BUILD BACK BETTER?

The most recent Cold Spring Shops excursion was to hang out with the Steel Mill Modellers, who understand the role a steel mill can play in keeping an operating session on a model railroad challenging.  The gathering included a boat cruise on the Detroit River, to look at the steel mill operations, current and past.  We start with a view of the Great Lakes Steel coke oven and blast furnace complex at Zug Island.

From a distance, that still looks (and smells) like heavy industry.  Get closer, though, and a passage from Solzhenitsyn comes to mind.

"But when you get there, you find that not the living but the dead greeted you from afar. The marquees and signage has been knocked off the roof or twisted out of place long ago. The spires have been stripped, and there are gaping holes in the rusty steelwork. Weeds grow on the roofs and in the cracks in the walls. The landscaping has not been kept up, and the flowerbeds are trampled. The broken windows may have been boarded over, with obscene inscriptions scrawled over them."

If that sounds a little bit like what has happened in Democratic-controlled cities such as Detroit and to a lesser extent elsewhere around the Great Lakes and east of the Alleghenies, you begin to understand the secret of the Trumpening.

The coke works are still working, although none of that coke will be charged into those blast furnaces.  Those covered hoppers on the high line?

The best use of a high line at a furnace that will eventually be demolished is as storage track for cars that would otherwise carry fracking sand.  The property is less of a financial burden that way.  Those remaining piles of rock will never be taken to a skip hoist and charged into the furnace.

Before the introduction of self-unloading freighters, these bridge cranes were a feature of Great Lakes ports.  One of them was stripped for parts to keep the others operable, although there's unlikely to be much call for unloading coking coal or taconite pellets in the future.

Downriver are the melt shops and rolling mills of the Great Lakes Steel Ecorse Works, now a U.S. Steel property.  From a distance, it still looks like the efficient size basic oxygen plant it once was.

The rolling mills got the U.S. Steel blue paint treatment of recent years.  Get closer, though, and the picture changes.

The Number 2 Basic Oxygen Shop is being turned into bite-size pieces for the likes of Nucor or Steel Dynamics to recycle.

Mill gondolas now relegated to scrap service.

The Number One Basic Oxygen shop is also being flensed.

For now, the eighty inch hot strip mill is still working, rolling slab brought in from elsewhere in the U.S. Steel system, although that is unlikely to be sustainable as a long term going concern.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's been a hot, humid week with lots of developments that only get me hotter under the collar.  I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word.

1.  We empowered the boy-rapers to protect Afghanistan from the head-choppers.

2.   Oregon has sent an unmistakable message that it has no confidence in the ability of its minority students to learn.

3.  You know what woke means. It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to shit. It’s true.

4.  People are tired of the facade.

5.  BOOM! "An administration exquisitely sensitive to pronouns, bathrooms and fictitious forms of self-identification has shown itself to be brutally insensitive to the fate of Afghans who have risked all by self-identifying as allies of the United States and everything it once stood for."

6.  Yes.  Next question? "Could it be that this is a waste of money? Could it even be that the [diversity programming] mania is counter-productive, with administrators stirring up racial tensions to justify their jobs?"

7.  They're not going to like the new rules.  "The shoe is on the other foot — and we need to kick some butt with it."

8.  Stop playing by their rules.  "The leftist machine knows how to manufacture outrage, but it has no real concern for the little guy."

9.  Truly.  "We are rudderless with Dementia Joe and effete intellectual snobs that surround him."

10.  Safetyism is stupid. "But for some health experts, there's no such thing as being too cautious."  It's also inefficient.

11.  "Equity" programs will end up hurting the disadvantaged most.

12.  The way High Priests of Public Health discredit science.  "That attitude is hardly consistent with the epistemological modesty that seems appropriate in light of the scientific uncertainty she emphasizes."

13.  Economically illiterate enough for a gig with the Gray Lady.

14.  We deserve better than elitist hacks.

15.  Sure, Jen.  "We’re not the ones doing the stranding."

16.  Precisely.  "The overall impression is that Biden, Harris, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jen Psaki are in over their heads, and utterly incapable of meeting the moment. History called, and they let it go to voice mail."  I've also seen a cartoon about that 3 am call coming in at 3 pm, and nobody in the White House is answering.

17.  The tragic vision, I.  "[Social media gatekeeers] drive people with mistaken beliefs further into echo chambers where their statements are less likely to be challenged. The alternative—rebutting false claims by citing countervailing evidence—may rarely be successful. But at least it offers a chance of persuading people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society."

18.  The tragic vision, II.  "Handing out the accoutrements of a middle class democracy does not mean it actually exists, in the same way, in failed domestic policy failures, we give people cars and mortgages and declare them to be middle class. And in a final trenchant illustration of the incoherence of the leftist project, we on one hand declared Afghan culture to be equal to ours, and then set about to change it to look like ours. Is this not colonialism?"

19.  "Getting a law passed is not the same thing as getting people to obey."  Think about it: people used to risk fines to bring colored margarine into Wisconsin.

20.  Pipe down, Donald.  "Trump runs the risk of changing the media coverage and reminding a large percentage of the voting public why they didn’t like him. Right now, they’re learning why they really shouldn’t like Joe Biden. Trump shouldn’t interrupt that class."

21.  Another reason to respect Kristi Noem.  "It's increasingly rare for a political figure to loudly proclaim the principled libertarian position, which holds that such restrictions should be neither mandated nor prohibited."

22.  How old are you?  "The dysfunction in our government is deep — the last time Congress could be bothered to carry out its regular appropriations process, Frank Sinatra was alive to see it, the Spice Girls were on the radio, and the face of sober Republican government was Rudy Giuliani."  That might be a reason for more modesty on the part of the political class, which might not be what the author has in mind: "Too much democracy, and too few institutions that can or will overrule the will of the people when appropriate."

23.  The fruits of rent-seeking.  "What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008."

24.  Reason's David Bier, "I don't care much for politically correct language. I avoid the euphemism treadmill."  Substantively, he's arguing for a country that buys into its immigrants, and immigrants who buy into their country.

25.  It's called p-hacking.  "With modern tools, it’s easy to torture a data set to produce some sort of interesting-sounding result, even if it’s not really valid."  (That "p" is voiced, unlike the one in "Psaki.")

