-destruct.  One place they like to put their follies on display is in recommending additional conditions of carriage in the course outline.  Perhaps one reason there's a "syllabus week" these days, rather than my preferred ritual of "here is the course outline, note the assignment schedule, note the examination schedule, here are a few other things, let's get to work," is that there's an awful lot in these recommended practices that might be contested.

What if a faculty member doesn't endorse the land acknowledgment statement, perhaps because he takes the view that conquest of land and the displacement of peoples is the norm in human history (might the Piscataway Conoy have "stolen" land from others who lived there before?), and not something that he thinks merits particular condemnation or explicit attention? Or what if he's skeptical of claims of "generations of racialized trauma rooted in the institution"? The school may have its own view of the matter, but one principle of academic freedom is that faculty need not endorse all the views that the school endorses, and cannot be compelled to publicly make such an endorsement.

Now presumably the first paragraph, by committing to "respect all forms of diversity," commits itself to respecting diversity of opinions (religious or secular) as well—though apparently not diversity of views on "land acknowledgement." But how exactly can an honest faculty member commit to having all class materials respect all forms of diversity, given that many important source materials may well express views that sharply condemn various groups (political, religious, and otherwise)? And what about students that want to express views condemning, rather than respecting, various belief systems (Marxism, libertarianism, jihadist Islam, conservative evangelical Christianity, traditionalist Catholicism, scientific atheism, etc.)?

Link backwards if you want to read the recommended language, and decide for yourself whether it is cringe-inducing, infantilizing, or farcical.

It's on the faculty, not careerist deanlets and deanlings who might not hold tenure in academic departments at all, to take control of the course outline, and of the institutional stance on what controversies get taught and how.

Universities aren’t without rights here. By tradition, the university has a strong hand in broad curricular decision-making. Further, it’s important to protect the rights of faculty to choose to approach their material through an antiracist lens.

But administrators mustn’t chill student and faculty expression with vague and uncertain requirements. Nor can a public university violate clearly established First Amendment rights in asserting its role.

There are few environments better situated for a wide-open discussion of antiracism and its related issues than the university. But universities are also troublingly susceptible to demands for orthodoxy and the squelching of dissent, perhaps never more so than in moments of national reckoning.

Yes, in part because administrative usurpations began with a number of policies that made sufficiently many faculty comfortable with their priors that almost nobody spoke out against the power-grab that could follow, and in part because there's a lot of self-selection on faculty committees.  Freethinkers get bored with the curriculum committee, while careerists will nit-pick and virtue signal until all the life is choked out.

THE KANSAS CITY CHIEFS ONCE AGAIN MADE BART STARR LOOK GOOD.

Yes, the man himself has crossed the final summit, and football fans everywhere have been deprived, again, of that rematch of the first ever interleague world championship game.  Search the records, though, and you see that the quarterback who found a way to beat you is still, despite all the improvements in fifty years, the most efficient post-season passer of all time.

Michael from Novato, CA

Hey Wes, no question, just an observation. With the poor game Mahomes had on Sunday, Bart Starr is once again the all-time leader in playoff QB rating. When you consider 1) the era he played 2) that this is almost 25 points higher than his regular season rating (and he was one of the all-timers when he retired) and 3) I can't find anyone else even 10 points higher in the playoffs than regular season. This is one of more underappreciated feats in football, in my opinion.

You're absolutely right. "Big Game" Bart is again atop the list with a postseason passer rating of 104.8. It's incredible someone like Starr, who's larger than life, can still be so underrated for what he did on the field.

Stingy defenses tend to get the rings, and for all the respect the Lombardi-era offense gets, people like Nitschke and Jordan and Robinson and Wood and Davis and Adderle giving, inter alia, Len Dawson and John Unitas fits had a lot to do with it.

TODAY'S RAILROAD REMINISCENCE.

New York Central's W. L. Gwyer recalls a trip from headquarters to check on the Boston and Albany.

In 1967 I was in New York Central’s management-training program under the supervision of R. D. Timpany. This was the dawn of the computer era in the railroad industry, a direction firmly embraced by the NYC (President Alfred E. Perlman even created a Vice President of Cybernetics position before 99 percent of the world and 99.9 percent of the New York Central even knew what the term meant), and we were installing a computer-based payroll system for the Maintenance of Way, Mechanical, and Signal departments. We trainees were drafted to help educate supervisors on how the new system worked, and this meant travel from headquarters in New York City all over the railroad. One of my assignments was Boston.

At the time, public travel options between New York and Boston included flying, a bus, or the New Haven Railroad either via Springfield, Mass. — the long way around — or the main line through New London, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island. I chose the latter option, although I’m sure my boss would have preferred otherwise, as passenger trains were a dirty word on the NYC. Nevertheless, I booked passage on the Owl.

The railroads had recently instituted something called the Home Road Pass Plan in a move to get rid of the pass department and its associated paperwork. Under that system, all one did was show his pass to the foreign-road ticket agent and you got half fare. As I recall, the New Haven was a signatory to the pact. So, on the appointed evening, I presented myself, pass in hand, to a ticket agent at Grand Central and paid for a lower berth to Boston. The fare came to $20.78 (in a coach it was $15.39).

