GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,169.

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 857,401 infections and 13,621 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,279,772 infections and 23,793 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.

The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over seven million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.  I'm encouraged that Republicans seeking state office are going to make that a campaign issue.

Let us also note the outcomes of our Easter Monday projection.  Although there's something happening in Michigan, where even the lockdown-happy governor there is out of ideas, the rapidly-rising infection curves of the winter break or last summer have still not materialized. the latest outbreaks seem to be in the still locked down states, and the hospital capacity warnings (anybody else remember the original rationale for all this pain?) are mostly silent.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,167.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.

As of 29 March, 10,125.

As of 22 March,  10.095.

As of 15 March, 10.070.

As of 8 March, 10,017.

As of 1 March, 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 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.

BLESS ME, THIS IS PLEASANT, DINING ON THE RAILS.

Despite occupation and communism, the independent contractor Wars continues to operate Polish dining cars.

Created over 70 years ago, the Wars company (originally known as Przedsiębiorstwo Wagonów Sypialnych i Restauracyjnych or “Sleeper and Restaurant Cars Company”) is now a veritable institution on the European railway network, operating a host of sleeping cars and couchettes for domestic and international travel, as well as food and drink trolleys.

But the company’s name has in Polish become all but synonymous with its dining cars, serving up a taste of Poland – everything from hearty pierogi to piping hot żurek fermented-rye soup – in sleek and comfortable surroundings. Wars dining cars have fostered countless anecdotes, inspired songs, and generated a large following among contemporary train buffs.

And recently, those restaurant cars have been even more of a welcome sight, as they have become the only sit-down restaurants in Poland allowed to remain open amid coronavirus restrictions.

That doesn't roll off the tongue quite like "Catering by Fred Harvey," and yet, it's there, and still operating.

The railway dining cars quickly became notorious for the vast quantities of alcohol consumed by passengers inside. In one entry in her post-war diaries, Polish writer Maria Dąbrowska described one train journey as “a little nightmare”:

...

Trains rarely ran on time, and journeys that were supposed to take between six and ten hours could stretch to 16 hours, providing ample opportunities to foster new friendships, among plates of comfort food and glasses of beer and vodka.

“The times were different, most of society used the trains, hardly anyone could afford their own car,” former bar car manager Jerzy Gidelski told Gazeta Wrocławska in 2008. “That is why in bar cars you could meet people from all walks of life.”

In crowded corridors, passengers from all classes and ages would strike up conversations, which inevitably reached their conclusions over the porcelain tableware of the Wars dining car. By the mid-1970s, 114 restaurant cars were running on the railways.

Gosh, if I can find evidence that Polish millennials like their Wagonów Sypialnych i Restauracyjnych, might I persuade Amtrak to give us our dining cars back?

FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

Here are this week's collection of interesting posts that caught my attention.  Follow the links for elaboration.

1.  Reason's Robby Soave shakes his head.  "And some in the media still wonder why Republicans and independents are so distrustful of them."

2. Paul S. Levy has had it with universities being run by craven and stupid people.  "Donors need to close their wallets, trustees need to fire administrators who show their contempt for freedom of speech and due process, and if that is not possible, they should take their expertise and their philanthropy somewhere else."

3.   Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is all about using the universities to play with ideas.  "If your worldview is so brittle and delicate that it can’t survive exposure to someone who disagrees with it, you’ll have a hell of a time participating in a free society."  It might be that the illiberalism of the Florida legislature is a response to the illiberalism of the one-party campus, and yet, offsetting wrongs do not better thinking make.

4.  Victory Girl Kim Hirsch has low expectations for the coot's executive orders attempting to restrict homemade firearms.  "Only a reversal of the social pathologies permeating our cities would stop [the latest outbreak of shootings in Chicago.]"

5.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan charges the reader with owning her education.  "Don’t rely on your literature professor to get you there; as Theroux notes, you might get a propagandist. And anyway, you’re supposed to have cottoned to the scandal of great fiction a good many years before you get to college."

6. John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane writes long posts, that often have pithy abstracts.  (Anybody who ever got one of those "add more observations and take out five thousand words" revision requests from The Review of Economics and Statistics understands how that works.)  Because baseball season is under way, we offer a doubleheader.  First, "If your game is to argue for more taxes and transfers to fix income inequality, that is a dandy subterfuge as no amount of taxing and transferring can ever improve the measured problem!" It might be that it's pre-fisc income inequality that is the case for the tax and transfer regimen, and yet, knowing what the fisc does is also important.  Second, "Why is the Janet Yellen I know and respect giving voice to such nonsense?"

7.  The roads are fine!  I also commend "endemic congestion."

8.  Too much risk aversion is too risky.  Michael Barone continues, "So, this one-dimensional risk-averseness starts to look like an urge to control the movements of others." Not only that, the Nurturant Parent party is more harmful to its children than the Stern Father.

9.  End corona tyranny.  "Infectious disease experts can no longer rule our society. We must stand up to them and dismantle the public health police state. For over a year, the commissars of the public health police state have inflicted enormous pain and suffering on their human subjects, in conducting their ongoing, pseudo-scientific social experiment."

10.  Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, "[G]overnment will restrict your liberties for far less than 500k deaths!"

11.  Power Line's Ammo Grrrll, "People of color are racing to get into White Supremacy Central."  Going to make for an interesting Democrat coalition when all those Central Americans discover they're on the hook for reparations, isn't it?

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES.

Chicago's travel and entertainment businesses face problems beyond the governor's lockdowns in ramping back up.  What was I saying about "mask up, shut up, and wait for the welfare checks?"

Business reopening as vaccination rates continue to climb and people going back to work is good news, right? Obviously, it is, assuming employers can find enough interested and qualified applicants to fill the openings. But CBS Chicago is reporting that the owners of bars and restaurants are increasingly having trouble making that happen. Multiple restaurant owners are reporting that their former employees were expected to be eager to return to getting a steady paycheck now that the vaccines are more widely available, but many of them are not interested. Some have left the industry altogether. And few new people are applying for these food and beverage service jobs. The owners are attributing this issue to a combination of big COVID relief or enhanced unemployment benefits and a dislike of the new rules imposed on them because of ongoing pandemic restrictions.