26.  Indeed.  "Biden’s second hundred days have been an unmitigated disaster."

27.  A gentle reminder that you give yourself no powers you wouldn't want an adversary having.  "But it's shortsighted to imagine that only administrations you like will wield extensive and authoritarian new powers once granted."

28.  Resign.

ANALYZE THE CONTROVERSIES

Digging through the archives: let's consider induced demand.  Let's open with Strong Towns's Daniel Herriges, "The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic."  That post went online before I heard of Wuhan or coronavirus, and at the time it was Donald Trump sucking up to the highway lobby.

After a four-year reprieve, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has once again published its infamous Urban Mobility Report. So if you're seeing a spate of headlines about how the traffic is bad and getting worse, coupled with outrageous dollar amounts that Americans supposedly lose to congestion—like $166 billion in 2017—the source of those claims is almost certainly the TTI report.

This report is pure propaganda for the road-building industry, designed to elicit credulous takes from major news outlets that cement in the public's mind the idea that We Need to Spend More On Infrastructure™. It inflates the cost of congestion in a dozen different ways, by making unreasonable assumptions that don't reflect the real world. It has been debunked repeatedly by a range of transportation policy experts, and yet it just. Keeps. Coming. Back. And without addressing any of the substantive criticisms.

The post provides links to those substantive criticisms.  Go, read, understand.  Some of the substance follows.

Glaring problems with the report include that it assigns the value of time lost sitting in traffic based on prevailing wages, which is a nonsensical practice to economists: the alternative to losing 6 minutes on your commute is virtually never that you could have otherwise earned 6 additional minutes of pay at your job. And very rarely would anyone be willing to spend 6 minutes worth of their wages (say, on an express toll lane) to avoid that congestion—turns out this has been studiedand people will pay, on average, more like $3 an hour, or well under minimum wage.

Another error: the study defines “delay” (congestion incurring a cost) as any time vehicles are moving less than free-flow speed. But on some roads, the free-flow speed is actually greater than the legal speed limit. Drivers simply obeying the law are counted by the TTI as evidence of congestion.

The glaring errors in the report go uncorrected because correcting them would defeat the report’s purpose, which is to make congestion look bad and always worsening. Because others have done such a thorough job deconstructing the report's definitions and assumptions, though, I'm going to attack it from a more root philosophical angle that helps explain why this report is asking and answering the wrong questions.

Yes, and Burma Shave had the right idea about what commuters would do with six additional minutes, years ago, plus it's difficult to attribute "delay" on a road moving at slower than the speed limit without considering how much slower, if at all, travel would be on other roads available for that trip.

CRIKEY, MATE, WE GOT OURSELVES A CONVOY.

There's something about the sight of massed trucks that makes the liberal weenies quail.  That might have started with the organized protests of the 55 mph speed limit, during which over-the-road truckers used their citizens band radios to alert each other to the presence of speed traps and to organize convoys with more than a little speed limit civil disobedience.

You might have to open the video in You Tube in order to enjoy it, good buddy.

In the comments I find the lead to today's story.  "Our Aussie Truckers are about to shut down the nation... yes it will be an inconvenience but they may just save a million lives."

Australians are suffering under technocratic overreach far beyond that suggested by the 55 mph speed limit.  Their gear-jammers are going to call attention to it.  "Australian Truck Drivers Vow To Block Every Major Highway In Radical Anti-Lockdown Strike."

August 31 promises to be an interesting day, beginning with the Australian job action, and continuing with the Taliban's deadline in Afghanistan.  "Them chicken coops was full of bears, and choppers filled the skies."

NOBODY NEEDS TWO OR MORE RAIN BARRELS.

Ordinarily,  Reason's J. D. Tuccille might simply qualify for a Friday short take with his "The West needs markets in water, not allocations based on political considerations."  I make no apology for suggesting that water is a commodity and ought be allocated the same way any other commodity gets allocated, or for mocking the arid West for its unwillingness to do so.  Similarly, there's nothing new in noting that trade unites and politics divides, something that the water regulators seem to have trouble grasping, e.g., "You have to have markets that actually work, that allow competing users to resolve their competition amicably and efficiently rather than through political allocation of water."  Nor is it any surprise that people who think they are smarter than you will come up with ways to introduce excessive complexity and conceal it behind wordnoise.

"The Tier 1 declaration gives states and local communities reason to remove barriers to transferring water," observes Robert Glennon, law professor and water rights expert at the University of Arizona. "Market forces are playing an increasingly critical role in water management in the West. Many new demands for water are coming from voluntary transfers between willing sellers and desperate buyers."

That said, Glennon doesn't advocate a completely free market for water, since he fears that farmers, who consume the lion's share of the region's water, wouldn't be able to compete with urban users. He supports "a process to ensure that transfers are consistent with the public interest," though it's unclear how to keep that from degenerating into the political allocation of water against which Watson warned. He also may confuse "public interest" with sentimentality over inefficient use of a scarce resource.

Still, Glennon co-authored a piece for the Brookings Institution in 2014 advocating that "sensible water policy should allow someone who needs water to pay someone else to forgo her use of water or to invest in water conservation and, in return, to obtain access to the saved water."

That's true whether or not your tax dollars are making possible the cultivation of sugar beets on the eastern plains of Colorado.

But, seriously, there are limits on the placement of rain barrels.

Harvesting rainwater is also becoming more common as people embrace the practice—and as the law gets out of the way.

"Colorado's longtime ban on residential rain barrels has come to an end," Colorado State University celebrated in 2016. "Now most homeowners in the state are allowed to collect precipitation for later outdoor use."

Colorado still strictly limits households to two rain barrels, but other states are more relaxed.

"In the state of Arizona, it is legal to collect any rainwater that falls on your property for future use," the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center notes. The center offers a guide advising on how to do just that.

Still, graywater and rain barrels are only going to chip away at the problem so long as federal agencies allocate massive amounts of water based on political considerations. In a land where water is scarce, its use will be most efficiently determined by the prices that users are willing to pay in an open market.

A rain barrel might be a useful way to cope with higher water rates. Review the comparison of rates in those enlightened European countries that get plenty of rain with the flood-irrigation of Phoenix lawns.

THE TACTIC MIGHT WORK WELL ENOUGH.

Two years ago, Michael Barone called out the foolishness of fact-checkers letting the self-styled progressives get away with hyperbole during campaigns, who really weren't firing up their oppressed communities.

