FRIDAY short TAKES.

This week has been a good one for doozies.  We'll open with something different, and elaborate on some of the themes the clip raises, as we go along.  We'll have the usual pithy summaries and a sting in the tail.

Americans stiff arm Fauci pic.twitter.com/pPh7ggvf3Q

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 8, 2021

That clip includes "Jump Around" from Camp Randall, where having fun even when the football team is underwhelming its opponent is a tradition.  Maybe it's not exactly a short take, but then, some of the entries that follow are short only by Chicago Great Western standards.

1.  The corona tyranny ends when the people decide it ends.  That starts with college football.  "The full stadiums across the country, in both red and blue states, signaled an end to another part of the pandemic. Skeptics viewed packed stadiums as one of the final steps to normalcy, and Americans took that step this weekend. We will see how long our leaders allow it to last."  The article also notes, "The more Americans ignore Dr. Fauci, the less power he wields. College football fans are already starting to ignore him."  Anthony Fauci, and killjoy politicians generally, become fretful whenever they think somebody is having a good time.  "So what’s the Democratic response to joy? Liberal tears. They would like you to continue to cower in your home."  FJB. The panic porn peddlers are upset but are powerless.

2.  None of this is normal.  "In fact, the only thing the Biden presidency has done most effectively is prove that we are not on the path to normality under his administration."  Joe Biden is a total failure.

3.  It's all a muddle.  "We are trapped in a COVID Hotel California. We can check out at any time, but we can never leave."

4.  Scientific socialism.  "The homicidal policy of reopening the economy and letting the pandemic rip—rejecting science-based policies to eradicate the virus because they cut across corporate profit-making—is bound up with the termination of the meager social relief measures imposed at an earlier stage of the pandemic."  What's the shorter list, viruses that have been eradicated, or socialist governance that has actually worked?  Ask vaccine developer Andrew Pollard.  "[T]he push to reach 'Covid zero' is a fool’s errand, for the virus,according to many such competent professionals, is like the seasonal flu and the common cold and will be with us in perpetuity." Common colds, common socialists, common liberal scolds.

5.  Disingenuous arguments and fake narratives.  "[H]istorians today prize emotion over evidence and fiction over fact." So it is when the Primitive returns!

6.  The progressive thing to do with regressive rules is retire them.

7.  The withering away of the Rule of Experts? "If there is one thing each one of us can do to hasten this day of reckoning, it is to treat progressivism for what it really is: the deceptively credentialed face of self-serving stagnation."

8.  Speaking of self-serving stagnation, "Inflation, crime, American retreat — these hallmarks of the 1970s have returned. And they have joined postmodern threats, such as a worldwide pandemic, unchecked migration, climate change, and the global jihadist-Salafist movement. Biden has been president for less than a year. The number of crises buffeting American politics, economics, society, and culture already has multiplied beyond his control."

9.  We became arrogant, loud Americans for a good reason: we’re better.

10.  Turf them out.  "As they are increasingly perceived to flout values cherished by most Americans and as the perceived return on a degree becomes more uncertain, decreasing public support will force colleges to face the creative destruction commonplace in the Real World."

11.  They're not going to like the new rules.  "The truth is that in just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger directed at Donald Trump. And it may be vented through the very protocols that the Left invented for its own short-term advantage."

12.  I'd be safe and warm, if I weren't in L.A., California bleeding.  "[T]he opportunities are slim, and live-and-let-live has been replaced with a stultifying 'progressive' orthodoxy and weaponized Karenism."

13.  They don’t know much, but they know what they hate.

14.  By any definition of which I am aware, Fauci lied.

15.  Don’t play. Don’t sign up. Not until this nonsense stops.

16.  Biden and Blinken's leadership failures and the State Department's ineptitude have created a prolonged hostage situation.

17.  "Race advocates and feminists claim that statistical disparities reflect racist and sexist discrimination. This is a factual question, and so we must consider the evidence."

18.  "[M]uch economic instruction is too mechanical."  Yes, and more complicated than Scooter McLean's playbook.

WILL SOCIAL SCIENTISTS EVER BE ABLE TO DISENTANGLE THE CAUSES?