Part of the problem is that it's the line workers, such as stewards and waiters, who have to ask patrons to keep their masks on except when food is served, and that's risking abuse for relatively little pay.  All the same, it's hard for Jazz Shaw not to say "Told ya so," specifically, "The government at nearly every level was in such a rush to make sure it looked like they were 'doing something' at the beginning of the pandemic that in too many cases, not very much thought was given to what would happen when we finally came out on the other side." That presupposes Our Political Masters had "coming out the other side" in mind. But as several columnists have noted, the lockdown tyrants seem to be enjoying the power trips.

THE DISSERTATION USED TO BE THE BASIS OF A DEBUT PAPER.

That was the standard when I was writing mine, and I managed to get two refereed articles, and the beginnings of a third, and an overly ambitious fourth, out of it.  Over time, a positional arms race broke out, in which graduate students strove to get part of their dissertation published before they hit the job market, and apparently that was a requirement in Red China.  Until recently.   "Growing numbers of Chinese universities are dropping the requirement for Ph.D. students to publish papers in journals in order to graduate."  What's interesting is that the requirement has elements of a positional arms race in it.

Another proposal put forward by Li Yusheng, an adjunct Ph.D. supervisor at Nanjing Normal University, points out that this demand by universities “lacks legitimacy” and “could infringe Ph.D. candidates’ rights to obtain degrees and be assessed fairly.”

Zou Jianjun, a professor in the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Central China Normal University, told Times Higher Education that the adoption of mandatory publication over the past two decades “was mainly driven by the benefits it offers for subject evaluation and university rankings rather than the commitment to guarantee the quality of Ph.D. education.”

Other academics agreed that closer supervision and more holistic assessment were a better option than effectively outsourcing a key graduation requirement to journal editors.

“For students who made contributions to research projects with a long time horizon and extreme difficulty, especially the ones in basic theoretical research, there should be more flexible and comprehensive graduation assessments based on the students’ research areas and subjects,” said Zhang Ruomei, a research assistant in South China University of Technology’s Institute of Public Policy.

Zou added, “Institutions have their own rigorous procedures to assess postgraduates, where they have to go through research proposals, pre-defense, anonymous peer review and the official defense. The root of the long-lasting problem lies in some evaluation requirements implemented by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.”

Pursuit of higher rankings and subject ratings also led to academic publication often becoming a mandatory requirement in academic recruitment.

It might be that the publication requirement cuts down on the number of wishful-thinking dissertations, if some of the work goes out for external review. On the other hand, it's on the faculty to help their students develop dissertations that are proper academic contributions, which, if submitted to the proper outlet, ought be validated as peer-reviewed publications.

THE LIMITATIONS OF TECHNOCRATIC EXPERTISE.

It's likely that some version of a piece of academic humor that might have been "The Laws of Humanistics" or perhaps "Rules for Experimenters" is still making the rounds in the dorms and frat houses.  One of the entries read, "If facts do not conform to the theory they must be discarded."

Perhaps it is in taking that rule seriously that one Anthony Fauci, M.D. was rewarded by becoming the highest-paid Washington bureaucrat.  Texas authorities have lifted many of their corona ukases, going so far as to allow baseball teams to fill their stadia, and disaster has not followed.  So the doctor is looking for epicycles.  “It can be confusing because you may see a lag and delay because often you have to wait a few weeks before you see the effect of what you’re doing right now, There are a lot of things that go into that. When you say they’ve had a lot of activity on the outside, like ball games, I’m not really quite sure. It could be they’re doing things outdoors.”

That's the sort of thing that gives purchase to assertions such as Donald Trump's "we are being governed by stupid people," or George Wallace's "pointy-headed professors who couldn't park a bicycle straight."

It also isn't wearing well with Normals who have long since seen through the tyranny.

Fauci claims that there is COVID fatigue, and he is right.  I don’t know anyone who isn’t sick and tired of being locked down during the past year.  However, what the MSM and Dr. Fauci don’t understand that there are many Americans who have Fauci fatigue.  And unlike the COVID cases in Texas, that number is growing.

The article also notes that the one thing Texas has been doing a lot of is testing? Why don't we hear Nancy Pelosi chanting "testing, testing, testing" any more? Is it because the testing is making clear that the corona tyranny is now a greater threat to our health than the Wuhan coronavirus?

LET'S PLAY SPOT THE LOSERS.

That's a game started around the time of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, with strategist Charles Peters writing an essay so titled that now seems to be well hidden to search engines.  Used to be, we played that game with countries.  It's also possible to play that game with states, using survey data highlighted by the latest Power Line Geek in Pictures.

Possibly, "most progressive governor" J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) is working on a percentage.

Or perhaps it's an election strategy.  Who you can't scare to death with ineffective business closures, you scare away with higher taxes.  Where the money will come from to prop up the remaining, primarily Democrat voters, remains to be seen.

DID HENRY EVERY GET TO THE OAK ISLAND MONEY PIT FIRST?

He might have been to Rhode Island.

The first complete [Yemeni] coin surfaced in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a spot that had piqued [metal detector Jim] Bailey’s curiosity two years earlier after he found old colonial coins, an 18th-century shoe buckle and some musket balls.

Waving a metal detector over the soil, he got a signal, dug down and hit literal paydirt: a darkened, dime-sized silver coin he initially assumed was either Spanish or money minted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Peering closer, the Arabic text on the coin got his pulse racing. “I thought, ‘Oh my God,’” he said.

Research confirmed the exotic coin was minted in 1693 in Yemen. That immediately raised questions, Bailey said, since there’s no evidence that American colonists struggling to eke out a living in the New World traveled to anywhere in the Middle East to trade until decades later.

Since then, other detectorists have unearthed 15 additional Arabian coins from the same era — 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island and two in Connecticut. Another was found in North Carolina, where records show some of Every’s men first came ashore.

That's a lot of top pocket finds, and not an excited narrator or spurious reference to the Romans to be found.

THE POTENTIAL ENTRANTS ARE ALREADY THERE.

David Kirp suggests that the U.S. News-favored institutions clone themselves.  "Harvard-San Diego, Yale-Houston — this idea is not simply off the table in academe."  The onus really ought be on the University of California at San Diego to run with this -- they have the geographic location going for them, and without the sports impedimenta of the Los Angeles or Berkeley; or in Houston the University of Houston, already with some sports visibility, or Rice, which is not without some chops already, to take up the challenge.  Mr Kirp might even recognize the opportunity.