Maybe instead they're virtue signaling to the white college graduates who are the dominant segment of the Democratic electorate these days. What "sounds like an exclusive appeal to minority voters," writes the New York Post's Michael Goodwin, is "just as likely to be aimed at those whites embarrassed by their race."

Enough changed in two years that the virtue-signalling, and the denunciation of the police, might still be a winning issue, never mind the reprise of the Carter years that seems to be taking place as I write.

MAKE THEM PLAY BY THEIR OWN RULES.

Sometimes it is easy to be dyspeptic, because the stories almost write themselves.  Take the California recall election.  "Progressives don't really think that the recall process is illegitimate or unconstitutional. They simply don't like that it's being used against one of their own."  Years ago, they had similar problems with the Proposition Thirteen property tax limit.

Our state's problems entirely are the making of its U.S.-citizen politicians and the voters that have empowered them.

Nevertheless, the recall process—like the two other cornerstones of direct democracy, the initiative and referendum—is dyed into the fabric of our state. Today's progressives, who claim to stand for the power of the people against special interests and the political class, despise a process that was devised by early 1900s progressives for that explicit purpose.

I'm sure advocates of initiative, referendum, and recall saw only upside potential at the time, much like their national counterparts saw only the upside of prohibition and direct election of senators.

Their opposition is situational, an outgrowth of their fear that the public isn't nearly as given to liberal pipedreams as they would like. Note the results from November, when the same California voters who reliably send Democrats to Sacramento rejected initiatives that would expand rent control, increase commercial property taxes, and re-impose race-based college admissions. They supported a measure that exempts drivers from a ban on independent contracting.

This special election is entirely legitimate. State law clearly spells out the rules. Recall supporters gathered the requisite signatures, submitted them for approval, and have legally placed it on the ballot. By contrast, California Democrats toyed with the schedule, as they passed a law designed to speed up the election date because they believed an earlier date would help Newsom.

As news reports note, they previously passed a law to protect Sen. Josh Newman (D–Los Angeles) from a recall in 2018 by moving the date to a more Democratic-friendly primary. Their goal in both situations was to rig the rules to benefit their candidates, so they ought not to lecture us about their, er, principled opposition to this time-tested election innovation. Their only principle is whatever helps them the most.

The article contains three passages that could merit Friday short take status:

1. Their opposition is situational.
2. Their only principle is whatever helps them the most.
3. Progressives apparently no longer trust the people they claim to represent.

Everybody understands that entrepreneurs and capitalists act in what they perceive to be their best interests.  Why anyone would think that elected officials, particularly career politicians, are capable of putting some higher principle ahead of their own interests continues to fascinate me.

NICE JOB, BIDEN.

Common Dreams's Abby Zimet sees the consequences of the left's Islamophilia, up close.

In Kabul, thousands of people, even those with U.S. visas or passports, are unable to reach the gates of the airport, never mind get on the flights they've been promised; instead, they are among packed crowds "trapped in hell," with little food or water, amidst a rising stench of garbage, at the mercy of Taliban soldiers on all sides who have already killed over 20 people. "There’s horror in everyone’s eyes,” says a stranded woman, one of over 14 million Afghan women most in peril from extremists already tearing down beauty parlor images and whipping women at the airport who don't obey their orders fast enough - this, in a country long deemed one of the most dangerous in the world for women. As many women hide at home, fearful of what comes next and burning any evidence of links to the West, others have taken to the streets as the "face of resistance," intent on keeping freedoms hard-won in the over 20 years since the Taliban was in power. "They have one message - this is not the Afghanistan of 1996," said a reporter for Gravitas as she showed video of "braveheart" women marching, chanting, wearing the Afghan flag as a hijab, often at the point of a Taliban gun. "Have you wondered what courage looks like? This is what courage looks like." Arguing "Afghan women know exactly what is in store for them," she urged the rest of the world to help protect them. "Their stories are heartbreaking," she said, "and they must be told."

Protection is unlikely without any rough men who understand chivalric codes present to enforce them. That doesn't strike me as descriptive of Common Dreams readers, and those codes are too modern for Taliban types.

UNIVERSITIES CONTINUE TO FAIL AT THEIR MISSION.

I've filled up a weblog documenting the ways, and it's the gift that keeps on giving.

The nation’s foreign-policy and Middle East “experts” have blown it again, and academics are part of the problem. In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, many are simply silent while others are expressing surprise. Still others can’t transcend their default position of blaming America.

Let’s start with silence. What is the Middle East Studies Association up to? Its Committee on Academic Freedom is very active when it comes to writing letters to governments that restrict access to education. Where is the letter to the Taliban demanding that women be allowed to learn how to read and write and universities should remain open?

Islamophilia is a convenient pose for the academic left, as it is a way to call out others for wrongthink with respect to third world people, while it's not their spouses, daughters, or neighbors being stuffed into burqas.

Many academics are simply reluctant to say or write anything at all critical of Islam or Islamism for fear of being branded an “Islamophobe.” Amazingly, this even applies now to the Taliban. According to ABC 6 Rhode Island News, Faiz Ahmed, an associate professor of modern and Middle Eastern history at Brown University, said that “it will take more than just one side to begin recovery efforts, including the U.S. and neighboring countries as well as the Taliban to honor universal and Islamic values.” Newsflash to Ahmed: The Taliban are quite confident they are restoring Islamic values to Afghanistan after 20 years of Western influence.

Not surprisingly, Juan Cole merits mention.

Thus far, the worst of the bunch is Juan Cole, who teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. Cole calls the U.S. project in Afghanistan a Ponzi scheme. Leaving aside the weak metaphor, Cole’s faulty logic and inaccurate claims stand out. Seeking to let the Taliban off the hook for 9/11, Cole claims, “There is no reason to believe that the Taliban leadership was aware of what al-Qaeda was planning.” But it gets worse. He also believes that “not only the Taliban but many in al-Qaeda felt deeply betrayed by bin Laden’s use of their hospitality to stage a brazen attack on a superpower.” This is the kind of bad advice that academics have been giving U.S. presidents for decades.

