DO TODAY'S ADVOCATES OF INCLUSIVE MATHEMATICS AND WRITING OWE AL CAMPANIS AN APOLOGY?

I purchased a copy of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve shortly after it came out, but for the past quarter century it's mostly languished unread, as working through a thick volume with a lot of charts, tables, and dense prose that didn't address questions of technology diffusion or self-selection wasn't going to help me with my research, and my preference in lighter reading goes to train stories or Tom Clancy.

Note, though, that they worked at a level of disaggregation that would embarrass today's Diversity Weenies, who put what, half the world's population in the Asian - Pacific Islander box.  Here's an excerpt from their summary of chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," at page 269.

East Asians (e.g. Chinese, Japanese), whether in America or in Asia, typically earn higher scores on intelligence and achievement tests than white Americans.  The precise size of their advantage is unclear; estimates range from just a few to ten points.  A more certain difference between the races is that East Asians have higher nonverbal intelligence than whites while being equal, or perhaps slightly lower, in verbal intelligence.

The difference in test scores between African-Americans and European-Americans as measured in dozens of reputable studies has converged on approximately a one standard deviation difference for several decades.  Translated into centiles, this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84 percent of the population of blacks, and that the average black person tests higher than about 16 percent of the population of whites.

The average black and white differ in IQ at every level of socioeconomic status (SES), but they differ more at high levels of SES than at lower levels.  Attempts to explain the difference in terms of test bias have failed.  The tests have approximately equal predictive force for whites and blacks.

Those are the passages that likely set off the rage mob a quarter-century ago, and yet, contemporary efforts to make writing and figuring more "inclusive" sure look like efforts to compensate for something other than biases in standardized tests.  "The disparity year after year, decade after decade, in math competency, reading proficiency, test scores, honor roll status, and graduation rates, in virtually every U.S. school system, between African American students and other students is disturbing."  That's Townhall columnist Jeff Davidson, with a reiteration of something I've only told you what feels like every week.  "This disparity encompasses such issues as the number of hours the television is on in given households, family or parental encouragement for completing homework assignments, a regular workspace, and established hours for studying in a quiet environment, among other factors."

Instead, what the critical studies types do is propose approaches to education suitable mostly for mockery.  In mathematics, being called upon to "show your work" is culturally biased, or something, probably intersectional.  "Thus, requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism."

Perhaps it's not so much the written word, though, as it is those pesky rules of construction. “[S]ubmissions will not be judged on traditional literary or grammatical standards.”  The projects must still conform to length limits, and be compelling.

It's almost enough to make one think that the people pushing "inclusive education" have among their priors that their protected-class charges don't have the necessities to write a coherent essay or derive a proper proof.

THE BEST POLICY PUTDOWN OF THE WEEK.

Honors to Victory Girl Deanna Fisher, for "If this were a game of Uno, [geriatric lockdown advocate Anthony] Fauci would be holding all the Reverse cards in the deck, while the lockdown governors were holding all the Draw Four wild cards. It’s kind of impossible to get anywhere in the game this way."

Here's the elaboration.

While more studies on COVID-19 spread after vaccination are clearly a work in progress, this seems perfectly OBVIOUS to anyone who has looked at how vaccines work. Again, measles are so much more contagious than COVID, and yet we don’t have this impending sense of doom anytime there is a measles outbreak. Why? Because we know that vaccination, while not perfect, STOPS COMMUNITY TRANSMISSION on the large scale. That’s what vaccines are MEANT TO DO. By constantly changing up the messaging on what the COVID vaccine is meant to do, and sounding the doom and gloom bells by saying that nothing changes even after you get vaccinated, the public health community, with Fauci standing at the top of the heap, have shot themselves in the proverbial foot.

Public health officials have lost so much credibility during this entire pandemic, and I think we all tried to give them the benefit of the doubt in the beginning when no one really knew what we were up against. Well, now we know, and we can also see who is addicted to the power trip and those sweet media spots. And the highest paid federal employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has proven that he is a political player rather than a singularly focused scientist. Anything he says now has to be seen through that lens.

Yes, and the petty tyrants who have been micromanaging for over a year are useful to have something as scary as a novel coronavirus to hold onto their powers.

If the coronavirus is indeed disappearing by April, it will be interesting to see the reaction of the authorities. One would think that good news about the epidemic will be welcome, and things will rapidly return to normal. But that may not be what happens. The proto-fascists–you know the governors I mean–have gloried in their ability to use “emergency” powers to bully their fellow citizens. I suspect they will not give up those powers willingly. And the sheeplike behavior of other institutions, colleges and universities for instance, suggests that they too have enjoyed the opportunity to impose conformity. So we may have to fight for our freedom to live normal lives.

The old saecular order is spent. A new one will emerge, but emergence isn't always easy.

That noted, Cuomo impeached, Fauci fired, Newsom recalled, and Pritzker and Evers primaried will be a good start on that new birth of freedom.

AN IN-KIND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION?

Donald Trump notoriously carried on with or married (that is an inclusive or, dear reader) runway models for years, and that provided plenty of copy for the tabloids and fashion and gossip magazines for years.  Until he had the effrontery to successfully run for president.  Then any pop-culture celebration of the extended first family had to be suppressed.

There's a new administration in Washington, and how quickly things change.

They already knew she looked good in a coat.

So the designers at Proenza Schouler decided to dress Ella Emhoff — art student, knitwear designer, fledgling model and stepdaughter of Vice President Kamala Harris — in a couple of coats (plus a pantsuit) for her modeling debut in their new collection, unveiled Thursday for New York Fashion Week.

Designers Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough said the fashion world took quick notice when 21-year-old Emhoff appeared at the inauguration in January, dressed in a quirky Miu Miu coat with bejeweled shoulders along with a starchy white collar. Social media took notice, too.

It's a shame the amusement parks are mostly closed, you could run a Tilt-a-Whirl all day on this spin.

“We very much believe this moment is about the elimination of anything superfluous, the elimination of excess,” Hernandez said, explaining the ethos of the collection at a time when fashion itself can feel, well, superfluous. “Just reducing things to their most essential basic forms. All the buttons are invisible buttons. The pockets are just internal.”

Hernandez said he saw Emhoff representing “this idea of a new beginning, a whole new chapter in American life, in American culture.”

“She’s a nice sort of ambassador of the new moment,” he said, before moving artfully away from any political implications. “You know, via the filter of fashion and art and craft and the world that we all inhabit. She’s sort of the ambassador of that.”

Is that how the self-styled thought leaders say "she has a good personality" or conceal Undeniable Truth of Life N^o 24 these days?

I wonder, if I had to put together a photo shoot or a promotion that would be more persuasive with a cast dominated by scrawny twos, if the modeling agencies' stable of possible participants would be dominated by the spawn of well-connected people?