Most enterprises where demand far outstrips supply would seize the opportunity to expand. A handful of public universities like Arizona State have done precisely that. Last fall, Arizona State enrolled more than 128,000 undergraduate and graduate students at campuses across the state and online. Even as Arizona State has become bigger and more egalitarian — the number of undergraduates from low-income families has increased nearly 300 percent since 2002 — it has also gotten better. The percentage of students who earn a bachelor’s degree has climbed to 69 percent, well above the national average.

Look, I'm going to keep making the same argument until somebody convinces me I'm wrong. The Arizona States and the land-grants and the mid-majors and maybe even the California flagships keep messing up the value proposition. Matt "Dean Dad" Reed might take issue with my use of the expression, "value proposition," but, scoop, there it is.

If high tuition were truly driving students away, then we would have seen massive enrollment drops at the most expensive places and massive enrollment increases at the least expensive. Instead, we’re seeing application booms at exclusive places and community colleges taking the biggest hits on enrollment. The expensive places are attracting more people, and the affordable ones are attracting fewer. That’s a story in itself, but it’s not a story of colleges pricing themselves out of the market.

The story there isn’t of tuition spirals, out-of-touch academics or any of the usual suspects. It’s a story of wealth polarization. The wealthiest institutions are becoming more so, and everyone else is struggling. Ultimately, that’s not really a story about colleges; it’s really a story about the larger economy and the political choices underlying it. The fear that high school students express about employability are not mostly about tuition; they’re about an increasingly winner-take-all job market. As Tressie McMillan Cottom put it in Lower Ed, prestige degrees serve as a sort of negative social insurance. They provide the prospect of protection against economic free fall.

That also says something about more people getting richer, and about the laggards in the U.S. News league tables not lifting their game, doesn't it?  "Credentialism, along with the exponential growth of higher education bureaucracy, have perpetuated an expensive system that often fails to prepare students for the workforce."  That's not a good place for either the industry or the potential clientele to be.  Buy a prestige degree, maybe you're good enough; or maybe you're no better than the person who got the less well-regarded degree, apart from having paid more to find out.  The excess demand for the signal is still there, but signals can be produced relatively cheaply.

JUST CALL IT THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE.

Mark Mercer is the latest academician to have had enough of administrative usurpation.

The course outline or course syllabus is a teaching tool. Since it is a teaching tool, what it contains should be entirely up to the professor. Professors’ prerogatives with regard to their syllabi should be protected by academic freedom guarantees.

Well, that’s in an ideal world. In the real world, in order to balance what might be competing interests among students, professors, and the university, perhaps some university senate guidelines are necessary. Even so, senates should legislate with a light hand.

The writing of syllabi used to be entrusted to professors, but two or three decades ago, rules and regulations began to multiply. Today, at many universities, half or more of a course syllabus will be material that the university mandates. Senates might require that syllabi contain warnings regarding plagiarism, statements of learning outcomes, blurbs for the writing center or student counseling services, directions for special needs students, or the university’s safe-and-respectful campus policy. Professors might be instructed to include their preferred pronouns or an indigenous land acknowledgement.

At some universities, professors are directed to follow a template when constructing a syllabus. This is to ensure uniformity in both content and appearance across the university. Sometimes, professors must submit their syllabi in advance to the dean for approval.

Professors who wish to beef up their syllabi with plagiarism warnings and the rest should, of course, be free to do so. No professor should be forced to include any of this material, though.

For my part, I want my syllabi to be short and plain. A short, plain syllabus helps create the classroom atmosphere that I like. We’re in class to discuss philosophical problems, and a bare-bones syllabus with no distractions helps to signal that.

It was not given to me to win that argument. I am pleased to see others taking it up.

STUCK IN TRAFFIC, WITH THE BATTERY RUNNING DOWN.

Does Subsidizing Electric Vehicles Promote Car Dependency?  Yes.  "A move to electric vehicles doubles down on suburbanization and misses an opportunity."

Advocates make the primary claim that EV adoption will reduce stress on the climate system. Yet the value of greenhouse gas emissions reductions by way of EV switching is far lower than the existing tax credit implies. Electric vehicles draw power from the grid, so that their emissions simply occur at the generation site, rather than the tailpipe. Most U.S. power comes from natural gas and coal, so an electric vehicle still emits about one-third of what a conventional vehicle would.

That is only one of the immediate consequences. There are more immediate, and beyond, consequences.

The counterargument is that people can charge their cars at home. But that is a luxury those of us living in apartments and townhouses do not have, which highlights the regressiveness of [electric car]E subsidies. [Those] are products for suburban homeowners that call for yet more suburbanization. The Americans who benefit most from EV subsidies are those who are most attached to suburbs, the Boomers. Fifty-four percent of new EV purchases are made by people born before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president.

>More critically, [electric cars] will do nothing to return American streets to human beings. Thousands of Americans are killed each year while walking by drivers crashing vehicles into them. To the human body, whether the projectile hurtling towards it is powered by gasoline or by battery is of no consequence—but at least death by EV comes quietly.

Helpfully confirming the capture of climate policy by car culture, General Motors has now humorously announced it is “all in” on [electric cars]. This should come as no surprise. The Detroit giant senses a shift in the political winds and smells a new sales market. GM’s [electric] push doesn’t signal the end of an era so much as it signals the beginning of a new stanza in the epic of the car.

At the margin, you could fit the electrics with that Jetson deedling sound (per the Blogfather) but you're still engaging in regressive transfers in the name of the environment.  And neglecting the consequences of recycling all those batteries?

ALL THINGS BECOME TRIVIAL.

Freddie DeBoer, academician of the left, has had enough of performative identity politics.

The insistence that all things have political valence, no matter how ridiculous; that every last aspect of your life is a potential site of political struggle; and that these struggles are of vast importance even though they have no material impact on the world - these things combine to make social justice politics totalizing and yet unserious, inescapable and thus mundane, unremarkable. Paradoxically the intense emotionalism of this school of politics, the insistence that feeling a particular way amounts to doing something, must inevitably leave its proponents unable to make basic distinctions of priority and practice, unwilling to distinguish between what makes them feel intensely and what could make the largest impact in real-world terms. This is not a popular sentiment, to say the least, but it is true: oppression is not emotional, oppression is material.