In the heyday of the 20th Century Limited and trans-Atlantic liners, it was chic to have dinner in Manhattan, drinks at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, and proceed to your accommodations. But by 1967 the Century as well as the greyhounds of the sea were on their way to Valhalla. All was not lost, however, as the Oyster Bar and the Owl remained — smoldering embers of a different age. Not wishing to offend the gods of the high iron, I headed for the Oyster Bar to celebrate my impending New Haven adventure — after all, it was a road that I had never ridden, and the NYC was footing the bill. About 11 p.m. I walked to the gate, which still announced the Owl in the grand manner, just as in the Trains photo. The sleepers were open at 10 p.m. and the train left at 12:40 a.m. Arrival at Boston’s South Station was at 6:50 a.m., but you could stay aboard until 8.

The Oyster Bar is still there, although there are fewer high-roller commuters headed for Scarsdale or Danbury these days.  The Owl didn't quite survive Penn Central, although apparently for a while there was a setout sleeper for New York passengers.

My employer merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad in February 1968. As a condition of the merger, Penn Central was forced to absorb the New Haven, which it did in January 1969. The Owl came off the following month. One could still book a sleeper between New York and Boston, but the car was handled both ways by PC’s Federal, a through train to/from Washington that operated via Penn Station.

[Dispatcher with BNSF Henry Frick] had his Owl memories too. He rode the train in September 1968 from Grand Central to Boston in a bedroom, also in a Beach car. He told me he saw the Owl the last week it operated: just one FL9 locomotive and three forlorn cars.

Amtrak never reinstated overnight New York-Boston service as such. It did run a Boston-Washington sleeper on a train called the Night Owl, which appeared in the November 1972 timetable and was more a reincarnation of the Federal, not the Owl. Indeed, its Gotham times were not conducive to the overnight New York-Boston market, as it left Penn Station in the wee hours in both directions. I had occasion to ride it several times while in the employ of Amtrak, but the ambience and romance of the old New Haven was missing. It just was not the same.

Under Amtrak auspices, the Night Owl ran under some different names, and the current service runs between Boston and Newport News, but with no sleeping cars. Amtrak officialdom keep talking about adding sleeping cars once the latest fleet of Viewliners hits the rails, but so far that hasn't happened.

BOURGEOIS CONVENTIONS CONFER EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGES.

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Grant "Anthropology and Economics" McCracken.  It's a podcast.  The main message might be "What America needs, says McCracken, is a rebirth of honor that demands we insist on basic standards of behavior, especially from those in positions of power, and that we also treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated: with respect and compassion."

That's probably not the way to garner clicks or eyeballs.

The problem is, once cooperation breaks down, and everybody is playing their grim strategy, finding a way back to a rationally cooperative equilibrium is hard. "Put another way, the majority-minority or more diverse or whatever nation the United States is likely to become will benefit more rather than less from a common set of norms."

Our Intellectual Betters think they are powerful, but they are weak.

THERE WAS THAT CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE WOKE DOG IN THE NIGHT.

Somebody must have been telling lies about Kimberly Diei, because one fine morning she was called in front of the Holy Inquisition.

In September 2019, one month after enrolling at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, an administrator told Diei that the university received an anonymous complaint about her Instagram and Twitter accounts — and that she was now under investigation.

Diei appeared before the college’s Professional Conduct Committee, which unanimously determined that she violated university policies with what the committee deemed to be her “crude” and “sexual” posts. Refusing to identify the policies she violated or even the posts in question, the committee required Diei to write a letter reflecting on her behavior. She completed the letter despite reservations that the committee was violating her First Amendment rights.

The woke dog did nothing in the night, which is intriguing, given the nature of the complaints.

Less than a year later, the committee notified Diei of a second investigation, this time with screenshots from her social media accounts. In one tweet, Diei contributed to a trending discussion on Twitter about the song “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, suggesting lyrics for a possible remix. In another, Diei joked about the amount of time she spends getting prepared to go out by referencing a popular Beyoncé song.

“It’s so important to me to just have my voice, because people that look like me are often told ‘be quiet, stay in the back,’ and that just does not suit my personality,” Diei said. “I’m not asking for approval. I’m asking for respect.”

The photos and tweets the school identified — which comply with the social media sites’ policies — are fully protected by the First Amendment. Further, the accounts are operated under a pseudonym and do not even reveal Diei’s identity as a student at the College of Pharmacy or indicate any association with the university.

That's right, dear reader, presenting as authentically black can be conduct unbecoming a pharmacist, or something. And I checked Inside Higher Ed for any references to her case. Crickets. Go figure.  You'd think some of the usual race hustlers there would sound off about hegemonic biases, or call out whatever deanlet in the pharmacy administration was engaging in racism.

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

A columnist for Los Angeles's Times unaccountably shelters in snow country, and something terrible happened.

The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Forget about every day being Groundhog Day, every day something comes along that even The Babylon Bee wouldn't touch.  Rod Dreher offers the reality check.  "Normal people don’t have this problem. Normal people think, aww, how nice, and start thinking of ways to return the kindness. But normal people are not Harvard-educated New York-based liberal journalists."  And the credentialed elite never miss an opportunity to point out their specialness.  "Too much of the political or financial or cultural aesthetic comes bundled with hybrid cars and bike lanes and five dollar cups of coffee and eight dollar artisanal stale pale ale, better understood as headache in a glass."  That expensive coffee and hoppy faux beer might make those people crabby.  Thus more from Mr Dreher.  "This [Virginia] Heffernan column is so revealing. Is that really how urban media liberals see the rest of America: as a place full of people as bitter and as judgmental as themselves? Heffernan’s column is what happens when people who have extraordinary power to shape the media discourse live in a political monoculture."