Cole’s relativism is so pronounced that he actually wrote this sentence: “U.S. troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the U.S.” If Cole can rationalize the idea that the men of Afghanistan had only the binary choice between growing poppies and selling their daughters, what might be going on in his classroom lectures? This statement should earn Cole a place in the bad expert advice hall of shame. Maybe Joe Biden will hire him to replace some of the others giving him equally bad advice. I suggest deer-in-the-headlights National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, or clueless Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Cole would fit right in.

The cluelessness began, dear reader, years ago when former president George W. Bush pivoted from being skeptical of nation building to installing democracies around the world.  Institutions have to be emergent to have any success.  It's unlikely that much could be done other than taking out a few terrorist leaders and destroying their training camps, then leaving with a warning not to host such people again upon pain of experiencing the full rage and power of the U.S. military.  No civilian social workers left in harm's way, and no military hardware abandoned.

WHY SHOULD ROAD SOCIALISM BE DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER FORM OF SOCIALISM?

Waiting in line is one of the identifying features of socialism.  Here's a look from last week.

I doubt that anybody is going to make an issue about that semi in the left lane.  It's just another Wednesday going around the southern tip of Lake Michigan.  In the forty years or so that I've been driving that route, there has ALWAYS been some sort of construction going on somewhere between where Interstate Eighty ties into the Tri-State Tollway and where the Kingery Expressway, or Borman Expressway, or whatever Indiana now calls that stretch of road, hives off Interstate 65 for Indianapolis, then the Indiana Toll Road with Eighty and Ninety for points east, and finally 94 for Detroit.  Doesn't matter what the construction is: adding a lane, replacing a bridge, blinging out an interchange, there's always some construction going on.

Sometimes the notion of remont comes to mind.  That was a Soviet trick by which an eatery offering better than the usual government-issue food in more pleasant surrounding at proletarian prices was perpetually closed for repairs, or by which a seaside hotel was never taking reservations.  You pretend that the service is there, only it has to be brought up to the standard Brezhnev approves of, but everybody understands it's more pokazhuka.  I'm not going to go so far as accusing the highway commissions of perpetually fixing parts of the interstates as a way of admitting they'll always be a mess, and yet I'm not convinced that the "infrastructure" is ever going to be better.

UNDERMINE THEM WITH MOCKERY.

You could be scolded by the likes of Robin DiAngelo.  Or you could laugh in her face.

Written by a manic new age Wiccan who gives off major crazy ex-girlfriend vibes, White Fragility makes the case that any time a white person defends him or herself from hoax accusations of racism, that is a sign of fragility; self-defense as proof of weakness and guilt. White people are so fragile! So easily broken! Pale and icy cold, they crumble at the slightest pushback, like the pathetic snowflakes they are!

But then you keep reading, and you discover White Fragility actually makes a pretty strong case that whites are the opposite of fragile. In fact, they are so powerful, so strong, so superior to other lesser beings that the only way anyone else can get a chance is if more whites volunteer to be weaker.

In the face of such totalizing white dominance—or supremacy, if you will—all the weak can do is beg the whites to take a knee, step aside, apologize for and mute their own wondrous superpowers that no one has yet made a dent in, for centuries!

It gets better. I recently learned that it's impossible to be a good woke cat lady. Must sharpen my knives first!

IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS IN IVY-COVERED HALLS.

Tom Lehrer might have gone to Harvard, but the bad teaching is everywhere, and another cohort of critics tills soil that has been plowed repeatedly, probably antedating ProfScam, which shook up the deanlets and provostniks thirty years ago.

The arguments never seem to change.  Teaching is basically acting, and if thespians can learn how to act, the extension to teaching is immediate.  It might be that educational institutions are not developing human capital, they are selling credentials (signals, in Econ-speak.)  "One gets the impression that colleges figured out early on that they were selling credentials and whether the students learned much or little didn’t really matter."  It might be that there's a conflict of interest between teaching and scholarship.  "Many of the faculty who have gone through those education classes are still lousy in the classroom. That has a lot to do with their incentives. To advance, they need to focus on their research. Time devoted to the classroom and students is largely seen as time wasted."  Nothing new there, either, and given the creativity-destroying innovations the colleges of deaducation have attempted to impose on the arts, sciences, and professional disciplines (rubrics, objectives, assessment) that doesn't surprise, either.

That article misses a recent development that you might soon be hearing more about.  With the corona tyranny and more online classes, what happens to departmental divisions of labor?  Apparently "productivity" (which might mean grants and publications) has not suffered over the past two years; but are the work-from-home faculty throwing more of the advising and committee work on the faculty who are present on campus?

HARSHING THE MELLOW IN ADVANCE OF RUSH WEEK AND HOMECOMING.

Under Illinois law, the former teachers colleges commence instruction on the fourth Monday of August.  In honor of the occasion, let's look at the idiocies that return to campus along with the students.  Consider James Madison University labels ‘heteroromantic’ Christian men ‘oppressor group’.

I don't make this stuff up, dear reader, I only link and quote.

Are you able-bodied, between the ages of 30 and 50, a man or cisgendered person, heterosexual, heteroromantic, and Christian? Are you white, of western European stock, American, and middle or upper class? Do you have a thin, athletic build?

If you are all of those things, then you get a perfect score on the Harrisonburg, Virginia university’s official criteria for “privileged,” according to two charts shared with student employees.

You mean critical studies really is the splay kids attempting to intellectuallize their ressentiment of the sleek kids?  Read on and judge for yourself.

Conversely, if you have physical, mental, emotional, learning, or other disabilities; if you are younger than 30 or older than 50; if you’re a woman, transgender, nonbinary or genderqueer; if you’re a lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual; if you are homoromantic, aromantic, or bi/panromantic; if you are Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or pagan; if you are Black, Asian, or Latinx; if you are of non-western European stock; if your nationality is anywhere outside of America; if you hail from the working or lower class; if you are overweight or underweight; if you are any significant combination of those things then you might belong to the “oppressed group.”

I'm over 50, unchurched, comfortable around power tools, and more than a little stocky. On the other hand, I've got plenty of F.U. money.

The Morale Conditioners who hoped to demoralize the Normals apparently have stashed their work in the memory hole.

Over the course of the video, student employees of the university are asked to take some time for “self-reflection” on the messaging, write their reflections down, and save those reflections to be looked over by their supervisors later.

“After the training was completed,” Fox News reports, “student employees were sent an email instructing them to ‘not share these materials with others.’”