And where oppression is immaterial, reality has little regard for your feelings, dear reader, but I digress. Mr DeBoer makes a number of points.  Here's a key quote.  "In a very basic sense this means that social justice politics lack the typical correction systems of other ideologies. When criticism becomes forbidden it is impossible to recognize and address serious internal problems. This meta-problem permeates everything that follows."  Hie thee hence, read and understand.

PATIENCE REWARDED.

The Stanford women's basketball team won their bubble tournament.  It's tough to be a good team in the era of Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma.

Chiney and Nneka Ogwumike had their chances at championships for Stanford that fell short before the sisters celebrated one together in San Antonio when the Cardinal finally won again.

Kate Starbird, Nicole Powell, Candice Wiggins and countless others were also part of talented Stanford teams that didn’t end their seasons by cutting down the nets.

“It’s heartbreaking to go through that,” recalled Tara VanDerveer, who completed her 35th year coaching Stanford by capturing the program’s first NCAA championship since 1992.

Let the record show that Northern Illinois hosted a first-round game in that tournament. As a lower seed.  (The Northern Illinois rant will be for another day.)  Stanford has been in the final four ten times since them. As far as I know, nobody got after the coach for underachieving in the tournament. "The 67-year-old VanDerveer is the all-time winningest women’s coach and she’s not ready to say whether she is pondering retirement — not yet, anyway." Make of that what you will.

The Baylor men's team won their bubble tournament.  Make of a Baptist college outplaying a previously undefeated Jesuit college what you will.  Today's theme is patience.

The game ended in fitting fashion as the Bears stole a pass and dribbled the clock out, bringing a championship to Waco, Texas. It’s a huge feat for the school which has had multiple scandals over the years, including the men’s basketball program, but all that changed with the hiring of Head Coach Scott Drew who took over in 2003. He had visions of what the team could accomplish.

“We came to win games at the NCAA tournament,” Drew said in his introductory press conference in 2003. “We came with a chance to win a National Championship at Baylor University and that’s my goal here.”

Despite being given a program that has gone through many adversities, it’s great to see Drew so confident to fulfill on a promise he made nearly 20 years ago.

The Baylor women's team have not been bad over those past twenty years, either.  Building a men's program slowly, though, well, that's rare.

Then, Wisconsin athletics director and football coach Barry Alvarez announced his retirement.  "Wisconsin has enjoyed remarkable success during Alvarez’s tenure, winning a combined 16 team national titles and 74 conference regular-season or tournament crowns since he took over. In 2017-18, he earned Under Armour Athletic Director of the Year honors."  He and his staff arrived in Madison relatively late in the recruiting season, and yet put together a recruiting class that provided senior leadership for a Rose Bowl win at the start of 1994, back when there was no January playoff.

Since then, Wisconsin youngsters have not known suckitude.

University of Wisconsin photograph retrieved from Fox Sports.

I saved the best patience part for last.  One of the tasks the new coach gave his staff was to get acquainted with the various deans on campus.  Unfortunately, none of the news sources I searched through provided a transcript, so the best I can do is link to the university's video feed of Mr Alvarez's remarks.  (Why, oh, why, with information technology, is so much stuff only sequential access now?  I don't have time to sit through videos and stream podcasts.)

Somewhere in the early remarks, he tells a story about how one of the deans, if I recall correctly, subsequent chancellor John Wiley, was not at all interested in meeting with an assistant football coach for lunch, but that assistant persisted, and the resulting relationship turned out well for athletics, and perhaps for the university's visibility.  Recall, though, that "Wisconsin football coach" was up there with "Amtrak timetable coordinator" in the list of high status occupations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Congratulations, Stanford, Baylor, Wisconsin.

WE MADE DO.

Richard Roeper remembers the entertainment of his youth, before virtual reality and all the rest.

Bas-Ket, Sure Shot Hockey, electric football and let’s not forget that little backboard you hung on your bedroom door so you could play a raucous game of one-on-one Nerf hoops with your little brother or your best friend until your mom or dad told you to knock it off and wash your hands because dinner is in five minutes and we’re having pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas so hurry it up.

Some of those old-school games from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s rocked — but some sucked. They were terrible. We just told ourselves they were great.

Those archaic foods, such as pork chops, were likely a treat back in the day.  Bas-Ket featured spring-loaded flippers, and used a ping-pong ball, and I don't remember whether it was more fun to pull the levers back so as to accurately make the shots, or to see how far the ping-pong ball would go.  Sure-Shot Hockey could refer to any number of games.  All I can recall is that they were all too rich for our blood, never mind how well the version I recall was set up with Toronto playing Montreal, and how intriguing the countdown device that would drop the puck for a center ice face-off was.  Those vibrating table football games of the era, though, well, slot cars offered more play value, and the patience of setting things up is better reserved for model railroading, or learning to cut wood properly.

The metal field, which was scaled in the dimensions of a real football field, was a thing of beauty. The little players with their detailed uniforms were awesome. Each guy was mounted on a green plastic base with prongs, and you could bend and twist the prongs so a lineman would hold his ground or a running back would go to the left; at least that was the idea. Quarterbacks and kickers had movable parts so you could throw passes or attempt field goals; at least that was the idea. The ball itself back in the day was a tiny oval made of felt.

Before each play, you’d line up your 11 players and your opponent would line up their 11 players — and then you’d flick the “ON” switch and the field would begin to vibrate with a mighty roar, and 22 little football men would go this way and that, over here and over there, until one of the defensive guys made contact with the ball carrier, and you’d turn off the switch — and then you’d have to painstakingly line up all those players AGAIN. Did anyone ever finish a game of electric football? I think our limit was about six plays, including one errant pass with the felt football, before we’d break out the Hot Wheels.

The came the first video games. Did E-T-T-S follow?

MUSICAL TRAINS.

With visits to Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland limited by Germany's ukases, the staff apparently had time to build the world's largest glass harmonica.

Looks like garden railroad trackage and stock, and they used spare cotton swabs to help tune the glasses.  Who knew there was a Guinness record for tuned glass railroads.  Enjoy, and name those tunes!

WE GOT MOST OF IT RIGHT.

Stephen Kruiser refuses to apologize for The American Founding.  "The modern woke consensus is that we’re all supposed to be in a collective self-loathing guilt trip because the United States of America didn’t burst forth from the revolutionary womb having gotten it all right from the get-go."  Emergence is like that.  It also involves cultural appropriation, which he also won't apologize for.

THE TENURE TRACK IS A SCREEN FOR PUSILLANIMITY.