He's being kind.  Byron York brought more smack than the Tampa Bay defense did.  "She’s not a disingenuous heifer of a hack, she’s a lunatic."

Undermine them with mockery!

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 9,623.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 588,062 infections and 12,115 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,146,341 infections and 21,738 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  The governor's current less oppressive ukases are at best halting.

Last week, the governor trailed by 9,662.

As of 25 January, 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

THIS WEEK'S STUDY QUESTION.

John Kass, "Who needs to develop critical thinking when the great books are gone?"  Read and understand.

A REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY.

It's possible to make the case, as Brendan O'Neill does, that the "squad" wing of the House Democratic Caucus are a disciplined cadre.

Here’s what’s funny about The Squad, the toytown radicals in the Democratic Party who titillate the Twitterati but piss off mostly everyone else. These are the kind of people who would have been Bush-bashers back in the 2000s, shaking their heads at the post-9/11 ‘culture of fear’ and warning against the rash introduction of illiberal anti-terror laws. And yet today these people are agitating for a new war on terror, for an all-out crusade against ‘domestic terrorism’, for an unforgiving, even McCarthyite offensive against an enemy that is apparently so terrifying, so evil, that even America’s constitutional norms must be ripped up in the battle against it.

The "toytown radicals" is closer to the truth, and I suspect that the Chairman Mao who wrote of cadre who "must not relax in the least their will to fight; anything that relaxes the will to fight and belittles the enemy would be wrong" would not be impressed. Mr O'Neill might see that will to fight.

Right now, AOC might just be the most authoritarian politician in the US. Her hyperbole about the Capitol riot, her fearmongering about the threat of ‘domestic terrorism’, her animosity towards the free press, and her demonisation of her critics as being pro-murder or similar to sexual abusers, in the full knowledge that her army of devoted online followers will amplify these shrill, censorious accusations – this all points to how determined AOC is to crush anything that she considers too right-wing or too offensive.

Chairman Mao, on the other hand, might see these cadre being "cowed by the bluster of reactionaries," no matter how loudly Abby Zimet denies it.

Facing a Trump impeachment trial that could put their collusion with domestic terrorists on record, a craven and ever-hypocritical GOP is frantically backpedaling on history, downplaying the mayhem they unleashed, declaring themselves innocent of wrongdoing, blithely insisting it's time to "move on" and for good measure deriding those insisting on the facts and the need for accountability - thus following a long national tradition of willful denial that led writer Gore Vidal to proclaim us "the United States of Amnesia." In truth, the damage from the Capitol riot - and the "insurgents" the FBI is still tracking - runs deep and wide. On Thursday, several lawmakers spoke out in the House about the panic they felt that day, the ongoing trauma it engendered, and the rage they still must struggle with. Said Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, a former social justice advocate, "This was like one of the days out there when the white supremasits would show up and start shooting at us." Among the most visible of those speaking up has been New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a 98-minute video this week, she described her fearas she hid with Rep. Katie Porter - especially, AOC revealed, as a sexual assault survivor - and called out complicit GOPers who "continue to be a danger to their colleagues."

As a longtime target of right-wing vitriol and so many death threats her staff grows uneasy when a stranger appears at the office, AOC has keenly felt that danger.One of the rioters has been arrested for threatening to assassinate her; his lawyer says he's now trying to "de-program" his client from Trump, who he calls "a cult leader." Still, AOC determinedly argues, "We cannot heal without accountability" for those who "chose to tell the lie." For her bravery, she's become the target of a nasty smear campaign - classic abuser move - by right-wing pols and media:: She's "a petulant child" and a la Jussie Smollett the country should “unify in telling you to go fornicate yourself," her account was a “loopy delusion” of “amazing acting” and “gross manipulation,” she wasn't even in the building, and from Glenn Greenwald (yes, that one), she didn't have "even a tiny little bruise on her body," though damn you'd think he'd know about the long history of women needing to show bruises to prove they were harmed. The vicious clap back prompted several outraged pieces - here, here, here - about the indignities visited upon women who speak out. The gist, from one: "I am so fucking sick of men telling women they didn't experience what they experienced."

Name and shame Glenn Greenwald, and claim to be intensively sick, that's true "courage in battle, no fear of sacrifice, no fear of fatigue, and continuous fighting."  Not this cadre.  Yes, the following stories are from Twitchy, treat them accordingly, but the real paper tigers are the young House Democrats.  Specifically, "Congress has turned into some kind of bizarre public psychotherapy session where elected officials compete amongst one another for who can exhibit the most overbearing narcissistic personality disorder."  That includes, "Rep. Dean Phillips is tearfully apologizing to AOC for previously failing to recognize his privilege."  That might be what "dare to struggle, dare to win" has deteriorated to.  Or the parody has only begun.  "Rep. Mark Takano condemns those who have sought to "gaslight" AOC and others who claim they underwent trauma."  Then the profane representative from Michigan can't hold it together.  "Rashida Tlaib is bawling on the floor of the House. She can't even get through a sentence."  An observer sums it up.  "The more they talk, the more voters can see the crazy bullshit they’re peddling."  Not exactly "Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory."