Editor’s note: James Madison University appears to have removed the video in question from YouTube. Fortunately, The College Fix saved screenshots from the presentation, which we have added above.

Is it also a state secret that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people?

WHY DRIVE-BY JOURNALISTS ARE THEIR OWN WORST ENEMIES.

Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump held a rally during which he took a dig at current president^(*) Joe Biden's botching of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, something that lots of other citizens not holding office have also been doing of late.

A radio newsreader opted to append, by way of a fact-check or something, that the Trump administration had some sort of settlement with the Taliban and other Afghan tribal leaders under which United States forces and advisors would have been out by May 1.

As fact-checks go, that's a self-own, as we might expect an extension to have led to a better result, particularly with the adults Our Intellectual Betters keep telling us are Back In Charge adding their wisdom.

It might be, as my Member of Congress, who has experience in theater, noted, that the Trump foreign policy team made the botch possible by negotiating with terrorist overlords in the first place.  He continued, "The Republicans are putting out talking points to make Biden look bad. The Democrats are putting out talking points to point out the past administration. In truth, they're both responsible.  Both parties have failed the American people."

The news reader did not offer that, or any other elaboration.

MARKING OFF.

Let Facts be submitted to a Candid World.

I'm taking another break.  Thanks for looking in.  It's likely there will be more Official Nonsense to document when I get back.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

It's been at least a month since the Milwaukee Bucks won the professional basketball championship.  The usual neurotic cat ladies made the usual neurotic noises about all those celebrating fans crowding into the Deer District to enjoy the game and the victory celebration.  Superspreader event?  You decide.  "As of [August 3], the Wisconsin Department of Health Services had identified almost 500 attendees who later contracted covid."  That gets a dyspeptic Daily Kos diarist (is there any other kind?) excited.  "If you choose to remain maskless and unvaccinated while packed in like squeaky cheese curds with thousands of screaming strangers, you might be a COVID-riddled dumbfuck."  I need a magnifying glass to see the day-on-day change in deaths in all of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, the insurgents at Twitchy want to dunk on Dukes County, Massachusetts (where the Obama birthday party took place) as another superspreader event.  Sorry, no.  "An average of 6 cases per day were reported in Dukes County, a 2,050 percent increase from the average two weeks ago. Since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 1 in 12 residents have been infected, a total of 1,502 reported cases."  Yes, and if you start from a low base, you can get what looks like a massive percentage increase, in much the same way that allowing four earned runs in two-thirds of an inning can destroy your earned run average.  I'd need a microscope to see the day-on-day change in corona deaths in all of Dukes County, let alone on the Vineyard.

Will all of you neurotic cat ladies stop trying to scare us?

THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIESEL SWITCHER.

We can see the outlines of Big Boy in the earliest steam locomotives.  By the time oil-electric and diesel-electric locomotives appeared on the scene, the straight electric locomotive was established, and the boxcab design seemed like a more logical platform to house the prime mover, generator, and switch gear.

To the best of my knowledge, the first hint of the end-cab diesel switcher was in the form of Westinghouse's 1929 "visibility cab."  Eleven such units were built, between 1929 and 1937, and I am aware of two in preservation.  One is at Illinois Railway Museum, and the narrative reveals a few fits and starts, including the placement of the cab.  That diesel is a project, and, like everything else in railway preservation, it takes donor money and volunteer elbow grease to at least make it presentable, let alone operable.

Another is at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum near Washington, Pennsylvania, and that one has several stories.

Its work assignment was at Armco's Butler Works, the Illinois example having worked at a different Armco property, and the steelmaker refurbished the diesel before shipping it to the museum.  The diesel cannot venture too far, as the museums's trolleys use the Pennsylvania broad gauge (something done at the behest of, take your pick, the existing steam railroads wanting to preclude interchange with those upstart trolley lines, or the residents of the cities not wanting interchange freight service on their streets) while the diesel is the standard U.S. railroad gauge, useful for moving those gondolas of scrap and boxcars of refractory brick that came in from throughout the railroad system around the plant.

Because the diesel works, it can be used, and I understand during a recent power outage, it was used, as the backup generator for the trolley lines.  You couldn't do that at Union with the five car North Shore train and the four car Roarin' Elgin wood train out on the lines, but one Pennsylvania trolley at a time is not a problem.

The museum is worth a look (weekends only) if you're in the Pittsburgh area.  Easy on or off of Interstate 79 near the Interstate 70 connection.  The museum does offer a parking lot shuttle during the Washington County Fair.  A center-entrance Philadelphia and West Chester Car can haul a lot of fair goers.

These post-War St. Louis streamlined cars, which might have been the last interurban cars built until 1982, and, although they look like PCC streetcars from the folding doors to the windshields, they're not streetcars.

The museum has all of its rolling stock under roof, and a well-equipped maintenance shop.

There are two of the center-entrance cars, one of which is still a long way from ready for public use, and two of the streamlined interurbans, at least one of which will be ready for the Fair crowds.  The museum has ambitious plans for a visitor center and urban scene (yes, much like the Illinois project) and a larger park-and-ride lot for Fair weekend.  Perhaps there will be two-car trains, which was the practice in Philadelphia back in the day, time, elbow grease, and money permitting.

There's still summer to go.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

The final word, "system," is overworked.  We can speak of a system as something put together by a person or persons, such as the New York Central System of railroads, or the University of Wisconsin System.  We also use the term to describe emergent and self-organized human (sometimes natural) interaction, most typically around here as a "complex adaptive system," which the New York Central System was not because one word, "railroad" is almost sufficient by itself to describe it; and we can speak of those science-project-in-a-Mason-jar things as an "ecosystem."  That self-organizing capacity is what makes market economies impossible to describe as any sort of "-ism," which suggests some sort of governing ideology.  About the best the magnates of industry, including the Vanderbilts or Morgans, can do, is tame the complexity in their part of the world.

None of which stops good old C. J. Polychroniou, who is vying for the title of Most Mockable Common Dreams Contributor.

We live in a period of great global complexity, confusion and uncertainty. We are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our capability to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a political and economic order based on stability, justice and sustainability. Indeed, the contemporary world is fraught with perils and challenges that will test severely humanity’s ability to maintain a steady course towards anything resembling a civilized life.

The word salad goes on, with a similar degree of lucidity, for some time.  I think he wants the old-time religion back, rather than the vulgar culture studies that isn't even really Marxist.