LET'S SIGN OFF WITH SOME GOOD NEWS.

Pitchers and catchers are reporting.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN.

Imagine a bus that could also run on rails.  "Rails are set into a 12-inch wide concrete channel, which provides clearance for the road wheels and tires. Where rail ends, the channel slopes up, bringing the rubber tires into contact with the roadway. From there, the operator drives to the next rail segment or can go off-route as needed."  If that sounds a little like the Evans Autorailer, to an extent it should.  Washington and Old Dominion used two, and Chicago Aurora and Elgin considered buying some.

There's got to be a better way, though, of providing through service.

The company proposes two types of service. Larger 40 to 65-foot buses would operate station to station along the route while shorter, 24-foot vehicles would pick up and drop off riders on demand, much like an airport shuttle. They would then join the rail route to transfer passengers at a regular station stop.

Why not borrow another bus-on-rails idea, this time from the New Haven's FCD Railbus, and set'em up to run as trains?

The hazard with running relatively low-riding, lightweight buses on rails has always been that the bus never survives an encounter with a freight car, locomotive, or conventional height multiple unit car.  On a dedicated right-of-way, such as a light rail line, or a bus lane with tracks in it, that's not a safety problem.

IS A GENUINE REALIGNMENT IN PROGRESS?

Common Dreams regular Norman Solomon pronounces anathema on lockdown-happy big-state governors.

Like all politicians, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are expendable as far as the corporate system is concerned. If their individual brands lose appeal, plenty of other corporate-power servants are eagerly available.

When elected officials like Cuomo and Newsom fade, the solution is not to find like-minded replacements with unsullied images. The problem isn't the brand, it's the quality of the political product.

But it doesn't have to be this way. And some trends are encouraging.

Genuine progressive populism—insisting that government should strive to meet widespread social needs rather than serve the special interests of the wealthy and corporate elites—is threatening to disrupt the complacency of mainline Democratic leaders who have long coasted on merely being better than Republicans.

More than ever, many entrenched Democrats are worried about primary challenges from the left. Such fears are all to the good. Progressive activism and shifts in public opinion have strengthened movements that are recruiting, supporting and sometimes electing candidates who offer far better alternatives.

"Squad" style candidates running in the looted cities might not play well outside the dependent part of the Democrat base, and that's not the way to appeal to small business owners of all ethnicities who have been slammed by Democrat lockdowns for twenty-times-fifteen-days to slow the spread.

Pajamas Media's Stacey Lennox notes something happening here, but what it is isn't exactly clear.

Does becoming more liberal mean moving more to the left? Because going further left in the Democrat coalition means becoming more illiberal. That is Wokeville, the provenance of safe spaces, speech codes, and cancel culture. It is also the wing that wants to destroy our longstanding institutions by ending the Senate filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and eliminating the Electoral College.

Likewise, what do “farther right” or “more conservative” mean? Conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Candace Owens seek out conversations with decent liberals who agree on foundational principles. There is agreement on free speech, freedom of religion, skepticism of concentrations of power, and open inquiry, even if they disagree on policy solutions. In many ways, it seems those who agree on those fundamental principles are closer to forming a coalition than either party’s wings.

The electoral appeal that might work best is one that appeals to the large cohort of involuntarily homeschooling parents, generally the moms.

As Liesl Hickey reports in USA Today, some are preparing to sue teachers unions in Arizona, California, Illinois, and Virginia. If teachers don’t go back to work, there will be many more such lawsuits. If that fails, it’s time to start firing teachers. In the end, the inflexibility of the teachers unions is a function of its individual members. There is no significant risk associated with in-person instruction. The teachers know it, and the science proves it. Most importantly, the parents know it. If teachers remain intransigent and the Democrats acquiesce in their obstinance, parents will certainly revolt at the ballot box.

More to the point, parents who have set up home-schooling pods, or enrolled their children in private schools, are likely to be opposed to new school bond issues, or to paying their property taxes.

FINDING THE ZULUS' TCHAIKOVSKY AND THE PAPUANS' POULENC?

Orchestral music, and musical composition, might have become part of a division of labor made possible by metallurgy (otherwise no woodwinds or brass) and commercial institutions that made patrons of the arts well-off enough to invest in composers and orchestras.  That history, though, isn't woke enough.  (And, yes, the received forms of Serious Music might seem dated and off-putting.)

The music faculty at Northern Illinois University appear to be taking some of the wokesters' suggestions seriously.

Following the death of Floyd, [music school director Andrew] Glendening said he and Reggie Thomas, jazz professor and chairman for the Diversity, Equity and Belonging committee, decided not to publish a press release that sounds nice and doesn’t accomplish any changes in response to Black Lives Matter.

They formed a Think Tank Committee, composed of faculty, and established a Black Lives Matter statement that was approved by the entire staff, as well as five pledges for diversity that faculty members will incorporate into their curriculum. Faculty have reported what the statement means to them, and they will be required to submit how they’ve incorporated diversity into their teaching as part of the faculty service report.

The Think Tank also recommended five additional committees to create change.

The way to ensure that change doesn't take place in higher education is to create additional committees.

On the other hand, updating the repertoire, or finding creative ways that new people use the tools of melody, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, what have you, to keep the curriculum fresh is what scholars do.

The fifth committee, which studies bias in the music core curriculum, is composed of 10 people — all Music Theory and Music History area faculty, and two NIU alumni advisers. It was formed at the very end of the fall semester, Chairperson Lucia Matos said.

Their mission is to “examine [the] curriculum for implicit bias and move toward inclusive repertoire and approaches to teaching,” Matos said. They will submit recommendations by the end of the spring semester.

“One of the topics, for example, is the fact that textbooks focus almost exclusively on Western classical music,” Matos said. “We also started doing individual examinations of topics, concepts and musical examples from our classes, looking for opportunities to broaden these, especially by adding historical context.”

Next week they will be working in two groups, one for Music History and Literature and another for Music Theory.

Glendenning said if historical topics are inappropriate, they shouldn’t be in there, just because they’re artifacts of history. “If we can’t remove them, let’s either have some auxiliary materials or let’s put some context around them,” he said.

[Music education major Kee] Taylor said music history professors have included non-white composers, but in one of the classes they took, the professor segregated the days that they talked about Black people versus white people, and didn’t join the two.

Courses in music history and theory, however, prepare students to take a graduate exam to get into a master’s program, and those tests include more Beethoven and old music, Glendening said. “So, if we move some things and eliminate some of these things, it may cause some problems,” he said. A solution looks to be teaching this material for the exams but acknowledging the awful things the composers did throughout history.