Undermine them with mockery!

SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO BE ORDERED ABOUT.

I object to the spirit in which the past year of public health restrictions have been imposed, moreso than to their ineffectiveness.  There are dissenting views, such as a column out of Perth, Australia, where the "if it saves just one life" argument holds sway.  “My city in Australia locked down for a single covid-19 case. We welcome the restrictions.”  From time to time, people put their faith in experts, and from time to time they have to be mugged by reality.  "Just as the brainwashed victims depicted in [Communist] propaganda happily submit to their enslavement, so too, apparently, do millions of Australians submit to theirs."  Until they don't.  Bet on emergence, and offer the electorate positive choices.  That's a rant for another day.

WHAT IS THE SUPPLY ELASTICITY OF QUARTERBACKS?

Chicago analyst Hub Arkush breaks down the first two decades of the ongoing century.

There can be little or no argument that the most valuable commodity in the NFL is a franchise quarterback, and there is absolutely no argument they are few and far between and awfully hard to come by.

By my count, there have been only 13 of them over the past 20 seasons, 14 if you include Tony Romo, who I probably wouldn’t, but I suppose is on the cusp.

Those 13 are Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, Kurt Warner, Ben Roethlisberger, Russell Wilson, Eli Manning, Patrick Mahomes, Philip Rivers, Donovan McNabb and Andrew Luck.

Ten of them have rings, and the fact that Rivers, McNabb, Luck and Romo don’t probably is more about the teams they played with than their own performances.

Twenty-one teams haven’t had a franchise quarterback in the past 20 years, and only two – the Packers and the Colts – have had more than one.

Not that the Packers or the Colts have made a lot of appearances in the Super Bowl lately, and there's more than one way to get to that game and win it.

Finding a franchise QB is not the only way to win a Super Bowl, just check the ring fingers on Nick Foles, Joe Flacco, Brad Johnson, Trent Dilfer, Mark Rypien, Jeff Hostetler, Doug Williams ... and, yes, Jim McMahon.

But it probably is the best way, as only Foles, Flacco, Johnson and Dilfer are guys who weren’t franchise QBs to win a Super Bowl in the past 20 seasons.

Some of the franchise quarterbacks have more than one title on their record. Do the math: twenty Super Bowls, fourteen "franchise" quarterbacks per Mr Arkush's reckoning, four of whom never had the right sort of team around them, and I leave as an exercise the inventory of highly-touted quarterbacks, including Heisman Trophy winners, who were high draft choices and then undone by injuries or what have you.

Just more evidence, dear reader, that a general manager going all in to put a championship calibre team on the field stat is likely to be a disappointed general manager.

VARIATIONS ON "GOD SAVE THE TSAR."

Johannes Brahms wrote a set.

He originally published them under a pseudonym.  I wonder if performances or recitals of this work were banned in the Soviet Union.

I WASN'T KIDDING ABOUT DRUNKEN BEARS.

A Canadian Pacific train derailed in the vicinity of Field, B.C. (think spiral tunnels and Kicking Horse Pass) and the cleanup crews have to sweep up the spilled grain, expeditiously.  "Canadian Pacific has undertaken a massive cleanup effort at the site of a grain-train derailment last week near Field, B.C., an effort required to prevent the spilled cargo from attracting bears when they come out of hibernation." By the time the bears come out of hibernation (like the groundhogs living near Cold Spring Shops headquarters, they snooze as long as it's cold outside) those yellow peas will be sour mash.

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM IS A BOUTIQUE PREFERENCE.

Huffington Post contributor Alexander C. Kaufman doesn't admit it, but he admits it.  First, though, the junk science.

Already, the planet has warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, yielding biblically terrifying and astronomically expensive results in the form of deadly floods and fires, prolonged droughts and ravenous locust swarms. Last year, the United States alone suffered a record-breaking 22 warming-fueled disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages.

It's nitpicky of me to suggest that the Industrial Era started about the same time as the Little Ice Age, and that the damages from various storms and floods ought be adjusted for inflation.  The boutique preference argument comes with a seasoning of deplorable shaming.  "The industry, especially in the U.S., also serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families."  Otherwise known as Normal Americans, but in the salons of Our Intellectual Betters, you're supposed to play word association.  Trump voter.  Probably owns guns.  Might worship on Sunday.  Heck, even being responsible is irresponsible.

“Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it,” the study’s authors wrote. “Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.”

I'm not sure that deplorable-shaming the people whose driving and recreational habits might be adding a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and mocking their pickup trucks as toxic, is the best way to change minds.  But it's of a piece.  You can't drive for fun.  You can't go snowmobiling for fun.  You can't go fishing for fun.  You keep that mask on, and don't mix and mingle, even after you've had your Trump shots.

THE PLAYERS WERE PACKERS FIRST.

Vince Lombardi's civil rights credibility was real.  It's worth remembering.  "Make no mistake about it, if not for Lombardi's open-mindedness, the Packers would not have been the only team, still to this day, to win three straight NFL titles under a playoff format."  The Packers might have been the first sports franchise to push back against segregated hotels.

It was in the early 1960s when Lombardi informed restaurant and bar owners in Green Bay that if they didn't serve his Black players, he would put their establishments off limits to all of his players. In other words, he threatened them with a boycott, when having Packers as customers could be a magnet for even bigger crowds.