Darkening times, strangely enough, have never favored the Left. And today’s Left appears preoccupied with identity politics and culture, while unified ideological gestalts guiding social and political action towards the building of a new socio-economic social order are sorely missing. What we may see then emerge in the years ahead is an even harsher and more authoritarian form of capitalism.

Unfortunately, he doesn't even understand why "late capitalism" is such a stupid trope.

Of course, capitalism itself is a highly irrational system for meeting human needs and wants; yet it’s been around for more than 500 years and predictions of a post-capitalist future knocking on our door should be taken with a grain of salt. Capitalism has demonstrated an uncanny ability to evolve, and can easily co-exist with different types of regimes, ranging from social-democracy to dictatorship.  But now it is ruining the Earth, and unless we can tame this irrational economic system and, above all else, do away with its addiction to fossil fuels, the collapse of civilized social order is a near certainty. Then the floodgates of barbarism will be wide open.

Gosh, maybe a form of social interaction (not an ideology, not a system) might have that sort of staying power because it confers evolutionary advantages on its adopters.  Let me educate you, dear reader.

You'd also think that in five hundred years, methods of human interaction that conferred evolutionary advantage on their adopters would have emerged precisely where that existing commercial order was allocating resources least rationally.  Instead you get the likes of C. J. Polychroniou or Robert Reich tapping out their resentment of the existing commercial order on their smart 'phones and hoping their indignation is sufficient to improve the lot of the toiling massses.

THE AMWAY MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

Reality dawns on Rebecca Gordon.  "Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme?"

Yes, yes, it is, and we told you so a long time ago.  (So long ago, in fact, that the links have expired at that old post.)  It wasn't just a pyramid scheme at the lower levels of the academic food chain, even then.

It's interesting, though, how she won't see the root causes of the credential creep she bemoans.

In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don't have a bachelor's degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through résumés for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they'll hire people who don't have the skills they actually need, but that they're eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won't be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.

In part, though, that's an unintended consequence of Griggs v. Duke Power, which held employer-specific aptitude tests to be discriminatory, although what happened next was not amusing.  "I suspect Griggs v. Duke Power gets in the way of such testing, although the evolution of credentialing as a legal screening device that deteriorates into an aptitude test because of the failure of the credentialing institutions to do their work properly is funny."  In the case of those communities of color, it might be failures of their high schools to prepare their students for college, and those failures might be a consequence of fretting over disparate suspensions of the disengaged and disruptive students.

You won't be surprised to learn, dear reader, that a Common Dreams contributor will not go there.

IT'S OVER WHEN WE SAY IT'S OVER.

At the beginning of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, we didn't know how contagious or how deadly the virus was, and that created the canonical negative nonpecuniary externality.  "This notion of large external costs to individual behavior is what economists call an externality. And the spread of COVID-19 presented policymakers with a textbook example of an externality, which is typically viewed as just cause for some degree of government intervention." In the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm, it is, but it takes both an infected person and a healthy person interacting to pass the bug along.  That, recall, was the logic of everybody staying home as much as possible early on, if you're healthy and you don't get exposed, perhaps enough chains of transmission get broken that the immune systems of the early sick shut the virus down.

Given the dense interconnectedness of modern society, uncertainty about who was vulnerable, the subsequent difficulties of protecting them in reality, and the perceived benefits of solidarity from collective action, policymakers ultimately decided that society-wide mitigation policies were better here. All of us therefore faced measures being imposed by the state to mitigate the externality risk, including requirements for indoor mask wearing.

The presumptive “right” that underpinned previous mask mandates, then, was essentially that “individuals should have the right to not have you breathing near them unmasked when indoors.” It was a variant of “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins” with droplets or aerosols from your nose or mouth replacing the hand — albeit recognizing that masks reduced, but didn’t eliminate the risks of transmission given the virus was airborne.

When sufficiently many people have acquired natural or vaccinated immunity, that calculus changes.

Simply put, just about every adult in America who wants a COVID-19 vaccine can get one. Once they do, they have a near-zero percent chance of facing serious illness or death from the virus. So, thanks to these miraculous vaccines, there’s barely any externality still associated with the spread of COVID-19.

Yes, 42 percent of the population has still not received the COVID-19 vaccine, and thus could still get ill or even die from the virus. Yet, at this point, that’s a cost-benefit analysis they made for themselves. If unvaccinated people continue to get sick and pass away from the disease, that’s tragic, but it’s no one’s fault but their own.

There is no justification for restricting the liberty of vaccinated people in order to protect people who have willingly chosen to remain unvaccinated. There’s no longer any significant externality associated with my decision, as a fully vaccinated individual, to enter a restaurant without wearing a mask. Anyone who might be adversely affected by my decision has knowingly and willfully chosen to impose that risk on himself by forgoing vaccination and entering the restaurant.

Thus, the blanket mitigations of a year ago no longer make sense. "Crucially, as more people become vaccinated, the benefit-cost ratio of these mandates falls and the case for them becomes ever weaker." The elaboration follows.

In non-economic speak: if people still want to roam unvaccinated, they should bear the elevated risk, and not expect others to be coerced into making sacrifices to (primarily) keep them safe.

In other words, after setting aside a period of time to allow people to get the vaccines, we should take the non-vaccinated folks’ decision not to be pricked as a willing acceptance to personally front up the infection dangers. Many will self-evidently change their minds if they see delta cases in their area surge. But burdening everyone in a territory with government-enforced mask wearing or even lockdowns again (as Krugman advocates) is unjustifiable when the vast majority of the benefits will go to those actively forgoing the most effective means of alleviating the virus’s effects.

Accepting this means acknowledging that this principle may result in more illness and death. In many areas with weak vaccination coverage, hospitalizations are surging. If the public health officials are right, then mask mandates would reduce cases and deaths in these cities. But provided these hospitals are not at risk of having their capacity exceeded, the case for personal vaccine responsibility, and government action instead concentrating on broadening vaccine availability to children while offering resources to protect the immunocompromised, is now much stronger relative to society-wide mandates.

An economic approach to the pandemic made the case for certain government-mandated social distancing and mitigation efforts relatively strong a year ago. With vaccines freely available, those same economic principles bolster the case now for more limited interventions for the most vulnerable groups, while leaving most COVID-19 risk management to individuals.