Confound it, I wanted to pose a relatively straightforward problem in data analysis, and then the coot stepped in it yesterday.  "This arrogant, clumsy effort to score political points did nothing to help the nation or him."  Like Scooter McLean before him, he's already underwhelming in six ways.

And the “six-prong” strategy he advanced? It appears toothless on all fronts. His mandate for federal and federally funded workers to get jabbed comes with a 75-day grace period, which means 2½ months before it has much effect — and even then, the cumbersome federal discipline process will take more weeks to make resisters feel any pain.

Similarly, his order for employers to require jabs can’t take effect until endless federal rule-making procedures work out. And that’s at best: The courts might well strike the whole order down.

There is a comment period on those proposed regulations, and that's going to be interesting, to say the least.

The coot also confused himself with Scooter McLean in the way he talked to the governors who haven't been going along with the faucisti.  (That's where the social science project is, and the executive confusion will make any such work harder.)  In the speech is something a head coach might say to his platoon coordinators, but it's unbecoming a president.  "If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way."  There is separation of powers, even with the overweening administrative state these days, and some of those governors are aware of that.  "See you in court," from South Dakota's Kristi Noem, is representative.  The coot seems to think he's back at the swimming pool tangling with Corn Pop, and his response to the proposed lawsuits is "have at it."  I'll let others more schooled in separation of powers and the like figure out whether he's going to do a "Justice Roberts has made his ruling, now let him enforce it" down the line.  It will be on the state and local governments, and the businesses participating in public comment and otherwise filing suits, to hamstring the executive overreach.  "Ultimately, local government predominates ... when it wants to."

After all that, what was the social science question?  Let's start with  a political talking point in a Foundation for Economic Education essay.

States that harshly restricted their economies and continue to offer expanded welfare programs are trapped in a labor market coma. Meanwhile, free states that eschewed long-term lockdowns and welfare excess are leading the recovery. That’s no coincidence—and the principle here is worth remembering long after the pandemic.

Perhaps, there's a trade-off at work, if the "free states" (generally with Republican governors) had worse coronavirus outcomes than the "harshly restricted" states (generally with Democrat governors).  There is no such stylized fact, though.  "And still, there’s no rhyme or reason to this pandemic."  (Never mind that the coot was charging the lockdown-resistant governors with renting additional morgue capacity.  It's not that simple.)

Here are the death rates per hundred thousand people, as of 6 September.

Find more statistics at Statista

The National Review staff color coded those bars by party affiliation, and Charles C. W. Cooke noted "Try as you might, you will not find a plausible way of blaming this on that party or region or policy that you hate."  Note, for instance, lockdown-mad Michigan at 217, free Florida and somewhat freer Indiana at 216, Illinois at 209, Texas at 201, and Wisconsin at 146 despite the so-called super-spreader events during the Packer playoff run last winter, the Buck championship run earlier this summer, and the Brewers drawing crowds during their pennant chase.  Mr Cooke makes a number of other pair-wise and more aggregate comparisons, none of which give much comfort to any ideological stance.  But going normative is the way of the pundit.

The uncomfortable truth is that, beyond developing, encouraging, and providing inoculation, there’s not much that any government can do to guarantee success — and, even when it does what it can, a lot of people are going to resist for reasons bad and good. In their transparent attempts to draw attention from President Biden’s disastrous performance in Afghanistan, certain pundits have begun shouting loudly that we should be paying more attention to the 1,000 or so COVID-19 deaths we’re seeing here in America each day. Well, okay then; let’s do that. While running for president, Joe Biden said he’d “shut down the virus.” It’s been seven months since he took over, and, after a lull, we are now back in crisis. The obvious question, then, is: Why is Biden failing so badly?

About the best the researcher can do, dear reader, is provide information that might give pause to people too strong in their convictions.  "The tyrannically capricious response of the government to COVID-19 is but a trial run for the next great crisis."  I wonder if there's anyone in Scooter McLean's office asking for the labor market consequences should the six prongs pass judicial review and the macroeconomic torpor of the lockdown states becomes the reality in the free states.