In principle, academic tenure exists as a safeguard for people to play with ideas.  "In other words, if you want academics to engage in quality thinking, they have to be allowed to think out loud without fear of being fired if they say something that makes someone angry."  On the other hand, it might be a poisoned chalice for the protection of cowardly careerists.  "Ask yourself whether academic freedom and tenure are for Lernfreiheit, or for craven cowardice."  Used to be, the group-thinkers didn't want to be tainted with free market notions.  These days, that seem like a minor fear: now the risk is coming off as a segregationist or something.  The hammer fell on Elisa Parrett, recently tenured in English at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, for the crime of ... talking back in a struggle session.

Parrett went on to complain about the segregated setting of the training and what she saw as the generally closed-minded nature of the nation's post-Floyd discourse. "Democracy thrives on conversations, but what we are seeing happening right now in the United States is not a conversation," she read. "It is a coup. Everyday Americans of all colors, creeds, backgrounds, and beliefs are being held hostage. Zealots are telling us, 'You're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, you're an evil bigot.' They are telling us, 'You're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.' They are telling us that all people may be classified into two sides: us or them, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, people of color or white, righteous or bigoted, oppressed or privileged. I don't accept such false dichotomies, and I don't accept the ad hominem implications that come with it. Too often, words like 'privileged,' 'defensive,' and 'fragile' are just ways to dismiss what another person has to say. Too often, words like 'racist' are just a way to intimidate someone into silence." Parrett argued that people should work together to solve "real problems like wealth disparity, poverty, job insecurity, unemployment, the high cost of living, or the fracturing of the nuclear family, whatever form that family takes," but are waylaid by those who claim the "real problems" are "racism, sexism, transphobia…[and] hateful words."

Predictably, the careerists are manifesting themselves. "The group seemed unhappy Parrett had injected such a skeptical and defiant note into the proceedings—a fair amount of cross-talk and accusation ensued—though she says a number of other colleagues thanked her (mostly privately) for speaking up."  After an inquiry of Kafkaesque dimensions, the professor's docket includes a letter of reprimand.  The institute itself, just one more hothouse.

In parts of academia and media, it appears to be increasingly common for left-leaning people to make inflated claims of harm when they are exposed within their community to opinions that might rate as blandly center-right or even center-left in a broader context. In other words, the victims of these inquisitions are often accused of having perpetrated a level of harm that would strike a reasonable observer as a profound exaggeration of what occurred.

Parrett's case is drenched in harm claims. According to the LWTech administration, hundreds of her colleagues were rendered so distraught by her words they couldn't even do their jobs. She also needed to be punished, according to [vice president for instruction Suzanne] Ames, for the harm she could commit against a hypothetical student from a marginalized background.

In progressive communities threatened by illiberalism, this hysterical style of accusation is now commonplace.

The accusations also serve to shield people from precisely the sorts of ideas they'd most benefit from being able to engage in an intelligent manner.  Our universities, from Brown to Lake Washington, are being run by terminally stupid people.

MAJORITY TYRANNY IS BUILT IN.

As Steve Horwitz puts it, In Politics, Everyone has to Eat the Olives.  "Electoral politics, by its very nature, cannot abide the tolerance of minority tastes the way that markets do."  The bundle that might be Consensus today becomes Oppressive tomorrow.

Particular candidates or parties will offer a platform full of a variety of policy proposals. Individual voters might like some of those proposals but also dislike some of them. Some voters might dislike nearly all of a candidate’s positions. Whichever candidate wins, or whichever party wins a majority, everyone will be subject to their attempts to put their preferred policies in place, regardless of whether we liked those policies or not.

Imagine going to the grocery store and rather than picking out the individual items you wish to buy, each store offered a pre-selected bundle of groceries that were available for purchase. Kroger might offer a different bundle than Whole Foods or Aldi, but each store offers only one bundle and you have to buy everything that’s in it. If we push this analogy to its limit, imagine further that you are required to eat everything that’s in the bundle. Similarly, we could imagine restaurants working in this sort of way.

You can easily see the problems. First, the stores would cater to the median shopper and diner, in a pretty good replica of the median voter theorem. Minority tastes would be largely shut out. Second, very few people would be anywhere close to fully happy with their bundle of groceries or their meal. And if you’re required to eat what you buy, some folks are going to be very unhappy about their meals.

The median eater phenomenon is the best case scenario. Imagine a polarized polity, divided about evenly between strong olive eaters and strong olive avoiders, with control of the bundle being alternated every few years.

The collective choice processes of politics, by definition, don’t allow for the possibility of the tolerance of others’ preferences that is the foundation of the marketplace. This is why so many political battles, especially recently, seem so high-stakes. It’s a winner-take-all game, so those who perceive themselves in the minority have every reason to fight hard, if not cheat.

The more goods and services that are provided through political allocation, the more we will deal with this sort of problem.

Read and understand. Olives optional.

DEMONSTRATING ABSURDITY BY BEING ABSURD.

I thought the purpose of existential philosophy was to make people feel unsafe.  Silly me.

A petition has been launched against Western Washington University Department of Theatre’s decision to showcase the existentialist play “No Exit” this fall.

The petition argues the script is problematic because it gender stereotypes women and lesbians and puts a man in a quasi-leadership role, which perpetuates patriarchy.

Old Jean might have had to say "yes, dear" to Simone, but his plays might have been his way of talking back.  Maybe he wasn't as down for Simone playing both ways as he let on. But wait, there's more.

The petition also argues the play is inappropriate at this time because it is set in one room in which the characters cannot escape, thus may be too “mentally taxing for the community to watch. Especially if we are still in quarantine at that time.”

“This play is not challenging, but instead is reinforcing classical notions of womanhood designed by the patriarchy,” the petition states, adding “it is disturbing and unacceptable.”

“No Exit” is a play by French philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Penned in 1944, it’s about three people trapped in a room, and as they spend more time in it they come to realize that being trapped in eternity with the same three people is hell as opposed to fire and brimstone.

The play’s most famous line — “Hell is other people” — comes toward the end when the male character realizes this.

Good writing is supposed to shine a light (or is it direct a lens?) on aspects of life otherwise unexamined, and calling attention to quarantine conditions in a way that might be manifesting itself at the divorce lawyer's office is one way for that light to shine.  Good grief.

ALL SOCIAL HYSTERIAS RUN THEIR COURSES.