Director of Percussion Studies Gregory Beyer said for his percussion ensemble, the core curriculum includes a course on Afro-Cuban percussion and Afro-Brazilian percussion.

He is actively bringing guest artists of “Afro-descent,” such as alumni, to come and speak to his students on how to get started in the percussion field.

“Institutions like this don’t exactly turn on a dime,” Glendening said. He is expecting a report by the end of the year by faculty and what they’ve succeeded in doing, and if it’s not good enough faculty will be asked to come back and strategize how to move the needle, Glendening said.

Looking at the report after this year, Glendening will decide whether faculty introduced diversity in such a way that they did not “other” musicians of color. “We don’t really want to have Black music day and kind of, you know, isolate that,” he said.

Wouldn't it be nice to identify some new Rising Stars or some innovators, and make use of their work, without indulging in presentism, or without making the new stars look like tokens?

REMEMBERING RUSH LIMBAUGH.

God has called in the loan, and the mainstream media still don't understand why he was such a phenomenon.  "A Republican conservative and die-hard supporter of former President Donald Trump to the end, Limbaugh was among Trump's most important enablers of his failed effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election with baseless claims of voting fraud."  It's true that Mr Limbaugh recently suggested the left was moving toward Potemkin elections, and if you read that excerpt carefully, you'll note that many of the things he feared became things he and the former president brought up.

Read on, though, and discover that what he was doing was calling attention to things the journalistic establishment of thirty or forty years ago would rather not have noticed.

Journalist Ze'ev Chafets, whose 2010 biography of Limbaugh ("Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One") grew out of a New York Times magazine cover story in 2008, says Limbaugh was one of the top two or three most important figures in Republican politics in the 1990s.

"The reason is his show was heard in every congressional district in the country, and certainly every state, by a huge number of Republicans who almost entirely made up his audience," Chafets says. "He was able, at a granular level, to affect elections. The year Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House (1994), he gave Limbaugh an honorary membership in (the Republican caucus in) Congress because of his influence."

"Coastal Americans" who didn’t listen to Limbaugh had no idea of his "gravitational pull" because they underestimated his communication talents and his smarts, at least initially, Chafets said."They didn’t understand because they thought he was a carnival barker talking to rubes," Chafets said. "He talked about issues, not gossip. His show (consisted of) three-hour monologues without notes and included minute details about arcane matters that most talk-show hosts could not do."

Mr Limbaugh used to quip about "being equal time," which was a pitch-perfect riposte to people who thought the so-called fairness doctrine delivered what it promised.

The 1987 repeal of the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine  gave Limbaugh his head to broadcast his controversial opinions without having to present opposing views. In July 1988, he launched his own show on a talk station in New York City, and he was off to the races: His star was rising, and people noticed.

Back in the day, the licensed radio and television stations were more careful about separating editorial content from just-the-facts news reporting, and that format kept the editorials to a minute or two, which meant anyone offering a "significant opposing viewpoint" had to limit that comment to a minute or two.  The extent of the controversy?  Not much: it was rare that a flaming socialist or an opponent of expressway construction got the opportunity to use that minute or two.

Mr Limbaugh, let the record show, did not get his start raising hell about water fluoridation or intact busing or any of the other old controversies.

Chafets, who grew up in Michigan, remembers when he first heard Limbaugh on the radio as he was driving one day near Detroit.

"Before Rush Limbaugh, you could not hear conservative thought on the radio in the USA – Rush is the first guy to provide that, the rock-and-roll DJ with the news. And that shocked people," Chafets said. "I could not believe it myself. I actually pulled over to listen to what he was saying. I couldn’t believe it."

I don't know enough about Mr Chafets's body of work to evaluate his belief system at the time he heard the program.  My understanding of the Limbaugh phenomenon has been that he called attention to stuff that people could see, and made it clear that they were not in error for seeing that stuff wasn't turning out as well as Conventional Wisdom had it.

That's how Mike Landry summarized the dittohead phenomenon.

As the Rush Limbaugh Show spread across America, conservatives began to learn that they were not alone -- Rush was brilliantly articulating their very thoughts.  I found him to be an insightful commentator: wading through complex, murky, controversial topics, and deftly grasping the real heart of an issue.  “So that’s what this is really about,” I frequently would think to myself following an analysis by Rush.

Despite reaching the mega-big time, Rush has confessed that he was a bit taken aback when media peers did not accept his success.  For instance, he once was publicly insulted at a broadcasting awards ceremony. But that comes with being firmly on the right.  Where conservative pioneer William F. Buckley’s wealth, cultural refinement, and Yale connection could grant him the establishment’s grudging respect and acceptance, Rush Limbaugh, college dropout from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, received none.  A caricature developed of Rush as a rude, loudmouthed shock jock (a newsmagazine once pictured him with flames coming out of his mouth on a cover he shared with ever-vulgar Howard Stern).  The familiar criticisms of all conservatives (racist, bigot, etc., etc., etc.)  are laser focused on Rush,  presumably by people who have never really listened to him. Yet, longtime listeners know how he cares for people, that he is about entertainment and information instead of shock, that he treats callers with respect, and that his opinions are carefully reasoned and compelling.

Mr Limbaugh's signoff show, just before Christmas, might have been his valedictory.

Well, back in late January when I received this diagnosis — and I was shocked. I was stunned, and I was in denial for about a week. I mean, I’m Rush Limbaugh. I’m Mister Big of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. I mean, I’m indestructible. I said, “This can’t be right,” but it was. What I didn’t know at the time that I learned later in the course of the year was that I wasn’t expected to be alive today.

I wasn’t expected to make it to October and then to November and then to December — and yet here I am. Today I’ve got some problems, but I’m feeling pretty good today. God’s with me today. God knows how important this program is to me today, and I’m feeling natural in terms of energy, normal in terms of energy, and I’m feeling entirely capable of doing it today.

With this reflection.

I remember saying to all of you at that time that I had a little bit of understanding of something that had perplexed me for a lot of my life, and that was Lou Gehrig.

Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, New York Yankees, set the record for consecutive games played until Cal Ripken came along decades later and broke it. And on the day that Lou Gehrig announced that he had his disease that was forcing him to retire from Major League Baseball, he said to the sold-out Yankee Stadium, “Today I feel like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

I didn’t understand that. I mean, here’s a guy who’d just been diagnosed with the most terminal of terminal diseases, and I said, “This can’t be real. He can’t really think he’s the luckiest guy in the world. This is just something that he’s saying because it will play well.” I don’t mean to be insulting Lou Gehrig; don’t misunderstand. I’m just saying, how in the world if you’re being honest can you feel like you’re the luckiest man on the face of the earth?

Because he had the opportunity to perform, and to earn the respect of the audience. There are worse ways to face the final curtain.  That show included a charge to the living.