I resist the temptation to be provocative and suggest that clinics and hospitals start billing corona patients for their resource usage. Vaccinated people qualify for a break on their insurance!  I do not resist the temptation to suggest that the Technocratic Overreach be cut off!

Through vaccination, the COVID-19 externality has essentially been eradicated. So, too, has any serious or legitimate case for government measures trampling on individual freedom. The renewed imposition of mandates is thus little more than an unjustified attempt by power-hungry politicians to flex their authority and prolong their expanded control over our lives.

It's long past time for the corona tyranny to go.

If a bunch of people are becoming infected but not experiencing serious symptoms, then that really isn’t much of a problem. It’s especially not a problem of the magnitude that justifies restoring obsolete mask mandates and other heavy-handed impositions.

Early in the pandemic, when we were unsure of the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, did not have widely available (and very effective) vaccines, and had no natural immunity, there was a compelling case for masks, social distancing, capacity restrictions, and so on. We are no longer in that situation, and it’s not only irrational to pretend like we are, but insulting to Americans who have sacrificed more than enough over the past 18 months. It’s time to say enough, and leave masks in the past.

For instance, in mitigation-obsessive Illinois, a vaccinated person has a better chance of winning the lottery than of having a bad experience with Wuhan coronavirus.  "Of the more than 6.5 million Illinois residents who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, only 0.01% have been hospitalized with a breakthrough infection."  It is long past time to stop worrying about the variants and the breakthrough infections, unless your salary and your TV appearances depend on keeping up the skeer.

Of course, proponents of big government and government officials themselves will be the last ones to acknowledge the reality that the most dangerous phase of this pandemic has long since come to an end in the US. Why? Because the rhetoric of “emergency” and “crisis” is the government’s favorite tool to use in expanding and maintaining its power over our lives.

Those public officials, though, derive their powers from our consent. It is our right, as the Sovereign People, to withdraw that consent.

Once again, vaccination is widely available in the United States and the unvaccinated have chosen that status. They've made their own decisions and assumed the resulting dangers, just like people who smoke, eat too much, ride motorcycles, or go rock-climbing. In a free society, people have the right to make their own risk assessments, even if others don't approve, and the rest of us should get to live our lives without limiting ourselves because of the decisions made by others.

COVID-19 has been an unpleasant ordeal for the entire planet, but perhaps not so awful as the policies inflicted on us in the name of public health. It's time to move beyond pandemic panic to rebuild our prosperity, raise our kids, and reclaim our freedom. If the control freaks don't like that, well, they're another affliction we can do without.

Sometimes, the only intellectual argument is "pound sand."

Public-health authorities don’t know how to stop giving you extra-restrictive advice. And they can’t learn how to stop giving it if we don’t learn how to stop asking for it. Or until we start ignoring what they say, and start punishing politicians who translate their guidance into nuisances.

The people started staying in and stockpiling toilet paper before the governors issued their ukases; the people started going about their normal lives before the governors backed off, and the people can tell Our Intellectual Betters that it's over. It's Over.

The prudent thing to do, dear reader, might be to go about your life.  If you're feeling ill, the wise thing to do is just stay the hell home.  Emily Oster will lead you through the nuances.

Be more careful—more masks—when in indoor settings. Re-evaluating events like weddings, depending in part on how important they are to you. And if you feel sick, get a COVID test and wait for the results, even if you think it’s probably just a normal cold.  (I would suggest getting some rapid antigen tests to have at home).

If your whole household is made up of healthy, vaccinated people, then you should feel protected, and taking these precautions is a good idea and probably enough. (If your household contains older, immune-compromised people, I think this all gets a bit more complex, but I’m not going to talk that through today.)

There's more advice at the link about how best to work with children, who still aren't eligible for their shots.

EVERY MAJOR INSTITUTION IN OUR COUNTRY REVEALED ITSELF AS A FARCE.

That's J. D. "Hillbilly Elegy" Vance on the sudden bugout from Afghanistan, and worth reading in full for that alone.  While you're at it, read Jim Treacher asking, "With experts like those, who needs experts?"  That, too, focuses on the bugout, and the reprise of the fall of Saigon.

The generalizations, though, are straightforward.  A year-and-a-half, now, of however many days it has been to slow the spread, to no effect.  The continued efforts by apologists for urban unrest to somehow reimagine law enforcement whilst keeping the residents safe.

Isn't it long past time to turf the Credentialed Establishment out?

IS THERE SOME WAY THEY COULD SETTLE THIS IN THE OCTAGON?

Hope Solo Says Teammate Megan Rapinoe Would 'Almost Bully' Team to Kneel During Anthem. 

Ordinarily, it's not sporting to make fun of the off-the-field issues of the women's soccer team.  I'll make an exception because of the cast of characters.  But rather than trade barbs in Newsweek or on one of the social media sites, or go on an ESPN talk show, wouldn't a no-holds-barred cage match between these two be much more fun to watch?

THE INSURGENCY IS STILL THERE.

A few years ago, I referred to "the Confederacy of the frustrated," with an illustration of a flag sales tent at a Midwestern threshing bee.

My reaction at the time was, "The more censorious the Perpetually Aggrieved become, and the more in-your-face the rainbow coalition is in the entertainment industry, the more Gadsden flags and POW-MIA flags and Confederate battle flags will sell.  Subverting the dominant paradigm and being transgressive isn't for the critical studies people only."

At the time, I promised to keep my eye on the flag-sales tents.  It's been a few years since I got to a county fair or a threshing bee, but with the easing of the corona tyranny, some road tripping and some suitable stops have been possible.

You now have to look harder for Confederate battle flags, but Gadsden flags, Thin Blue Line flags, and variations on the Trump flag continue to sell well.

Sometimes, the message is more explicit.

Doesn't look like much of a chance for a single vision for the country anytime soon.

There are a few more county fairs and the like coming up, and I'll have to look for flag tents offering the, shall we say, opposing points of view.

HIGH SCHOOL CAN SUCK IF YOU'RE AN OUTLIER.

A College Fix contributor attempts to deal with her son's troubles.

Two years ago my husband and I were blindsided by our son telling us he was “trans” without any gender confusion before this time. He only had male friends and only liked and played with typical male toys and activities.