Around the same time, Lombardi was also looking to pull the Packers out of exhibition games in the Deep South. In 1961, before their game against Washington in Columbus, Ga., Lombardi took his strongest stand yet to keep his team together.

The game's sponsors wanted both teams to arrive early and help promote the city's first professional football game. Washington agreed and flew into Muscogee County Airport six days before the game. It practiced in Columbus all week, providing the local newspapers with plenty of copy for daily stories leading up to the game.

Lombardi refused to comply because of the South's Jim Crow laws. The Packers flew into Lawson Army Airfield the day before the game, stayed together – whites and blacks – at the bachelor officers' quarters at Fort Benning, a U.S. Army post located almost 10 miles outside Columbus, and held a practice and clinic there for the doughboys. As a result, the game drew a disappointing crowd of 18,000, about 6,500 below capacity.

After playing in Columbus and staying at Fort Benning again in 1962, Lombardi refused to approve a segregated seating plan at Memorial Stadium and canceled a third game in late July 1963. With Washington's approval, the game was moved on short notice to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The article includes other stories, involving Packers who were traded for having, shall we say, bad attitudes toward their teammates and coaches, and it raises the possibility that both the Packer successes in the 1960s and the rise of the American Football League showed how much the traditional football owners were paying to indulge in their prejudices.  It's also possible that Coach Lombardi recalled the days when Americans of Italian extraction weren't thought of as white folks.  "Maybe more than anything that's why come Sunday night, the winner of the Super Bowl will be presented with the NFL's ultimate prize: The Vince Lombardi Trophy."  Whether the Packers are participating or not.

THE DEMORALIZING AND EXCESSIVELY CAUTIOUS VACCINE ROLLOUT.

Reason's Robby Soave is having none of it. "People who have been vaccinated for the requisite time period can mingle once again. They can have parties and go to restaurants. They can hug and kiss their vaccinated grandparents."  Exactly.  I underestimated the speed and spread of civil disobedience against the excessive shutdowns last April, and will offer no prediction on how quickly social gatherings of people who have had their two doses will become a thing, maskless and in gatherings greater than 10.  Or perhaps more churches will be full on Easter, which is 4 April this year.

ARE WE CURRENTLY UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GRANDPARENTS?

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler lays out a "going Galt" scenario in which the people reject their failed rulers.

Emergently, then, the Big Box business model could fail, and in fairly short order, which would at least give Americans a chance to self-reorganize the production and distribution of goods in our own country. It sure won’t be like 1957 again, but it would give an awful lot of idle people more to do when they get up in the morning. Wait for it, and plan accordingly.

In the meantime, we are treated to the sordid spectacle of Democratic Wokesters endeavoring to destroy what remains of American cultural life. It’s an incomparably stupid and malign distraction from the imperatives of this historical moment. They will not succeed in cancelling those who object to the systematic disassembly of our national language, myth, and meaning, even if we have to go back to the mimeograph machine to keep these things alive.

For all the nostalgia about the twilight years of the American High, we're a lot richer now, although I suspect that twenty iterations of fifteen days to slow the spread have more people discovering the value proposition of tuna casserole or Jello salads, rather than marvelling at the benightedness of it all.  Yes, some of the productivity gains of the past sixty or so years might have gone to information technology types, and yet we use the expression "gains from trade" for a reason.  The wokesters, though?  Brain-brothers of Balph Eubank and Wesley Mouch.  Undermine them with mockery, or withdraw your sanction.

THE MISSION OF THE MIDNIGHT ECONOMIST.

The late William Allen released this column in November, 1988.

Note it includes both a variant on "doodling elegance and diddling rigor" and the "tyranny and poverty" lament I alluded to earlier this week.

Read, and understand, and speak basic sense to laymen.

THE ART BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD.

The American Conservative's Addison Del Mastro offers a tribute to the neon signs of the American High.

Neon, compared to the backlit printed plastic signs that have overwhelmingly replaced it, is a form of art as well as a kind of manual labor. Producing a neon sign requires real mechanical and artistic knowledge, from the delicately bent glass tubes to the proper selection and blending of gases. Colors are produced by tinkering with the gases themselves, as well as with additives and phosphor coatings on the tubes. Many neon signs are not only unique images but unique handcrafted devices.

Unfortunately, like so many other manifestations of the Second Era of American Greatness, it ran afoul of the Aesthetes.

As the early postwar boom gave way to growing environmental and social concerns, neon increasingly took heat for its alleged tackiness, garishness, and for the stereotype that it tended to advertise downmarket or seedy establishments. It’s no coincidence that Vance Packard, Rachel Carson, Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes,” the Wilderness Act, Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification, and anti-neon ordinances all hail from this era.

About Highway Beautification. Both a movement and a 1965 Act nicknamed “Lady Bird’s Bill,” it’s famous for tight regulation of billboards and removal of aesthetically unpleasant (though economically important) land uses like junk yards from public view. But the Highway Beautification Act’s control of roadside advertising also had a depressing effect on neon signage.

I submit that the development of interstate highways, particularly away from the cities, favored those plastic printed signs as something more easily repaired, as the new way of calling attention is to get your sign at least fifty feet high the better to be picked out well before the exit.  (Yes, I'm aware of the Sapp Brothers coffee pots along Interstate 80.)  The good news is that the art has not died.