We Americans have adapted to our problems. We’ve adapted to changing evolutionary things in our lives, in our country because of our freedom.

Our freedom has allowed our adaptability. If disaster is coming our way, we don’t just sit there and endure it. We come up with ways to avoid it, to beat it back, to overcome it, but we don’t just sit there and accept it. And, as such, we don’t just resign ourselves to the fact that they’re living in the darkest days because we, at least to this point, still have the greatest degree of freedom of any people on earth.

Now, it’s under assault and under attack and we all know this. But I don’t believe our darkest days are ahead of us. I never have. People have been asking, “You’ve always told us you’d tell us when it’s time to panic. Is it time?” It’s never time to panic, folks. It’s never, ever gonna be time to give up on our country. It will never be time to give up on the United States.

It will never be time to give up on yourself. Trust me.

It may not have been given to Mr Limbaugh to finish the task, and yet the militant normals, and more than a few less-politically-involved people who have been badly served by a year of coronavirus tyranny will not give it up. RIP.

ENUMERATED, LIMITED, AND SEPARATED POWERS.

Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey has something that should be first order of business in the several States.

The stench from [New York] Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo’s nursing-home carnage and months-long coverup is finally causing even some Democratic pols in Albany to turn against the governor. At least 14 have now joined Republicans to demand Cuomo be stripped of his pandemic emergency powers.

And not a day too soon. Cuomo used those powers to shutter restaurants and other businesses, close schools and impose especially heavy-handed restrictions on houses of worship (the US Supreme Court rebuked him on that last count).

Emergency powers should last for a few weeks or maybe a month — long enough to keep the public safe until the Legislature can swing into action. Instead, the governor has wielded emergency powers for 11 months — and for what? One of the worst COVID performances in the nation.

I've been suggesting that the legislatures take ownership of the shutdowns for several months.  It's encouraging to see a former elected official making the same suggestion.

Stripping Cuomo of his emergency powers is politically doable, and the public would benefit. That would put the state Legislature back in charge, ensuring that whatever actions are taken to fight COVID are more balanced and reasonable than what Cuomo did. It’s hard to imagine that lawmakers would vote to shutter churches, destroy businesses and close down schools in their own districts.

They’d have to answer to their angry neighbors and constituents. Albany is largely insulated from that under the dictatorial arrangement.

Even when governors behave more honorably than Cuomo, prolonged emergency powers are a bad idea. After all, if government by one person produced wiser decisions than government by the people’s elected lawmakers, we’d opt for autocratic government all the time. Why choose it during crises?

Eleven months into the pandemic, the public all across the country is revolting against governors whose emergency powers have allowed them to act like autocrats. More than half the states are in the process of passing laws barring governors from closing businesses and schools in a future emergency. Pennsylvania is considering a law to limit a governor’s disaster powers to 21 days, Kentucky to 30 days, Indiana to 60.

Laughably, many of these governors are pushing back, even going to court to hold onto their autocratic powers. They argue that in emergencies, the democratic process is too slow and messy. Like Cuomo, they’re relishing power. But limitless emergency powers are far more dangerous.

Decide for yourself, dear reader, whether it is more dangerous to live in a state where the legislature is reluctant to exercise its authority. In Illinois, the governor is a tool of the Chicago Combine that holds a majority in both chambers of the legislature. In Wisconsin, the governor is of one party, and the legislative majority is of another, and the legislators sometimes seem more interested in making the governor own the shutdowns and the resulting carnage, than in doing their jobs.

WHEN THIRD-PARTY PAYMENT TOTALLY DESTROYS PRICE DISCOVERY.

That prompts John "Grumpy Economics" Cochrane to ask, "Still, has the US really gotten to the point of health care sclerosis and dysfunction that it costs $500 -- on top of money already allocated -- to give someone a shot?"

FASCHING IST.

Here's a timely Nubbelverbrennung, with the Wuhan coronavirus burned in effigy.

The ritual, and the subtitles, are in the Kölner dialect. The meaning is clear enough.

Enjoy, then reflect.  Sober times to come, but perhaps an early April resurrection of normal life, with enough people vaccinated, and the Powers That Be not yet crucifying anyone or throwing them to the lions.

VACCINES WILL END THE PANDEMIC.

Everything else is elaboration.

If you live in a community where the unions refuse to let kids go to school, or if you see the conversation heading in the direction of “We will go back when the kids are vaccinated,” understand you’re in the grip of forever-pandemic mania; fight it as best you can.

We need people to get vaccinated, and the way to speed up this process is to assure people that their lives — their masked, isolated, miserable lives — will change with the shots.

Let it begin with the people who have had their two shots.

Perpetual mitigation, perpetual masking, perpetual physical distancing: this generation's version of the national 55 mph speed limit, which existed in name only long before Our Political Masters -- Congressional Democrats, mostly, lifted it.

A RETURN TO TRADITIONAL SNOW DAYS IN IOWA.

As of this morning, the government schools are back in session.  Note the way in which that came to pass.

[Iowa governor Kim] Reynolds has allowed schools to offer a hybrid plan where 50 percent of their instruction had to be in-person and the other half could be online. But she made returning students to the classroom full-time a priority when she delivered her Condition of the State address in January. The GOP-controlled legislature was swift in getting her a bill to sign.

“It’s unconscionable to think about their social-emotional well-being and to think to not have access to behavioral health,” Reynolds said after signing the bill on Jan. 29. “We have a responsibility to make sure these kids have a safe environment to learn in.”

Now, all school districts will have the option to send their kids to school or have them learn completely online.

It matters less to me what the current policies are, or whether the lockdown scolds -- and, as I got the article from an Iowa public radio affiliate, you know the lockdown scolds get most of the coverage -- don't like them.  It matters more to me that the governor and the legislature worked together to change the quarantines, and share the responsibility for what comes next.  Which will probably still be better than the outcome in Illinois.

OVERWORKING THE TERM "CONSERVATIVE."

The Cold Spring Shops position ought to be straightforward enough.  "The problem, dear reader, is that there is no common understanding about what "conservatism" means in national politics, although, to the extent that it means skepticism of grand constructions and respect for life's hard-earned lessons, it's not what [Vichy Republican S.E. Cupp] is writing about."

That appears to be the understanding National Review's Kevin D. Williamson has, and it makes for an instructive smackdown of Ezra Klein.  "Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices."

Dear reader, do read the whole thing, but let me highlight a few instructive paragraphs.

Unless Klein intends to argue for some kind of benign dictatorship, he must eventually understand that the troubles he identifies in California are baked into the progressive cake. Create a political power that limits property rights, and that power will be used in the interests of politically powerful people at the expense of less-powerful people as long as there are democratic processes that give them the opportunity. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the program is. It doesn’t matter what a regulation was meant to do — it matters what it does.