So too, suggests James "Long Emergency" Kunstler, with woke doctrines.

They run out of new gags, and out of new recruits. Their tropes grow tiresome, even comical, such as the Woke mainstays of “racism,” “misogyny,” and “white supremacy.” Their promptings reveal themselves as obviously dishonest. The punishments they seek seem increasingly warped and sadistic. The behavior they induce begins to look patently insane. That’s where America stands now.

Social movements that look scary and permanent at the time run their course. Younger readers were not around in the ten years from Steal This Book, to The Official Preppy Handbook, or for the change in Jeff MacNelly cartoons from Jimmy Carter begging Leonid Brezhnev to behave, to Mikhail Gorbachev begging the rest of the world for food.  In some ways, the contemporary manifestations of the counterculture are more fragile than their 1960s predecessors, and not just for the vegan diets and androgyny.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,167.

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 813,191 infections and 13,498 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,258,736 infections and 23,665 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.

The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over six million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.  I'm encouraged that Republicans seeking state office are going to make that a campaign issue.

That's despite Sweden doing at least as well as most of more lockdown-obsessed western Europe, despite ignoring scary advice that their relatively moderate mitigations would be deadly.  John Tierney comments.

Public-health officials widely denounced Sweden for refusing to lock down and mandate masks last spring, when its Covid-19 mortality was high. A computer model projected nearly 100,000 Swedish deaths from the virus last year. But that prediction turned out to be ten times too high [see above -- Ed.], and other countries have since caught up with Sweden. While it suffered another outbreak this winter, mainly in regions that were not hit hard in the spring, Sweden’s cumulative death toll per capita from Covid-19 is now slightly below the European Union’s average and about 20 percent lower than America’s.

Illinois policies, helping push the national average up.

Free states have largely avoided the labor market carnage associated with the COVID pandemic, while lockdown states have wrought higher unemployment levels — without guaranteeing better pandemic health outcomes.

As famed economist Thomas Sowell said, in complex issues of public policy “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” There was never an easy answer to the COVID pandemic, but the economic, health, and social outcomes of free states all suggest that they made the right call in rejecting the authoritarian instinct embraced by too many of their neighbors.

Although public health officials aren't necessarily economists, they ought be sensitive to the notion of tradeoffs.

Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations.

Sweden and Florida followed these principles when they rejected lockdowns and trusted their citizens to take sensible precautions. That trust has been vindicated.

That, though, is not the way for public officials with ambitions to be the next Platonic philosopher king to roll.  "The goal is always to make fear of something the problem and then empowering the government the solution."  That means keeping up the skeer. "A February bar opening in rural Illinois led to at least 46 COVID-19 cases, a school closure affecting 650 children, and the hospitalization of one long-term care facility resident, according to a Monday report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."  Nobody died, and the school closure was on the basis of Illinois ukases.  That doesn't matter, though, because there's a Narrative.  "Local health department officials first traced a cluster of cases to the bar event, which was mostly attended by 18- to 44-year-old white men. It's unclear how many people attended, but the venue could hold 100 people."

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,125.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.

As of 22 March,  10.095.

As of 15 March, 10.070.

As of 8 March, 10,017.

As of 1 March, 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 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.

LET'S TAKE A TRAIN RIDE.

The day train linking Wellington and Auckland is back in operation.  "You’ll feel smug as you settle into your seat and the train glides out of the city against the flow of commuters heading in to work." The suburban zone looks like what you might get if the Denver and Intermountain had remained in operation into the strip-mall era.  Although the train is running on the North Island, there is no such thing as a water level route.

Rivers threading down from their slopes have cut deep channels through the plain, but the smooth journey continues, thanks to more viaducts here. They date back to 1908 and one, marked by an obelisk, was the last link in the completion of the route between Auckland and Wellington. It’s the Hāpuawhenua Viaduct, rebuilt in 1981, that gets everyone jostling for photos. Its elegant 414m curve, on tall concrete pillars rising from the fern-filled bush, is a modern classic.

Trouncing even that, though, is the Raurimu Spiral that comes next. Designed in 1898 to make the steep 139m height difference accessible, the track here winds around on itself with two short tunnels, three hairpin bends and one big horseshoe curve. It’s in equal measure clever, using the topography to avoid the need for bridges, and a testament to engineering skill and, especially, hard work by men with shovels and horses pulling carts. It’s also quite confusing for passengers, able at one point to see their own train heading in the opposite direction on what looks like a separate track. The story goes that a train driver once slammed on his brakes, seeing his own guard’s van light apparently just ahead, and fearing a collision.

The train is primarily for sightseeing, and one rake alternates departures, marking off on Tuesdays.

REBUKING CAESAR.

Mary L. G. Theroux provides the Easter meditation.  "Easter is the day of liberation—the day the greatest earthly power has done its best, unleashed its ultimate weapon—and been defeated."  As the hymn puts it, "a mighty triumph o'er His foes."

JEFF MACNELLY WAS PRESCIENT.

I think "zionism as racism" was a public policy thing before there was a Star Wars cantina.  It's the message of his cartoon, not the presentation of the United Nations, that is really prescient.

Think I was being hyperbolic a month ago? "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."

It is difficult to survey recent developments in "inclusive" education and not be compelled to think as much.  Consider intelligence itself.  “Stop calling your female colleagues ‘smart,’ or ‘clever,’ or ‘brilliant’” might be a clunky way of saying "don't patronize people," but when it comes bundled with “intelligence is a White man’s mythology” what do you do, dear reader?

The hits keep coming in "inclusive mathematics."

The authors of the program state that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

The materials also instruct teachers to “Choose problems that have complex, competing, or multiple answers” so that students can come up with “at least two answers” in order to “challenge standardized test questions…”

Don't students deserve some intellectual basis for being able to "challenge standardized test questions," something that I used to do to get graduate students to be more careful in designing their exams? That implies a basis for producing right answers, which is to say a functioning intellect, doesn't it?

The next unnecessary difficulty to go is ... musical notation?  "Musical notation should be studied whether it has roots in Babylonia or Brighton."  Exactly, and Delta blues and Harlem jazz and Tribagonian calypsos are written down using it.