[W]hat remains of the original neon build-out should not be neglected, especially amid a mood of new aesthetic appreciation. Many of these remaining vintage signs, now roughly anywhere from 50 to 70 years old, are still vibrant and in working order. The preservationist instinct should resist being triggered merely by things that are old, but the solidity and craftsmanship of these iconic devices, and the nearly lost art of neon workmanship that went into them, would seem to suggest some form of preservation.  The older stretches of highway where these original signs can still be spotted are almost like museums or fossil records, places where new, more distant exurban growth or relative economic stagnation have preserved much of the look and feel of the first couple of generations of construction. They should be seen as living compendiums of a distinct piece of American culture and life.

That is, where those original highways haven't been downsized, like much of Route 66 across Illinois, or left to rot, like much of the original Highway One in New England.  In Illinois, more than a few owners of those American High era service stations and roadhouses have maintained their neon, and their tailfin era trappings.

DO YOUR JOBS BETTER.

Reason's Matt Welch sees nothing good in the various efforts by Our Intellectual Betters to grant themselves a monopoly on truthiness.  "If government was efficient and helpful, if journalism was compelling and truthful, if the academe was relevant and unpredictable, their lectures would have far more resonance, and audience."  You'd think that with three outs, it would be time for the other team to bat.

INTERNALIZING STEREOTYPE THREAT?

The affirmative action asterisk is real, and the efforts of Student Affairs types to condition student morale don't help. "Affirmative action policies tend to worsen racial stereotypes and harm cross-racial understanding, in violation of Supreme Court requirements."  Nor do such policies improve faculty morale.

Campus discontent was not limited to [underrepresented] students. The report found that “[g]reater numerical diversity” was associated with faculty dissatisfaction with students’ pre-college preparedness and work ethic, as well as the quality of education their institutions offer.

It’s not enough for “pro-diversity researchers” to achieve diversity by numbers, which is just the “pre-condition” for inclusion policies such as hiring more [underrepresented minority] faculty and making a more “inclusive curriculum,” [Center for Equal Opportunity] author [Althea] Nagai writes.

That doesn't come as a surprise.

Nor am I surprised that Northern Illinois University continue with the same failed policies, hoping, this time, to get different results.

The Academic, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Department will host a virtual town hall event, “What is Holding us Back?” Understanding- isms (Part 1) from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Feb. 4.

The town hall conversation will allow students to engage and ask questions about “Isms,” along with a panel of guest experts. A meaningful dialogue on what are “Isms?” and how they can create barriers to inclusive communities will also be discussed, according to the NIU event page.

Yeah, right, but that's just the usual suspects being true to form.

It could be worse, you could be at the University of Leicester, which is losing all the good of the intellect.

In January, the University of Leicester announced a consultation over proposals across a number of departments. It also plans to cut 60 posts, putting 145 staff at risk of redundancy.

Under the restructuring, the English department would no longer teach medieval literature due to "a drop in demand from undergraduate and postgraduate students in recent years".

If adopted, the changes would also mean the university discontinuing BA English with English language, and MA English Language and Linguistics.

The university said it would instead offer "a range of modules which are excitingly innovative", such as modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity.

The university said the changes would provide a "decolonised curriculum".

A university spokeswoman said this means reconsidering how the subject is taught "to make it more inclusive and reflect emerging developments".

"For example, many reading lists are dominated by white authors," she said.

"This ignores many great [nonwhite] scholars and also means that [nonwhite] students do not see themselves reflected in what they are being taught."

I'm not sure what's more distressing, the business jargon that crowds out the substance, the trendy methods that crowd out the learning, or the category error (which several of the people interviewed in the article emphasize) that equates the ancestry of the scholar with the relevance of the message.

In addition, I wonder whether the very attempts to be more inclusive, whether it be in affirmative action goals, or in decolonised reading lists, impede the development of the next generation of scholars, particularly those holding protected status under the civil rights laws.

A GREATEST TOO FAR.

Utilitarian thinking is empty, and there's nothing like a rigorous price-theoretic argument to show it.

What is nonsensical about the proposition, “A good economic system maximizes the welfare of the maximum number of people”?

Only one quantity can be maximized subject to all others being held at specified levels. You can maximize the welfare of one person provided that the welfare of each of the other people is unchanged.

I'll let Rawlsians struggle with what happens if you treat the welfare of the least-favored person as the constraint.

The moment we admit into consideration the welfare of a second person who potentially interacts, directly or indirectly, with the first person, the literal maximization of the first person’s welfare is no longer ethically desirable. If maximizing the first person’s welfare were truly the goal, then the second person must disregard his or her own welfare and act exclusively as a means of assisting the first person to achieve maximum welfare. The second person, in effect, would be the first person’s slave.

Once the welfare of the second person is admitted to be desirable, we encounter the necessity of making trade-offs. Although very often cooperation of person one with person two enables both persons to increase their welfare, neither person gets all the gains from the cooperation. The gains are shared.

It might be fun to come out of retirement, if only for a while, to pose on a survey of public policy examination a question reading something like, "Last year, the Centers for Disease Control chose to permit 81,000 deaths by drug overdose, 50,000 suicides, half a  million cases of domestic battery, and three million episodes of severe depression ..." in the service of maximizing the risk reduction from Wuhan coronavirus.

SOME SUPER SPREADER EVENT.