Intentions do not matter very much, and mere stated intentions matter even less. Klein is blind to that, which is why he is able to write, as though there were something unusual on display: “For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, [San Francisco] has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country.” Rich progressives have always been in favor of school choice and private schools — for themselves. They only oppose choice for poor people, whose interests must for political reasons be subordinated to those of the public-sector unions from which Democrats in cities such as San Francisco derive their power.

Conservatives do not resist many regulations of the sort seen in California because we want cities to be horrible or because we secretly are in the pockets of developers who for some reason want their cities to be horrible; rather, we are skeptical of such schemes because they tend to create artificial shortages, distort markets and investment decisions, and prevent solutions from emerging organically. “MARKETS WORK!” is cartoon libertarianism, but you know what? Markets work. And if you don’t let them work, you end up with artificial scarcity, high prices, and rationing.

That has real-world consequences, currently on display in California to such a spectacular degree that even Ezra Klein is able dimly to perceive them. Maybe he’ll learn something.

As Milt Rosenberg would say, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

THERE'S NOTHING PROGRESSIVE ABOUT OUR PROGRESSIVE OVERLORDS.

Their mind-set is the same as that of the overlords of the Thirty Years' War.

Werner Schuch, Two Riders of the Thirty Years' War and Farmers, 1881, oil on canvas.

Painting from the collection of the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux elaborates.

Yet for centuries, priests and monarchs and court toadies issued such determinations.

It’s nothing short of astonishing that those who today call for a return to such dark-ages’ practices call themselves “Progressive” – and are so uninformed about history as to believe their self-flattery.

It's on the oppressed peasants to push back.  Perhaps they are.  Two experts on domestic terrorism reported some of their work in an establishment magazine, and what they didn't find was the most meaningful finding.

[A] large majority of suspects in the Capitol riot have no connection to existing far-right militias, white-nationalist gangs, or other established violent organizations. We erred on the side of inclusion; we counted an arrestee as affiliated with such an organization if any court documents or news articles describe the person as a member, refer to social-media posts expressing an affinity for a certain group, or attest to patches or apparel that directly indicate support.

Tip of the iceberg?

[T]he demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.

Is it too soon to hypothesize that many of the participants had been deemed "nonessential" by lockdown-mad governors or seen depression and cabin fever among their kids?

Let the ruling classes tremble.

What’s clear is that the Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority. Preventing further violence from this movement will require a deeper understanding of its activities and participants, and the two of us do not claim to know which political tactics might ultimately prove helpful. But Americans who believe in democratic norms should be wary of pat solutions. Some of the standard methods of countering violent extremism—such as promoting employment or waiting patiently for participants to mellow with age—probably won’t mollify middle-aged, middle-class insurrectionists. And simply targeting better-established far-right organizations will not prevent people like the Capitol rioters from trying to exercise power by force.

It's unlikely that the kind of "truth and reconciliation" attempts at "dialogue" will have much effect. On the other hand, if the political class stops ordering people around, that might work.

The exact share of the GOP coalition responsive to extremist White nationalist beliefs or the use of violence to advance political goals is impossible to measure precisely. But polling and other research suggests that the best way to think about it may be through concentric circles radiating out from hard-core believers willing to commit violence themselves to a much broader range of GOP voters who might not become violent personally but express sympathy or understanding for those who do.

Don't say I didn't warn you.  "Did the thought leaders really think that they could stick their fingers in the eyes of normal Americans, and that normal Americans would refrain from being transgressive when everybody else's transgressiveness gets celebrated?"  That was four years ago, and a year of "fifteen days to slow the spread" including a summer of "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" have done nothing by way of counterarguments to the claims of the hard-core believers.

But Our Progressive Overlords show no sign of getting off their high horses.

THE WOKE DOG BARKS.

At the time the morale conditioners at Tennessee's pharmacy program went after student Kimberly Diei for (checks notes) having a social media presence and some musical talent, I noted the silence of the usual suspects.  "I checked Inside Higher Ed for any references to her case. Crickets. Go figure."

It's unlikely that anyone at the (cowardly, because they closed their comment sections) house organ for all woke things defended took up her case because I called attention to it.  But they noticed, and boy howdy, is the ensuing column the seventieth degree of longitude and the highest degree of platitude.

Diei got her bachelor’s degree in biological sciences at the University of Chicago, which is considered one of the nation’s most academically rigorous colleges. She is a frequent participant in class, so much so that she said classmates have complained and approached her about limiting her speaking time.

She said the “toxic” and targeted comments by classmates soon escalated into formal reports, as fellow pharmacy students began to monitor and anonymously share Diei’s personal social media posts with college administrators, claiming they were in violation of the Memphis health science center’s “professional standards” for students studying health and medicine.

Graduate students are a notoriously competitive lot, and professional jealousy playing out through cancel culture doesn't come as a surprise.

While Diei was reinstated at the college three weeks after she appealed the expulsion to the college's dean, Marie Chisholm-Burns​, she said she has had to censor her social media posts ever since and try to guess what might be deemed “inappropriate” because of the health sciences center’s vague policies on professionalism.

Diei says her lawsuit is about more than just her dispute with the college. She’s fighting on behalf of all medical students, especially women of color, who have been forced to curtail their self-expression by administrators who are "judging what’s appropriate and inappropriate" based on "how [it] makes them feel."

“It’s to ensure that other people, especially minorities, are allowed to have their voice and are allowed to live,” Diei said of her lawsuit. “We are more than student pharmacists. We are mothers, sisters and wives. We should be allowed to participate in those roles and live our lives without judgment and without the threat or the fear of losing out on this investment we’ve made to pursue these particular degrees.”

Diei’s case might be one of the first to challenge medical colleges’ professional conduct policies and get national attention, but her experience is certainly not a unique one, said Londyn Robinson, who is in her final year at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Robinson recently became a public advocate for women in medicine when she created the hashtag #MedBikini, which turned into a movement that encouraged female doctors and health-care workers to post photos of themselves in swimsuits.

It was a protest of “professionalism” norms espoused by the field, and in particular, a now-retracted article published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery that said photos in “provocative Halloween costumes, and provocative posing in bikinis/swimwear” are inappropriate.

Women studying and working in medical professions, particularly Black women, often find themselves held to “subjective” standards of social media use policies and how their posts are perceived, said Robinson, who is white. She said it’s frequently the classmates of the targeted women who report them for supposed violations of conduct codes in order to get a leg up in the hypercompetitive medical field. Students will report others to smear them and hurt their chances of getting future residency positions, she said.