THE GENERALIZATION TO OTHER EXTRAPOLATIONS IS STRAIGHTFORWARD.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn reveals the dirty little secret.

The opacity of the models reinforces a power dynamic that is central to the purpose of modeling. It is not the goal of a traffic model to predict the future flow of traffic accurately. That is impossible. Even though the person doing the modeling likely believes their own results, at least enough to bet other people’s money on them, the goal is nearly always simply to justify more investment in transportation.

For "future flow of traffic" substitute "temperature" or "coronavirus deaths" and for "more investment in transportation" substitute "more spending on pet projects" or "more control."

Kindly be advised by the following General Notice.

It would be funny, but for the error repeating with a different coterie of Wise Experts.  "It causes few sleepless nights among my colleagues that this approach bloats engineering projects and budgets, increasing the size of contracts, fees, and compensation. It also creates few incentives to question the value of traffic modeling deeply or seek alternatives to an approach that relies on projections of traffic known to be false."  That's what happens when you treat scientific inquiry as a faith tradition rather than as orderly skepticism.

I LOVE A GOOD FIGHT. LET'S JIMMY KIMMEL AND A RADIOLOGIST HAVE ONE.

On the late-night comedy shows that offer political commentary with applause tracks, Jimmy Kimmel thought he was scoring some points with “Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed. That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.'”  That's a bit of an advance on experience rating, under which smokers and fat people might pay higher health insurance premiums, rationing the use of intensive care facilities on the basis of cooperativeness with the health authorities, something that is consistent with the health authorities deciding how many intensive care facilities should be built.

But one of Mr Kimmel's followers saw an opportunity to dunk on him. "Alternate: @JimmyKimmelLive @jimmykimmel basically is saying HEALTH CARE IS NOT A RIGHT."  A positive right is only as good as your productive sector's ability to make good on the promises, and it's subject to resource constraints.  If Mr Kimmel is being more explicit about allocating a scarce resource by politics than, say, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is, he's only being more honest.  We can ration by price, we can ration by pull, we can ration by politics.

BID RENT CURVES APPLY TO PARKING SPACES.

Strong Towns contributor Daniel Herriges notes a failure of Minnesota city governments to price that asset properly.  The sub-heading of the post would be worthy of a Friday short take but for the substance that follows: "How much is the curb space in front of your house worth? How much does your city act like it's worth?"  I could really confound the issue and tell Minnesotans about "dibs" in the Chicago style, couldn't I?  That would be contrary to Minnesota Nice.

There are plenty of good ways to get to the fair, and driving is far from the best of them. Biking is easy on a new dedicated path, buses that run every few minutes will drop you off literally at the front gate, and there are hundreds of park-and-ride shuttles from around the metro area as well. Nonetheless, the fair is such an enormous event, and it draws so many people from far outside the Twin Cities who aren't habitual transit users, that inevitably drivers pour into the residential neighborhood.

Dozens of the neighbors respond by becoming temporary entrepreneurs. Many homeowners—including nearly everyone on a few blocks closest to the main gate of the fairgrounds—turn their lawns into impromptu parking lots. This can net the owner of a normal-sized yard a couple thousand dollars over the 12-day run.

"Parkers," as they call themselves, chit-chat with each other from opposite sides of the street, compare notes, and certainly scope out each other's pricing, in the same way that gas stations are always eyeing each other's price so as neither to be undercut nor leave potential profit on the table. The vibe is more cooperative than competitive, though. Neighbors will trade shifts with each other so as not to be tethered to a lawn chair all day. Someone who doesn't have room for a larger truck or SUV might shout down the street to a friend who does. One block with a prime location plays "baseball," as a friendly neighbor explained to me: a "batting lineup" of participants get to take turns ushering cars into parking stalls, and they share the proceeds.

There's a similar phenomenon at the Wisconsin State Fair, which is similarly in an urban setting, and there are Green Bay mortgages lifted early from the sale of parking spaces on lawns near Lambeau Field.  In all such places, a rent gradient emerges.

All this would just be an entertaining object lesson in capitalism and free enterprise, but the parking aspect is also a lesson in the incoherence of parking policy. A quick survey of handmade signs reveals the going market rate for a parking space in my neighborhood during the fair, and the answer is between $15 and $40, depending on how close to the gate you are and whether you get to keep your keys or leave them with a stranger.