The good news is, people with bigger platforms, and differing viewpoints, are noticing.  Sgt. Mom at Chicago Boyz suggests losing the good of the intellect is deadly

Encouraging black youth to better themselves by achieving in school, working at legitimate jobs, eschewing substance abuse and sexual experimentation, and forming stable two-parent families is somehow not in their lane; so much easier, more immediately satisfying and rewarding when it comes to regular gigs in national news media, academia, or in the newly popular gravy train of corporate anti-racism training. At the bottom line of this all is the realization that the problems and pathologies afflicting the worse-off urban black communities can really only be fixed by the community itself. Blaming everyone else for those pathologies is a useless and potentially dangerous diversion.

Unherd's Douglas Murray concurs.

In the past, differentials in educational attainment were put down by some to genetic factors; the outperformance of a particular racial group was explained by making reference to the genetic superiority of one group over another. For reasons to do with inaccuracy as much as unpalatability, this explanation has declined in popularity.  But if someone today were to enter a discussion wielding the hammer of genetic traits, we would all be able to see what they were doing: rather than being interesting in discussion, their conclusion had already been decided.

Instead of "genetic traits," the one-size-fits-all argument these days is "institutional racism," as if somehow the very tools of writing words or music or equations aren't for everybody.

In Evanston, Illinois, Ndona Muboyayi is running for the school board precisely to protect her children from that sort of intellect-crushing idiocy.  "I want my children to know about slavery and Jim Crow. But I want it to be balanced out with the rest of the truth. They’re not taught about Black people who accomplished things in spite of white supremacy; or about the Black people today who got ahead, built things, achieved things; and those who had opportunities that their ancestors fought for."  Read the entire interview, I'll give her the final word.  "Showing up on time has nothing to do with being white. It’s something that you’re taught or not taught. My [Congolese] father taught me at a very early age to keep my word. If you say that you’re going to be somewhere at some time, be there. What system of white supremacy was he influenced by?"

PRODUCTIVE ASSETS IN THE GOVERNMENT'S PORTFOLIO?

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  Cato's Chris Edwards applies similar thinking to the infrastructure parts of Our President^*'s latest wish list.  "It moves entirely in the wrong direction by increasing subsidies and centralizing power. A better approach would be to end federal subsidies and decentralize infrastructure ownership and decisionmaking."  Make people aware of just how much they're relying on other people's money to keep their roads passable and watch the fireworks.  But it's an idea that might just catch on, after Our Political Masters have tried everything else.

Biden would subsidize Amtrak $80 billion. Instead, passenger rail should be privatized and de‐unionized to reduce costs and increase flexibility to run the system efficiently based on consumer needs, not political directives.

The federal government should also privatize the air traffic control system, the U.S. Postal Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and its water supply infrastructure. All these assets would be better managed in the private sector supported by user charges.

Heck, as long as the heirs to the sewer socialists are fundraising off streetlights, and they sold water, and dried sewage sludge, as commodities long ago, why not?

Biden would subsidize highways $115 billion, public schools $100 billion, urban transit $85 billion, water systems $66 billion, and airports $25 billion. There is no need for federal subsidies for these state and local assets. The states should fund their infrastructure with taxes and user charges. Indeed, many state and local assets—such as airports, seaports, and water systems—should be privatized and subsidies ended. Some highways and transit systems should also be privatized.

All levels of government are in this situation in part because a previous cadre of Wise Experts objected to common ownership of streetcar and interurban railways and the power company, and municipal ownership of transit precludes transportation companies engaging in real estate development.

THE CIRCUS COMES THROUGH TOWN.

That preceding post turned out to be long, and a balky internet connection made its production even longer.  Now put yourself in the shoes of the train dispatcher, as five sections of the Ringling Barnum train move The Greatest Show on Earth through Iowa.

On the other hand, the yardmasters welcomed the distraction, as on any model railroad, the distance between towns is so short that the yards quickly become overwhelmed, and with all the road operators stretching out their motive power on the circus extras, the yardmasters were able to get caught up, even taking some time to record the passage of the trains.

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

It's been an interesting week for people making observations in the service of longer arguments.  Here are the passages that caught my attention.  Follow the links for the elaborations.

THERE ARE LIMITS TO SEWER SOCIALISM.

In Milwaukee, the authorities understand that streetlights are productive assets.

The City of Milwaukee is ready to implement a new street light fee.

Approved as part of the city’s 2021 budget, the Department of Public Works says it will be part of the municipal services bill people will receive starting next quarter.

The charge is $1 per linear foot for a property’s street frontage, or the shorter street side for a corner property.

The average household should owe around $10 per quarter.

Time to update the Community Chest card?

I leave it to people more versed in the minutiae of municipal finance to determine whether this street light charge is a user fee or a new assessment on a property tax.  I wonder, though, what balance the taxing authorities might strike between taxing road access, which is what the Monopoly assessment, or a similar sort of quarterly frontage charge to property owners is, and taxing road use, which is what excise taxes on tires and gasoline (and there has to be a way of metering battery use) do, if incompletely, and what those miles-travelled taxes also intend to do.

BASEBALL RETURNS.

The Milwaukee Brewers got to the back end of Minnesota's bullpen, scoring three to tie in the ninth, and getting the runner at second across in the tenth.  Spectators are in the stadium, in limited quantities, and the runner at second in extra innings continues to be a measure to conserve players.

NO APRIL FOOLING?

Conrail famously or infamously came into being on the first of April, 1976, and today comes Amtrak's new wish list.  There are the beginnings of something resembling serious regional rail, with a Cleveland to Cincinnati service (gutted by New York Central before the merger) and an intriguing skein of regional services running from Duluth as far as Louisville, including a project that has appealed to me in the form of a second service through Wisconsin restoring bits of the old 400 service via Eau Claire, and connections to the principal corridor at both Portage and Milwaukee for Madison, and some sort of train service to Green Bay.  Sadly, the most direct lines north from Milwaukee are fragmented or torn up in places.  There's a Chicago to Rockford line, although I suspect Belvidere and Genoa will still be wrangling about which line gets it, and going onward to Galena and Dubuque is unlikely even by 2035.

That's right, the map is aspirational, and also taking such a long view that if nothing changes, nobody notices.

Along with [Amtrak head Bill] Flynn’s statement, the company released a “Amtrak Connects US” fact sheet and map, available here, that shows existing routes, including those with “enhanced service,” and suggests where new routes might be added as part of what Amtrak calls “Our 2035 Vision.”

The map is similar to one the company made available to advocacy organizations as it sought to garner support from states which might be interested in sponsoring short-distance corridors.