“The competitiveness breeds this grotesque idea that it’s easier to report a Black woman or a woman of color for a perceived professionalism violation than it is to respect her,” Robinson said. “It culminates in bullying and getting picked on, being treated like you’re less than. You pray that the school will back you up, and if they don’t, they’ll ruin your life.”

Is anybody surprised that when you replace bourgeois norms with no norms, it becomes difficult for people to conduct themselves in a professional manner and yet have a life outside the clinic?

But I promised you the woke dogs barking, didn't I?

A Black second-year medical student at a university in the Midwest said she was reported by classmates for tweets about her political views. In one of them, she objected to and was upset by students wearing pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” attire to class during final exams. Another post on Instagram reported to her college was a photo of her getting the COVID-19 vaccine; she was falsely accused of “jumping the line” to get the immunization, though it was being offered to medical students at the local health department, she said. Her institution didn’t punish her for either post.

In her view, it’s not just the “competitive nature” of medical colleges and the profession in general that lead to the reports by fellow students -- it’s racism. The vague professionalism policies leave “wiggle room” for students of color in particular to get flagged for social media posts and also leave all students confused about what the standards are, she said. Meanwhile, she’s seen racist and homophobic posts go unaddressed.

“I’ve had friends reported for talking about the George Floyd murder,” said the student, who did not want to be named because she feared retaliation from peers and her institution. “Our very existence, for some reason, is so offensive that they must find a way to undermine us.”

Robinson said she is “very privileged” to have received the support of her own medical school administrators, who praised her after she started #MedBikini. She said the support she got was in part due to her being white, and noted that how professionalism policies are enforced depend entirely on the institution and who’s in charge of enforcing the standards.

On the other hand, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education got it right the first time.

Greg Greubel, a staff attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, which is representing Diei, said her lawsuit against the University of Tennessee is a “lead case” on the issue of college students’ social media freedoms. The courts have yet to firmly say whether it’s constitutional for graduate programs to uphold “vague” and “arbitrary” professionalism standards. Diei’s main contention is the health sciences center was unable to tell her exactly what it defines as inappropriate and appropriate off-campus speech, which leaves students unsure of their rights and the activities that can get them in trouble, Greubel said.

“We’re not saying in the lawsuit that everything that a student does on social media is perfectly fine and there are no bounds to what schools can discipline students for in social media speech,” he said. “If there are these bounds to the First Amendment’s protections on social media, we want to get some guidance on what those are.”

There are constitutional protections, to be sure. Maybe dismissing traditional standards of probity, including "presenting yourself more subtly than an entertainer would," is another experiment against reality, whose end will come soon enough.

A POST-MODERN FEAST DAY FOR FLAWED SAINTS, BUT WITH NO GOOD EATS.

That's "Presidents' Day," the attempt to be inclusive rather than take two separate days off for Washington and Lincoln, unless you're in Illinois, where the public officials got a four day weekend this year as the state still observes Lincoln's Birthday on the 12th.  Reason's Billy Binion correctly describes the holiday.

Presidents aren't saints. They aren't monarchs. They aren't celebrities. And they aren't your friends! The executive leader is an employee of the country—someone whose job was, and still should be, limited in size and scope.

It has become something decidedly different over the years, with each president becoming more powerful than the next. That maybe explains, to some degree, why the political fangirling has grown in tandem.

Not to mention, the presidency becoming destructive to a state of good repair in the country, with each Chief Executive being put in office to sign executive orders that impose the preferences of one faction on members of the other faction, and then to sign continuing resolutions that continue business as pretty much usual.

Democrats, according to [Chicago Law's Eric] Posner, benefit more from a heightened executive role than do Republicans, particularly on issues like climate and immigration. But that comes with a huge caveat: "True, when Mr. Trump took power, he reversed some of Mr. Obama's unilateral actions, causing damage to the environment, the immigration system, health insurance and financial regulation," Posner concedes. "He also used his unilateral powers to unleash a destructive trade war."

Put more plainly, those in Posner's camp are "in for a rude surprise when the other team wins, notes Reason's Jacob Sullum. For now, however, the tug of war continues: Biden kicked off his tenure with a series of executive orders, many of which just undid Trump's free-flow of directives.

That cognitive dissonance isn't going away anytime soon, and it will take quite some time before we see the air let out of the presidency. Maybe we never will.

On the other hand, Donald Trump's detractors have it about half right. Take frustrated technocrat Tom Nichols.

The Republicans have repeatedly betrayed both Lincoln and the Union. The party whose first president died as a martyr at the hands of an insurrectionist is now controlled by empty, hollow people who rolled their eyes and lazed their way through the trial of a president who was manifestly guilty of inciting an insurrection.

If nothing else, perhaps this disgusting dishonoring of the memory of our 16th president should persuade the rest of us to bring back the actual Feb. 12 and Feb. 22 birthdays of Presidents Lincoln and Washington as national holidays, so that we do not confuse their heroism and nobility with the cult of personality practiced by modern Republicans.

Nobility? The last five occupants of the Oval Office have been a cuckold, a legacy, a fake messiah, a reality show host, and a coot. And yet, each has his adoring fans.

And Abraham Lincoln saw the tragedy coming.

While the 1830s mobs “hang gamblers, or burn murders,” he cautioned, tomorrow’s mobs would hang and burn the innocent — “and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”

While after January 2021’s Capitol riot we’ve all seen the ruthless efficiency with which our government is capable of cracking down on lawlessness, we too saw the summer before, when months of attacks on federal officers, politicians, police, private homes, courthouses, and innocent bystanders met calculated indifference and shrugged excuses for “historic racial injustices.”

This too, was well familiar to Lincoln, who knew the mob will go further and spread deeper, warning, “by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.”

“On the other hand,” he predicted, “good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose.”

Combined, he warned, these seemingly opposing feelings come to one terrible conclusion: “the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the People.”

There's nothing like annoying and frequently ineffective executive orders, whether signed by the coot, or by the various dictatorial (and that's only the beginning of a list of their shortcomings) governors, that will make people tired of, and disgusted with, "government" that offers them no protection.  We could start, as Mr Nichols notes, by not worshipping "an abstract office."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 9,693.

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 608,411 infections and 12,428 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,162,154 infections and 22,121 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  Sunday evening's  local news coronavirus countdown noted more Illinoisans having received at least one dose of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines than there are Illinoisans reported as infected, by their count.  That report also noted a statewide recovery rate of  98 percent.

Last week, the governor trailed by 9,623.

As of 1 February, 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.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

It's wise to test any new wiring or control system on a locomotive BEFORE the body shell goes on.

The Ring Engineering system checks out on the first Atlas F unit so converted.  Locomotive is fifty years old, Keil-Line Mars light circuit is late twentieth century, it seems to be working.