The incoherence is in the street parking. "The city does not charge for on-street parking on any of the streets adjoining the fairgrounds, and as a result it fills up almost immediately. You get a space in one of two ways: show up very early in the morning, or win the lottery, essentially, and arrive as another fairgoer is pulling out."  You'd think St. Paul might prohibit all nearby on-street parking on fair days the way West Allis does or on game day the way Green Bay does.  (It is possible to find vacant on-street parking during State Fair season or on game day, if you don't mind walking.)  You'd be wrong.

On some of the neighborhood streets, however, the city does ration parking, just not by price. Permit parking was instituted a decade or so ago by request of a noisy contingent of neighbors; it applies from May through September, and was implemented less because of the State Fair than the several months of heavy weekend traffic to nearby Como Park, which sports a zoo and other attractions. These residents complained that they frequently couldn't park directly in front of their own houses (although every house in the area has off-street parking, either via driveway or alley), and the city obliged and established a permit zone.

What happens in the permit zones during the State Fair, when parking demand is overwhelming? The answer is that they fill up anyway by mid-day. Some people don't notice they're in a permit area, but many do. (I know because they ask my dad if the permit requirement is enforced, and he tells them it is.) Given the expense of the alternatives and the value of their time, the risk of a $40 fine is just another price tag.

The lesson is simple. "Parking space has both a price and a value whether or not city policy acknowledges it." Ultimately, the parking spaces are productive assets, and their owners ought to price them accordingly. "The next step just might be to apply some Shoupian wisdom, and make an honest assessment of what the curb space the city owns is actually worth—not just in my neighborhood but in all of them. Every city owes it to its residents and other taxpayers to be a good steward of its public street space by taking stock of this, rather than just defaulting to giving away free parking to those who've won a proverbial lottery."

PUNISHED FOR ASKING QUESTIONS.

Portland State philosopher Peter Boghossian, who we recognized for "doing continual and fearless sifting and winnowing in the belly of the beast," has had enough.

[B]rick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.

I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view.  Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.

Mr Boghossian did not enjoy the protections, such as they are, of academic tenure, and his public resignation letter does not spell out the reaction of his colleagues. Perhaps there were no tenured philosophers with the stones to tell the complainants to pound sand.

At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?

Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public.

I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.

So it always is with a faith tradition, whether or not there is a deity involved.  But there are many ways to say that universities are failing at their mission.  Sic semper Portland State.  "Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas."

THE GREAT GAME THAT IS COLLEGE FOOTBALL.

I'm using "great game" in the sense of proxy warfare as it used to be waged in Asia and Africa, rather than what goes on on the field.  When somebody says a Tripartite Pact among the Big Fourteen Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference, and Pacific Twelve is "not driven by revenue," follow the money.

The Southeastern Conference remains the kingpin of college football.

That only will become more true as its footprint grows — enormously — with athletic powerhouses Texas and Oklahoma expected to relocate from the Big 12 in 2025 or sooner.

But the alliance among the Big Ten, Atlantic Coast and Pac-12 conferences that became official Tuesday could — and should — prevent the SEC from using its outsized heft to dictate the direction of college athletics’ bell-cow sport.

It’s also — one hopes — a shot in the arm for many other college sports, including Olympic sports at the low end of the revenue spectrum.

Once upon a time, it was the Southeastern and Big Eight conferences that set the pace for college football, no matter how many times public broadcasting covered the Harvard-Yale game, or how fraught the rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State was.  But rather than be the second most powerful conference (and seek an alliance with Britain?) the Big Eight, now Twelve, might be seeking Anschluss with the Southeastern.  That's creating a Tripartite Pact out of necessity, sort of like the coalition that won World War II, only without the nuclear weapons or a Casablanca conference.

While there is no contractual agreement between the three leagues as far as it relates to the alliance -- and nothing in writing that prevents them from poaching each other's teams -- the message conveyed Tuesday was that the creation of the partnership lessens any incentive for that.