The outline claims there would be “up to 160 more communities served; multiple daily trips in 15 more states; up to 30+ potential new routes; and up to 20+ existing routes with more trips.” Details are not provided because all those proposed additions would require a buy-in by states, or groups of states, to make a long-term commitment to fund operations.

The skeptics are already at work.

Amtrak, and the political figures pushing for an expanded Passenger Rail network, ought not be calling attention to any ultra-fast, French or German style, dedicated services on special rails.

Something more like this, which is to say, a restoration of a state of good repair, might be the place to start.

That Hiawatha is passing through Camp McCoy, near the crossing of the old Chicago and North Western at Camp Douglas, and once upon a time, the connection for Madison was to a train at Portage rather than the bus at Columbus.

THE HOUSE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS HAS A FRAGILE MAJORITY.

What was I just saying about the rent-seekers and oligarchs with donkey ears?  "Democratic moderates are holding climate policy hostage to get a tax cut for the rich."  Usually, the point of putting as many projects into an omnibus bill as possible is to secure the necessary votes.  Arnie van Damm told Jack Ryan as much.  Here's where the true believers get off the train, though.  Note what "tax cut for the rich" is at stake here.

The state and local tax (SALT) deduction was capped at $10,000 as part of the 2017 Republican tax-cut legislation, a change that prompted outcry from centrist blue-state House Democrats who represent the higher-income, higher-tax areas that were disproportionately impacted by the limit. The House voted to suspend the cap in 2019—a move opposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other prominent progressives—but the effort died in the then-Republican Senate.

There is nothing like the prospect of losing your seat in two years, either by redistricting or by facing a primary challenge from a more leftist Democrat, to concentrate the mind.

In a joint statement late Tuesday afternoon, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), and Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) declared that they "will not accept any changes to the tax code that do not restore the SALT deduction and put fairness back into the system."

"We say, 'No SALT, no deal,'" the lawmakers said. "The GOP passed an unfair cap of $10,000 on state and local tax (SALT) deductions to pay for their 2017 tax giveaway. Due to the GOP cap, our home states of New York and New Jersey have been crushed and residents have been leaving for other states."

The trio of House Democrats issued their demand just 24 hours ahead of President Joe Biden's expected release of a $2.25 trillion infrastructure and climate package that the president is aiming to finance by hiking taxes on the wealthy and corporations. While Biden is pushing to partially reverse some elements of the 2017 GOP tax law—including its cut to the corporate tax rate—the initial package is not expected to call for repeal of the SALT cap.

Axios reported earlier this week that Gottheimer and other centrist Democrats are pushing back against some of the proposed tax increases while simultaneously demanding repeal of the SALT cap as a necessary component of the forthcoming package.

Pass the popcorn, it's going to be fun to see these guys attempting to tax that guy behind the tree, when that guy is behind a tree in Texas or Florida.

LIMITED IN SCOPE AND DURATION.

I'm just a guy with a free weblog, and I can point out that emergency orders issued by governors ought to be limited in scope and duration in Pennsylvania or around the Great Lakes or in Illinois.

When a state supreme court rules accordingly, all I can do is call approving attention.

In a 4-3 decision released Wednesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Governor Tony Evers’ cannot use successive emergency orders to tackle the same Covid-19 crisis.

“The plain language of the statute explains that the governor may, for 60 days, act with expanded powers to address a particular emergency,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority. “Beyond 60 days, however, the legislature reserves for itself the power to determine the policies that govern the state’s response to an ongoing problem. Similarly, when the legislature revokes a state of emergency, a governor may not simply reissue another one on the same basis.”

It matters not whether the ukases are of Platonic perfection or are arbitrary and capricious. The legislative branch is coequal with the executive.

“Some may wish our analysis would focus on ensuring the Governor has sufficient power to fight COVID-19; others may be more concerned about expansive executive power,” Hagedorn wrote. “But outside of a constitutional violation, these policy concerns are not relevant to this court’s task in construing the statute. Whether the policy choices reflected in the law give the governor too much or too little authority to respond to the present health crisis does not guide our analysis. Our inquiry is simply whether the law gives the governor the authority to successively declare states of emergency in this circumstance.”

No. Next question?

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty have released a position paper spelling out what steps the legislature ought take once the pandemic is past to codify emergency powers in future pandemics (and there will be future pandemics.)  "  If the Wisconsin Legislature chooses to adopt these policies, then our civil liberties and the separation of powers will be more secure when we confront the next emergency."  Good.

Where is the similar lawsuit for Illinois?

THE SHAPE OF PRAGMATIC LIBERTARIAN POPULISM.

Jack Hunter suggests it's The Right Kind Of Realignment.  It sounds, at first blush, like something out of the New Deal.

How many wealthy people today have benefitted from the trillions in coronavirus relief at the expense of those in actual need? Republican Congressman Thomas Massie said of the first relief package in March 2020, “The tragedy of this bill is it’s a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the moneyed class.”

Americans have become accustomed to watching the rich and powerful shielded by big government, while the little guy has to accept his financial hardship. Maybe there should be a major American political party that fights for them.

The rent-seekers are too much in charge of the Democrats for the traditional nostrums to work.  Now season that with a year of public health measures that looked anything like expertise in action.

Many of those Republican voters are still dealing with or recovering from job-crushing coronavirus lockdowns, and fear that their civil liberties are under assault by the government and Big Tech. Many voters are distrustful and angry at their state and federal governments working in tandem with large corporations to disrupt or suppress daily life.

It's a long essay. The organizing theme appears to be "Why not make the cronyism favored by political and corporate elites the enemy?"  By all means, go there and read it.

BOURGEOIS CONVENTIONS AS ANTIPOVERTY MEASURES..

Mark "Carpe Diem" Perry recently posted three charts that gathered widespread attention.  Two call attention to the success sequence, more precisely to what happens in its absence.  He offers a sad prediction.  "As long as 70% of black children are born to unmarried mothers, the black-white disparities in income, wealth, homeownership, educational outcomes, school suspensions, crime rates, incarceration rates, etc. will all continue. And of course, the racial disparities between Asians and whites (for income, wealth, education, etc.) receive almost NO attention because it doesn’t fit the narratives of white privilege, black victimhood, systemic racism, etc." Most of the people who picked up his post and commented on it are from the traditionalist or culturally conservative parts of the commentariat.  I haven't yet seen any reaction from the usual woke suspects.