A few weeks ago, the Packers won a playoff game, and Packer fans congregated in bars, and the Guardians of Public Morals got worried.  Now the body count is in.  "Thirteen cases of COVID-19 have been traced back to gatherings for the Green Bay Packers playoff games, Brown County health officials said Wednesday."  That's thirteen infections.  "The cases that have been tracked back to playoff partying as of Wednesday [February 3] did not match the numbers of the surge from holiday parties over Christmas and New Year's, although videos and photos that circulated on social media still showed large crowds of people at bars for the games."

The corona scolding, dear reader, comes from the same sort of scolds who thought the Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally would produce a story worthy of Albert Camus.  Four hospitalizations and one death associated with that event in Minnesota, and I'm not persuaded that all the mortality being laid off on Festive Season gatherings more generally was a consequence of those gatherings.

The same people who were advising everyone to isolate at Thanksgiving are now advising everyone not to enjoy the Super Bowl.  "The Biden administration would really prefer that people 'lay low' on Super Bowl Sunday."  Yes, and the hard core Biden voters are probably fine with that.  There's this school of thought in governance that views the population as if children to be supervised by credentialed nannies.  It sounds harsh, but they might be winning the argument.  "[T]he useful idiots of the mainstream media have given up all objectivity and are the direct descendants of Ponytail Man, existing only to make the Taxocrats look good."

I concur with John Hinderaker.  "[D]on’t let the proto-fascists intimidate you into uninviting your family"  Exactly.  We were doing the right thing before the governors started issuing their ukases, and we can calculate our own risks better than those Credentialed Experts, who are enabled by like-minded voters to think of everyone, potential Democrat voter or not, as so many children to be led around.

THOSE NEUTRAL SITE RULES.

Years ago, Northern Illinois University hosted first-round games in the Big Dance.  That mean some of the features on the scoreboard could not be used.  In those days, the games were in the zeppelin hangar, er, Evans Field House, and jumbotron technology wasn't what it now was.  Never mind that, the animations the scoreboard operator could use to fire up the fans had to be turned off.  There might have been some restrictions on how frequently the band could play, even if the opponent's band wasn't along for the show.

It's in that same spirit that some of the home field features cannot be used at Tampa Bay's football field.

In an attempt to keep this "neutral site" game as even as possible for both the Bucs and Cheifs, the league is not allowing Tampa Bay to fire the cannons from their famed pirate ship after touchdowns and big plays.

"The firing of the cannons after big plays is a tradition that defines what it means to be a Buccaneer fan and serves as a signature element of our home game experience at Raymond James Stadium," the team said in a statement released on Tuesday. "However, we also acknowledge and understand the NFL's position with regards to maintaining the integrity of a neutral site atmosphere for Super Bowl LV. While the cannons may not fire in their typical fashion, we look forward to showcasing parts of our tradition while working within the league's guidelines."

Kansas City will be the visiting team again, but that's because Kansas City was the visiting team, representing the upstart league, in the first NFL-AFL Championship Game. That made the Oakland Raiders the home team in the second such game.

The Buccaneers are technically the home team for this Super Bowl, but it has nothing to do with the fact that they are in their own building. It merely has to do with it being the NFC's turn as both conferences alternate who will be the home team each year. That really is only significant as it relates to picking what jersey they want to wear. Everything else -- logos on the field, endzone paintings, etc. -- will all be designed from a neutral standpoint.

Presumably the home team gets to pick locker rooms first? That can matter: at the start of 1994, Wisconsin, because of the alternating home team convention governing the Rose Bowl, got to use the home locker room, and UCLA, which uses the Rose Bowl as their home stadium, had to dress in the visitors' locker room. The Badgers won the game, and the Wisconsin fans won the Fifth Quarter.

HONORING THE MIDNIGHT ECONOMIST.

Long time readers, and more than a few of the introductory price theory students I had the opportunity to work with, will recognize my debt to the various versions of Armen Alchian and William Allen's University Economics.

I consider myself fortunate to have learned intermediate price theory out of George Stigler's The Theory of Price and Alchian and William Allen's Exchange and Production, rather than out of the Henderson-and-Quandt-stripped-of-Lagrangians canonical texts of the day. I'm not sure my students agree, as it is my penchant to ask questions that require them to develop their intuition in quirky ways, rather than scribble a figure or calculate an elasticity.

The organizing principles don't have to be buried in formulas and graphs, and students who develop their intuition are in a better place to make sense of the formulas, should the professor not present the intuition behind the formula.

Gary Galles, who studied with Professor Allen, has compiled a collection of economic insights from University Economics, the various "Midnight Economist" essays, and elsewhere.  Here is an observation that people who tell you "It is for your own good" ought respect.  "Each person is the appropriate, relevant judge of his own condition…no matter what the preferences and assessments of others may be."  There's also a variation on a passage I worked into the survey of public policy course.  "Much of our misery has stemmed from dumb economics—inefficient institutions, inappropriate property fights, wasteful processes, debilitating policies."  The passage I preferred read something like "The world has suffered more tyranny and misery than necessary because people have embraced, or had imposed upon them, dumb economics."  That passage summarizes exactly what the public health mitigation measures are doing.  RIP.

SOME COMMON SENSE FROM A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT.

A Drake professor of English thought she was at Oberlin, or something.  Drake president Marty Martin (not to be confused with theologian Martin Marty) threw a penalty flag.  Let's be charitable, it's a partial penalty flag.