"It was a moment in time for three new commissioners to be able to come in and say, this has a chance to really be a volatile time," ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. "I think we all know, the history of expansion after one leads to another leads to another. Very rarely has there ever been a domino that's fallen that hasn't knocked over a few other subsequent membership changes.

"We had some friction amongst two of our really important conferences that make up the Power 5. And so, to try to get some stabilization to try to work through the next several years in a way where we collectively can work together is so critically important."

"Working together collectively" might mean further conference realignments.  It might be, though, that the Triple Alliance is going to take sides in the Culture Wars, heightening the contradictions.

While there were specific topics they agreed to tackle together -- including the future structure of the NCAA, social justice and gender equity issues, the future of the College Football Playoff and more -- the actual news was more abstract. The conversations and questions focused on the future, leaving little if any impact on what this actually changes today.

The alliance between the three leagues was brought about by a summer packed with sweeping changes. It began in June with a proposal for a 12-team playoff and snowballed with legislation on name, image and likeness, a Supreme Court decision that opened the door to athlete compensation, a desire to completely restructure the NCAA's governance and the pending move of Big 12 co-founders Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC.

That protection of the nonrevenue sports seems to be the diplomatic cover.

And that means maintaining support for an array of more-vulnerable sports, which are present in greater numbers throughout the Big Ten, for example, than in the SEC. Ohio State has nearly twice as many men’s and women’s sports programs as Alabama. Illinois and Northwestern likewise have more than Alabama. Football is life in SEC country.

Wasn't Nebraska, currently in the Big Ten, also part of the old Big Eight? Was that move intended to protect women's volleyball?

Let me direct your attention, though, to the size of the Southeastern Conference.

While the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 have grown stronger together -- and the SEC will become the first 16-team superconference -- the Big 12's future is still uncertain.

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby declined to comment, but the ACC's Phillips said they want the Big 12 to survive.

"Let me put it directly," Phillips said. "We want and need the Big 12 to do well. The Big 12 matters in college athletics. The Big 12 matters in Power 5 athletics, and our FBS group. And so I can just tell you that we'll be watching what occurs here -- and obviously this transition isn't supposed to be taking place for another four years. This group in particular will be very interested to see what happens and to do everything that we can to try to make sure that, again, college and athletics look similar to what it is today about the numbers of opportunities, the commitment to one another."

It's not as if anybody has to go to war for Bosnia. Four conferences of sixteen teams, haven't we heard that before?

More than anything else, however, this is about football and where things are headed in a new era when the so-called ‘‘Autonomy 5’’ conferences — the Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12, SEC and Big 12 — have taken so much power away from the NCAA.

With three of those conferences in alignment, the SEC ought not be able to bully its way to whatever it wants in vital areas, including playoff expansion, playoff television partners and revenue. Also, a key part of the spirit of this alliance is conference stability. Assuming the SEC is taking all it wants from the Big 12 in Texas and Oklahoma, let the football kingpin’s growth stop there. The Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 will work together, as needed, to remain whole themselves.

For now, although if those conferences ingest attractive bits of the old Big Eight and the outsider conferences and become three additional sixteen-team conferences, I will not be surprised.

LAST OF THE NINTH, BASES ARE LOADED.

Any kid who ever swung a bat has probably imagined that situation.  Every so often, somebody gets to live it.

The sequence there is important. In the game situation that has become a Beethoven joke, two are out and the score is tied.  A good hitter will take what the pitcher and the defense will give, as any base hit wins, and beating the shift or dinking the ball over the infield will do that.  If the home team trails by a run or two, the home run gets the job done most efficiently.

Note, though, that Daniel Vogelbach represented the winning run.  Apparently when it's the last of the ninth, the bases are loaded, and the batter is the winning run, baseball's record keepers will call a home run an "ultimate grand slam" and there are fewer than thirty of them in the (incomplete, would you believe it??) record books.  I believe there are more perfect games than that.

THE LIE THAT IS INCLUSIVE EDUCATION.