One unit is good for nine or ten freight cars up that slope, which is the ruling grade on the railroad.  There are glimpses of the carbodies and other repowering projects visible in the video.

BE NEIGHBORLY.

Unless you're a sour-ass coastal newspaper correspondent, you're more likely to get along with people who are different than you when they're your neighbors.  "Their results provide compelling evidence on the importance of diversity: increasing contact between different groups in natural settings can pay long-run dividends by promoting tolerance, social cohesion, and pluralism."

That's the scholarly version, complete with sources, cross-tables, and notes.

The Cold Spring Shops version goes, "give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."  Always encouraging, though, to see a working hypothesis survive peer review, even if it's other people writing the articles.

THEY'LL TURN US INTO PAUPERS BECAUSE WE'LL BE EASIER TO PLEASE.

That might be the effect of the continued Wuhan coronavirus mitigations.  Sandy Szwarc has a two part essay entitled "How a Virus Was Used To Transform a Free Country" that argues a number of things, although the effect might be the pauperization and infantilization of many formerly autonomous people.  Here's the opening of the first part.

The economic consequences of these directives – masks; social distancing; testing; travel, school and business restrictions − have led to historic levels of job losses and businesses stopping new hiring. People looking for work have been crippled from finding jobs. Tens of millions of Americans are at risk of losing their group health insurance. As Americans grow increasingly more desperate, they are more willing to be convinced to accept government bailouts.

But public officials created the desperation in the first place.

Americans are coming to understand that the crisis resulting from the government lockdowns and restrictions was used to convince politicians to support the CARES Act. This Act, however, was never about health or helping working Americans. It can best be described as bailouts in return for socialism.

It’s undeniably evident that the CARES Act was focused on the progressive tenet of redistribution of wealth and growing the numbers of Americans dependent upon the government. It also epitomizes imprudent government spending and spending not free from corruption by special interests. Money is taken from working taxpayers, given to those who aren’t, expanding social programs and the size and power of government entities, while lining the pockets of special interests. That’s socialism.

I'm not persuaded that it's socialism. Neither are actually existing socialists.

I don't see any collective ownership of the means of production; rather, as the essayist suggests, the rent-seekers are making out in ways that old-fashioned grifters can only envy.  I don't see any democratic decision making; rather, as the essayist suggests, I'm seeing top-down control where previously there wasn't any.  The apotheosis, in other words, of Technocratic Expertise.  "Legislators have delegated much of their job to unelected bureaucrats, resulting in regulations that are often in an agency’s own best interest."  It's on the Congress to rein in the Centers for Disease Control, even if that means owning some of the mistakes.  It's on the state legislatures to rein in their governors, even if that means sharing some of the responsibility for the policy errors, and there will be policy errors.  "Deep within government there lies a shadow government of unelected officials—often known as the “administrative state,” who are a part of the executive branch, but who violate the separation of powers by exercising both executive and legislative, and sometimes judicial, power."  What they're getting away with now, they'll treat as the start line for what they will attempt to get away with in the next "crisis."  (And people in the political class justify their existence by hyping up crises.)

The second part argues how the pauperization will continue.

The public is finally coming to realize that there is no end in sight in the government’s plans to never allow the country to return to normal in the foreseeable future. The fact that herd immunity, from natural immunities preexisting from past coronavirus infections and people who’ve already had the virus, is making the pandemic mandates and the “vaccine” increasingly less critical, is being ignored.

Now, even the “vaccine” won’t allow life or business to return to normal. Anthony Fauci has threatened that government mitigation measures will last two years, continuing into 2022; some academics have advocated for mandates to continue years until the virus is completely eradicated (which will be never, as most coronaviruses become endemic nd part of the mix of seasonal viruses we have every year, and resemble the common cold); and despite the fact that the World Health Organization advises against mask wearing among the general public, stakeholders are saying that normal life (without masking, social distancing and other restrictions) won’t be permitted until after 2022, even after “lockdowns” are lifted.

All of this means that the projected economic and job recovery may not even begin until after 2022, at the earliest.

It's going to be on Australians and New Zealanders to turn on their leaders, who are imposing mandates each time a koala coughs.

In the States, it's going to be on libertarians and post-Trump Republicans to make the administrative state and the Democrats (and their enablers in news, entertainment, and the academy, but I repeat myself) own the shutdowns, own the overdoses, own the depression, own the suicides.

TODAY'S LOGIC LESSON.

Deflection is as deflection does, and sooner or later it's going to end up going wrong.

Donald Trump is not the only politician who revels in violent political rhetoric, who excuses or invites political violence. Some people, such as [his lawyer, Michael] van der Veen, think that this exonerates Trump, but in fact it is a reason to convict him. After years of politicians playing with fire, one of them finally sparked an inferno. This is the moment for senators—for all of us—to begin re-establishing the basic norms of politics necessary to sustain our Constitution.

It's more than one of them, notes George Mason's Adam J. White, and it's not changing many minds.

In terms of both violent political rhetoric and actual political violence, politicians and pundits in recent years have raised temperatures and lowered standards. And so today we see members of Congress and other politicians, over and over again, either using violent rhetoric recklessly or excusing (and thus encouraging) actual violence—from excusing the violent episodes during the summer 2020 protests to encouraging their followers to accost officeholders in public or in their homes.

In such rhetoric, our political leaders cast struck matches on the ground. Most of the time nothing has happened. Other times, the flames that erupted—from lives lost or property destroyed in protests to assassination attempts on members of Congress—were sufficiently distant in time and place from the incendiary rhetoric to give politicians plausible deniability. But on January 6, the connection became virtually impossible to ignore: President Trump and his supporters, after months of reinforcing the big lie of a “stolen” election, gathered a mob in Washington, sent it to the Capitol, and then let all hell break loose.

We are lucky that more violence has not erupted around our politics in recent years—though it is hard to ascribe “luck” to the fact that we’ve only seen the Capitol ransacked, city neighborhoods burned, and congressmen shot. Still, for all the struck matches that have been strewn about, it could have been worse.

Bourgeois manners. If they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them.

BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING MARTYRS.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass suggests that the senescent political class would like to make examples of all seventy million Trump voters as terrorists and insurrectionists.

Trump is gone. Many Americans want to move on. The people are worried about their jobs, whether they can get the vaccine, whether their children's schools will open.

The Democrats don't have the votes to convict him. Chief Justice John Roberts is not even presiding, as required by the Constitution for impeachments of sitting presidents. The job should fall to Vice President Kamala Harris as president of the Senate. But the Biden White House doesn't want her fingerprints on this, lest it backfire, so she steps back to allow Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to preside.

Democrats want to keep Trump politically alive for their political reasons. But what are they?