Our Statement of Principles states that anyone who violates the practices and values expressed therein ‘may expect strong and public censure by the administration, faculty and students.’ Indeed, the statement acknowledges that ‘to rebuke a speaker for … the odious nature of their expression is part of the robust and vigorous public debate that is the central purpose of the university.’ This is not about placing prior restraints on speech, as that would be an anathema to our embrace of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. It is about acknowledging when particular instances of speech undermine our goals of civility and mutual respect.

The social media posts from a Drake faculty member that have been widely shared over the past week are in conflict with values articulated in our Statement of Principles. The odious nature of the expression in those posts can be, and has been, interpreted by some Drake students as expressing hostility towards them because of their political persuasion. That is unacceptable. We expect and indeed promote and celebrate vigorous political debate on our campus and across our community. However, when that debate takes the form of demeaning speech, the speaker must hear and understand that such behavior is not welcome at Drake University.

Once upon a time, what the president referred to as "demeaning speech" might better be understood as "bad manners," or perhaps "unprofessional." But in an era of deconstructing everything, that might be the half a loaf we make do with.  Note his continuation.

We are here to help our students become disciplined and informed thinkers. We are not here to tell them what they must think or to convert them to any particular political philosophy or party. All of my Drake colleagues must be ever vigilant to avoid alienating any of our students through speech that conveys to them, ‘you are not welcome here.’

We all have a choice to make. Are we going to pour more fuel on our national political fire or are we going to help find a way to become a more unified people? The goal of unity does not mean foregoing accountability for that conduct which has placed us in this perilous space. Indeed, meaningful and lasting unity is not possible without appropriate accountability. Nevertheless, we must find a way to lower the temperature in our body politic and start working together to solve the array of problems that confront us. We all must strive to find a shared purpose that transcends difference and embrace a reverence for human dignity that transcends conflict.

I'm dubious about a "shared purpose that transcends difference" existing this side of the grave (or outside a corrective labor camp?)  Meanwhile, Drake seeks to put out the fire by bringing the coordinator of the 1619 Project back to Iowa to, you guessed it, "deliver the spring Sussman Lecture on April 8, as part of a community-wide dialogue about systemic oppression and racial equity."  We all know what "dialogue" means, particularly with such question-begging topics on the program.

LEARN TO SHORT BEANS, OR HOW TO DRILL AND TAP.

No, I'm not referring to cashing in on your humanities degree by working at Starbucks or the local sports bar (assuming your blue-city dictators let you serve beer.)  Rather, I'm noting a lament by Inside Higher Ed contributor (and longtime AAUP shill) John Warner about how wokeness on the masthead often covers Dickensian working conditions in the office.

There’s no doubt that the employees of The New Yorker and the faculty who populate higher education are overwhelmingly liberal in their voting patterns.

But these attitudes mean very little in the context of the structure of the institutions. Academia has consciously created an immiserated class of worker to protect the privilege of an elect group, kind of like serfdom, I guess. The management at The New Yorker and Condé Nast are fighting unionization with all the fervor of the robber barons of yore. Thankfully the tools they can use have been limited by the law. We’re not going to see head-cracking Pinkertons dispatched to the Queens two-bedroom being shared by four New York publishing editorial workers.

I’m rooting for the New Yorker staffers. I don’t have much power to aid them except for my Twitter feed, this blog and a willingness to cancel my subscription, but maybe if enough people pay attention, some good will result.

And maybe we can reflect on what bad end is coming for all institutions when we allow our labor to be devalued and disrespected by the system.

That's rich, since the snob appeal of the coastal opinion magazines, and the name universities, is precisely in conferring the credentials to devalue and disrespect precisely those people who don't hold the credentials.

It probably came to this years ago, when the Ruling Class's enablers first in the academy, later in journalism, and finally in entertainment, figured out that they could dress up their hectoring, condescending, and deplorable-shaming as Respectable Opinion. No sooner did the humorless, joyless, and grim Hillary Clinton concede the presidential election than did all of her fans on social media decide it wasn't enough to be upset, no, they started scolding or otherwise being nasty to anybody who wasn't fully in on the wake.

At various times, the Credentialed Elite have gone after farmers and commodities traders; or perhaps it's miners and operating engineers.  May they be damned.

MORE CLARITY ON SHORT SALES.

Any allocation of goods over time involves a long side and a short side of the transaction, and there is often somebody seeking to hedge and somebody speculating.  Sometimes, John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane notes, the short sale is actually the hedge.  "Short selling is a crucial supply mechanism. A lot of regulation is devoted to propping up stock prices, and thus hobbling short selling."  That's part of a longer essay with ample rigor and plenty of sources to study.  Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution also contributes.  "A very general point is that short selling is less different from “plain selling” than you might think, all the more so if you consider dynamic portfolio strategies (which can replicate just about any underlying desired net position)."

Dear reader, make sure you are able to explain what you are doing to your mother-in-law before you venture your retirement money or the cash you've set aside as a reserve for house or car repairs in one of those dynamic portfolio strategies.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 9,662.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 566,951 infections and 11,591 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,126,301 infections and 21,253 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  The governor's current less oppressive ukases are at best halting.  The wrangling between the governor, the mayor of Chicago, and lately the Chicago teachers' union is anything but edifying.

Last week, the governor trailed by 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.