Just before the corona tyranny began, followed by a summer of mostly peaceful protests, Power Line's John Hinderaker charged that "Liberalism causes achievement gaps."  Perhaps that's because more sensitive or restorative methods of school discipline don't produce kinder, gentler hellions, or because affirming those different ways of communicating or figuring don't produce intellectually curious youngsters; rather they're effective at producing socially promoted subliterates.  No agency, no discipline, no standards, no child gets ahead.  That leads to a sad conclusion, "[W]e can predict that the black-white achievement gap will be worst in school districts where [critical studies] values and principles take deepest root."  Put bluntly, "inclusive education" with a heavy dose of critical studies comes close to suggesting the students who the woke would like to protect are actually not competent.

Rod Dreher suggests it's the epistemic closure in such school districts.  "Note how there can be no answer for the underperformance of minority students in class other than white racism. These ideologues insist that reality must conform to the tenets of the ideology."  To suggest otherwise is to commit the secular sin of blaming the victim.  "What is not being taught—what students are not exposed to, and not even allowed to hear—is the contrary position that persistent racial inequalities are oftentimes rooted in cultural differences and behavioral tendencies that are not all traceable to slavery or Jim Crow, and cannot all be solved by purging the vague category of 'structural racism.'"  Rather, we pull down the shades on the train, and pretend we are moving.  "[Oregon spinner Charles] Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements will benefit 'Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of colour.'"

The idea behind so-called inclusive education is that it's supposed to produce those intellectually curious youngsters.  The lie is that those intellectually curious youngsters exist, and somehow a more conventional education doesn't hurt them.  Think about this, dear reader.  Each month I receive glossy alumni magazines from a university you might have heard of (not always in a good way) and you might be excused for thinking they're sending out Benetton catalogs based on the covers, and the feature stories.  The stories, though, describe faculty members or graduates working on Really Useful projects, and the language and presentation is impeccable.  One wonders if those star faculty members and featured graduates would have gotten anywhere at all had they been subjected to public education as offered in Madison or Minneapolis.

THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE.

"The science" and "Our democracy" have become incantations, more akin to the phrases invoked to denounce heretics than to concepts suggesting room for active contestation.  That's not going to end well.

Findings that fall into the wrong hands must be renounced. Offensive knowledge is to be buried. Truth is contingent on the identity of the person who finds it. The ascendant strain of thought today amounts to an attack on reason, rationality, and empiricism. An organized, well-funded, fiercely defended Disenlightenment is unfolding, and some of its most engaged proponents are explicit about their desire to demolish a 300-year tradition: In Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, the authors note that “unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Undoing the Enlightenment is an astonishingly bold undertaking that runs so contrary to centuries of progress in learning that it requires the frenzy of a guilt-wracked cult to sustain it. The Disenlightenment is fueled by a religious ecstasy that shares some characteristics with the Reformation (notably a dizzying rebirth of iconoclasm with no clear goal except the orgiastic thrill of destruction), while its reason-denying and reactionary elements recall the Romantic movement.

There's plenty of that sort of supposedly principled unreason floating around, all of which can be summarized as "If a thing is hard to prove, therefore, we should skip the proof and simply assume it."  That's called faith, dear reader.  These times, however, are times in which more than a little healthy skepticism is desirable.  Our New Priests would rather denounce the heretics and excommunicate the dissenters.

The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).

This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science.

Yes, and in an era when the political class and the boffins aren't performing so well, "The Science" or "Our Democracy" don't have much force.

Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.

That's not how any of this works.  Sometimes, it gets funny.  There's a yard sign going up around here that reads "Follow the science.  Unmask our kids."  Despite Illinois being supposedly in the grip of J.B. Pritzker and the Combine, there is dissidence, and calling out the credentialed mavericks is the right thing to do.

So the “believe the science” chorus gives the credentialed mavericks no notice unless it’s to defame them. Apparently, under the believers’ model of science, truth comes down from a secular Mount Sinai (Mount Science?) thanks to a set of anointed scientists, and those declarations are not to be questioned. The dissenters can be ignored because they are outside the elect. How did the elect achieve its exalted station? Often, but not always, it was through the political process: for example, appointment to a government agency or the awarding of prestigious grants. It may be that a scientist simply has won the adoration of the progressive intelligentsia because his or her views align easily with a particular policy agenda.