We'll see. As of now it's on members of the opposition, whether as Republicans, Libertarians, or any other alignment to be calling for the reopening of the schools, the lifting of the quarantines on ordinary business, the restoration of live sports with live audiences, and the recall or impeachment of the dictatorial governors.  It might be easier to keep up the Trump-tinfoil-hat skeer.

Implicit in all of this are the threats and shaming of 74 million Trump voters if they dare question the legitimacy of mail-in voting, which helped Biden win the election and which the Democrats now seem bent on federalizing to their advantage, or any aspect of election security measures.

I'm on record here and now that absentee voting is not bad per se. Neither is mail-in voting. But requiring voters to produce identification is not voter suppression, verifying signatures on absentee and mail-in ballots is following the law, and legislatures establish election law.  I'm going to have more to say of that, but it's Sunday, and there's a sermon to preach.

If that makes me deplorable, make the most of it!

What is frightening is that Democrats and some of their corporate media allies have been busy conflating all Trump voters with "domestic terrorists." In a recent essay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, by no means a conservative, asked: "What acts should be criminalized by new ‘domestic terrorism' laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because — just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws — their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition."

That brings me to the rather strange looking title of this post.  The chaplain of the Senate offered a false dilemma to the impeachment jury duly empaneled.

As he opened Tuesday's Senate trial with prayer, Senate Chaplain Barry C. Black said: "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

"Mighty God," Black continued. "Could it really be that simple?"

No, it was never simple. But this is more than simple power politics now.

And it should frighten us all.

That's the opening stanza of a James R. Lowell poem, "Once to Every Man and Nation."

It's also the opening stanza of a hymn of the same title, based on Lowell' but with different continuing stanzas in the traditional A-A-B-A' song form, and set to a draggy tune called "Ebenezer."  Perhaps that it's from a Baptist hymnal is fitting.  Those opening words might well be Aquarian, but it gets gloomy right quick.  The third stanza is a real morale-builder.

By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv'ries ever
With the cross that turns not back;

New occasions teach new duties,
Ancient values test our youth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.

Every so often it's the youth testing the ancient values, and that generally does not turn out well.

I FIND YOUR LACK OF GRATITUDE TROUBLING.

Last year, I decided I'd had enough of eleemosynary institutions behaving like cable companies.

It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled "Renewal Notice" or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution.

I'm considering reviewing my donation habits, in particular to reduce funding or end it completely, for any cause, no matter how meritorious, that engages in this form of official-looking begging.

Habitat for Humanity were the first to be sanctioned, and DeKalb's Salvation Army are on notice.

Chicago's Anti-Cruelty Society are also, effective immediately, on the Index.  No acknowledgement of my Christmas present, yet, but in addition to the annoying "Renewal Notice" they're also sending out mailings marked "Second Notice," as if I'm late on my electric bill, or something.

Sorry, no, we're done.  The principal mission of the society is to care for stray cats and dogs, although they're complicit in the banning of elephant acts in Illinois circuses, meaning children of all ages have at best a dog and pony show in their neighborhood.  Buh-bye.

GIVE ME TAMPERING WITH SPRINKLES.

Free agency, meaning the market for football players, is under way. "Culvers publicly recruiting JJ Watt to play for the Green Bay Packers."  As far as I know, that's not a conflict of interest.

SNOWFALLS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE A THING OF THE PAST.

Let's take a look out the back window at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

Groundhog Day, 2011.

Groundhog Day, 2014.

Groundhog Day, 2015.

Groundhog Day, 2019.

Groundhog Day, 2020.

Groundhog Day, 2021.

If there is an anomaly over the past dozen years or so, it is the absence of snow at Christmas.  Large snowfalls for Hallowe'en or Armistice Day, on occasion.  Mild conditions extending through the Festive Season to be followed by an onslaught of the polar vortex, more than once.

LET THE RECKONING BEGIN.

It's not quite "The Gods of the Market Place tumbled," but perhaps some of their "smooth-tongued wizards" will have to withdraw.

You would have to look far and wide to find a person more celebrated by progressives and most of the national media in 2020 than Andrew Cuomo. You would have to look far and wide to find a political group more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than the Lincoln Project. And you would have to look far and wide to find a place more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than California. And in the last 24 hours, all three fell from their high pedestals and landed with a hard “thud.”

Own it, Joe Biden.

What’s the theme that ties together Andrew Cuomo, the Lincoln Project, and California’s governing class? Since 2015 or so, a whole bunch of people who hated Donald Trump — and I am among those who believe the former president earned his animosity and scorn — chose to believe that anyone who stood in opposition to Trump had to be one of the good guys. A huge swath of the media world, elites across American society, and donors large and small, conflated political agreement in opposition to Trump with all other positive virtues. Outspoken opposition to Trump turned into an all-purpose badge of righteousness that many believed would outweigh or outshine any other issues or character flaws.

Perhaps it is the end of the beginning of the latest populist insurgency. "You made this bed, progressives. We tried to hold these guys accountable, but you wouldn’t listen to us. The only way we get better results is if you guys hold your own guys accountable."

So mote it be.

SOME WISDOM FOR A WINTER'S DAY.

Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw offers a "Conservative Guide to the Culture Wars."  It's uneven in places, probably not going to be as timeless as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.  And yet, "America is worthy of our love and patriotism" bears repeating.

TELL THESE NIMRODS TO SHUT UP.

Stephen Kruiser is ready to party, and if throwing a party is an act of rebellion, so be it.

My math skills are pretty good and I’ve lost count of how many times the [Centers for Disease Control] and [geriatric AIDS researcher Anthony] Fauci have been wrong about something and ended up contradicting themselves this past year. They shouldn’t be allowed to express opinions about the weather at this point. This isn’t a concern for the wellbeing of the public, it’s a power lust fetish. These people don’t actually care if you drop dead tomorrow. Sure, they’d prefer you stay alive just so they can tell you what to do but they know that there are plenty more where you came from.

One the most disturbing aspects of the last year has been watching American citizens casually give up various freedoms, yielding to government tyrants at all levels. It’s been sad to watch a variety of rights dying with a whimper.

Those of us who have never believed that bureaucrats are our betters have been pushing back. It’s time we get louder though. It’s true that some of the COVID restrictions will be rolled back now that Grandpa Gropes is in the White House. They need to try and give him an economic boost, after all. Many of these protocols are going to be around for long time though. Tyrants don’t yield power. Anthony Fauci and his psychotic ilk have no interest in relinquishing the hold they have on at least half of the U.S. population.

Buy beer. Disobey. Respect businesses that prefer their customers wear a Biden muzzle, but take your business elsewhere whenever you can.

Most of the lockdown-obsessive governors are running for re-election in 2022.   Turf them out.