Apparently, boys wanting to cross are relatively rare, all the attention a few runners in Connecticut get notwithstanding.  These parents weren't sure what they were dealing with, and they did some digging.  (It's College Fix, so I can't vouch for the validity or generality of what follows.)

Quickly some interesting commonalities emerged: 85 percent of our boys had an IQ over 130. We learned that these are mostly smart nerdy boys who claim they are straight and want to identify as a lesbian. They also were also often on the autism spectrum, had suffered trauma, or had internalized homophobia.

Put another way, outliers in the social structure of their high school.  That's the way of the world: the matching and mating rituals select for the modal population, and it's always going to be tougher for the people who live farther from the mode, whatever that mode is.  I suspect, though, that the matching and mating opportunities are going to be tougher for crossers than for people who practice their alternative lifestyles with the anatomy they were born with.

WEAK, MEEK, INEFFECTUAL, INCOMPETENT, AND CONFUSED.

Yes, that sounds like Friday short Take material, although when we're dealing with the dotard who is officially president of the United States, we ought devote a post to why his critics are writing such things.

As of Saturday, Kenneth R. Timmerman was hoping for the best.

The Pentagon is desperate to avoid a rout that is broadcast live on prime time. They want no helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy with desperate Afghans clinging to the skids, as happened in Saigon in 1975. They want no Blackhawk downs, or civilian contractors hung from bridges, all of which could have happened if they had allowed Biden’s retreat to continue as planned.

By Sunday, Miranda Devine saw a pattern. "Joe Biden has the reverse Midas touch."  The editors of National Review concur.  "This is a debacle and, more than most acts of the U.S. government, it is the responsibility of one man — Joseph Robinette Biden."

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds sees bipartisanship at work. as well. "Remember: The political establishment — including many Republicans — was so eager to rid us of a non-establishment President that they stuck us with this incompetent and his incompetent-buffoon staff. And they said they did it in the name of 'principles' and 'standards' and 'competence.'"

What would we ever do without Expert Competence?

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 11,502.

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 1,110,147 infections and 14,621 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,466,813 infections and 26,123 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.   The full reopening of the state, subject to local mask mandates or businesses requesting customers to mask up, commenced last Friday, 11 June.  As of this afternoon, the state counts 13.6 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they're still not disaggregating among finished and partial vaccinations, and the state's total count of the scary variants includes all of two thousand Delta and under three thousand Gamma infections diagnosed.  That's not much change on a month ago.

Note that since last month's post, Worldometers counted fifteen additional corona deaths in Sweden.  A year ago, a Foreign Affairs article suggested "Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s."  In the early going, that didn't look like a good idea, particularly to people keeping score, but a year on, we're seeing headlines like "Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths."

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the good news is the bad news might be wrong: "Delta variant of COVID-19 ready to ravage unvaccinated in Illinois: ‘Some areas are going to blow up’"  The sensationalist journalists are still claiming there will be a surge, but it's not yet showing up in the reports.

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count approaches thirteen million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes just over ten thousand, with 2,600 or so being whatever the "gamma" variant is.

These post will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 11,187.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 10,944. 

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.  The details for the past seven months are on page 2.

TAKING UP THE SLACK LEFT BY SECOND CITY COP.

I warned you today was not going to be cheerful.  We'll be releasing a compendium of policy failures, working our way from the cities to the states to the Nation today.

"The Night Chicago Died" includes a compendium of links detailing the continuing mostly peaceful summer weekends in Chicago.  Second City Cop recently filed a report on the most recent acts of disrespect from city government.  "The political structure, combined with the 'merit' system, has finally produced what is (likely) the ultimate nadir of morale. The wholesale abandonment of the rank-and-file is laid bare for all to see."

LEFTARDS REALLY OUGHT TO COME UP WITH BETTER SLOGANS.

Sorry, today is going to be primarily gloomy posts.  The best I can do on the lighter side is note how unimaginative the contemporary Jacobins are.  "Human Need, Not Landlord Greed."  Can't anybody come up with something that Ayn Rand didn't satirize years ago?  But the wishful thinking never stops.

Rent control doesn’t just improve tenants’ market position; it also paves the way for greater working-class organization and political power. With lower rents and guaranteed renewal leases, rent-controlled tenants are better positioned to organize and fight their landlords. They cannot be evicted for demanding more repairs, lower rent, and better housing conditions.

The writer has the somewhat charming faith that the owners might just write their investments off and go away, and the rent-controlled blocks will be residually inhabited by, shall we say, not the highest type of neighbor.

IT IS NOT ABOUT ZERO CORONAVIRUS.

Australia is an island with drastic quarantines in effect in response to relatively few infections or deaths, and that's not restrictive enough for some people.

Any strategy short of elimination will be a disaster for both the health and economic stability of Australians. According to the government’s own modeling, if we open up when 70 percent of those over seventeen (56 percent of the population as a whole) are vaccinated, it will result in two thousand preventable deaths within six months. Recent modeling suggests that if Sydney exits lockdown on August 26 — even with an adult vaccination rate of 70 percent — it will lead to 100,000 cumulative hospitalizations, 10,000 patients in intensive care, and thousands of deaths.

Here we go again with the modelling, the same sort of foolish extrapolations that anticipated twelve of the last two inches of rain in DeKalb during July.

But it's got nothing to do with the modelling, or even with the mitigations.

Giving all workers paid pandemic and vaccine leave would dramatically reduce the spread of the virus in poor communities where workers cannot afford to lose income by taking time off to be tested or vaccinated. These measures would also undermine anti-vaccination sentiment. Additionally, we need to overhaul the vaccine rollout to prioritize all frontline workers. This will halt the spread of the virus in Australia’s developing underclass of young workers in essential jobs who are disproportionately migrants.

That's right, dear reader, it's about zero commerce.  It's Cloward-Piven with mask mandates and boffins in lab coats.

Labor’s commitment to neoliberalism has stopped it from advocating serious redistributive measures and the reconstruction of our health and social-welfare systems. The Left must put forward a far stronger alternative. We must fight for an elimination strategy.

That does mean lockdowns and border closures. But more importantly, it means fighting to put working-class people first with a broad pandemic management strategy that breaks with the pro-business logic of neoliberalism. To be COVID-free, in addition to vaccines, we need better quarantine, better income support and welfare, and an overhaul of our health system.

Put another way, we need an Australia with all the redeeming features of Poland circa 1985.