But that’s not science; it’s religion, or at least it’s the stereotype of religion that the “science believers” oppose in the name of enlightenment. What it yields is dogma and, in effect, accusations of heresy.

In real science no elect and no Mount Science exists. Real science is a rough-and-tumble process of hypothesizing, public testing, attempted replication, theory formation, dissent and rebuttal, refutation (perhaps), revision (perhaps), and confirmation (perhaps).

That's how real democracy works, as well, but it's apparently easier to rile up followers than to look for areas of agreement these days.

Public policy is about moral judgment, trade-offs, and the justifiable use of coercion. Natural scientists are neither uniquely knowledgeable about those matters nor uniquely capable of making the right decisions for everyone. When medical scientists advised a lockdown of economic activity because of the pandemic, they were not speaking as scientists but as moralists (in scientists’ clothing). What are their special qualifications for that role? How could those scientists possibly have taken into account all of the serious consequences of a lockdown–psychological, domestic, social, economic, etc.–for the diverse individual human beings who would be subject to the policy? What qualifies natural scientists to decide that people who need screening for cancer or heart disease must wait indefinitely while people with an officially designated disease need not? (Politicians issue the formal prohibitions, but their scientific advisers provide apparent credibility.)

Here’s the relevant distinction: while we ought to favor science, we ought to reject scientism, the mistaken belief that the only questions worth asking are those amenable to the methods of the natural sciences and therefore all questions must either be recast appropriately or dismissed as gibberish.

There is no such thing as a right decision "for everyone," it's all about trading off among conflicting notions of desirable.  Enlightenment methods of thinking understand that; belief systems do not.  But noble lies are not science.

Americans at whom those barbs are aimed are not really rejecting “science” so much as they are rejecting the people who have glued themselves to it as a means by which to accumulate more power.

That rejection is likely to survive the end of the pandemic. Indeed, if this trend continues, it will take a long time for American progressivism to recover from the fallout. In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash. In the long run, progressivism will always fail, because it is incompatible with human nature and because it is simply not possible to abolish politics, but it can work for a short while, providing that its technocrats have the discipline to prioritize science as a neutral process over “science” as a deceptive buzzword. Unfortunately for today’s progressives, the technocrats of this era chose precisely the opposite course.

Observers who wonder why so many within our government have been unwilling to let go of their power would do well to consider that the endless series of lockdowns, mask-mandates, and social-distancing rules that we have just lived through has been progressivism in its purest form. Just as war is the health of the state, the arrival of COVID-19 provided the perfect impetus for the rampant safetyism, unchecked authority, hysterical micromanagement, mawkish moral crusading, and interminable federal spending that the sorts of figures who graduate from public-policy and public-health programs spend their lives dreaming about. For the better part of two years now, they’ve had an absolute ball. If history is any guide, they’ll spend the next 20 or 30 picking up the tab.

There's a separate post to be written on the extent of the authority of the administrative state, but not today.  The reality check is also coming for a different set of mawkish moral crusaders.

[Atmospheric scientist Cliff] Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change. “You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”

Exactly, and the climate modellers and the contagion modellers have in common their reliance on dubious extrapolations.

The common theme, dear reader, is that the primitive has returned because the Bright People got too skeptical.

Specifically, the West—like Afghanistan—is falling prey to a new form of clericalism. In Middle Ages, the clerical class—what the French called the First Estate — enforced the orthodoxy of the day from the Pope and the Bishops. Today, this discipline is undertaken by university faculties, media outlets, and, most egregiously, social media oligarchs. Once celebrated as forums for debate and open inquiry, our universities function today largely as defenders of orthodoxy.

In this, they are like their medieval and Communist counterparts. In medieval universities, dissenters, like Jews and Muslims, were rare, and barely tolerated. Similar conformity haunts our elite schools, where according to one study the proportion of liberals to conservatives ran as high as 70 to one, and at elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reached 120 to one.

But the similarities don't end there. In addition to living with droughts, famines, ever-colder weather and political unrest, the masses and even the elites in the Middle Ages lived in terror of eternal damnation. More or less everyone believed that the Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent; the period saw a surge of millennialist movements that took it upon themselves to enforce this orthodoxy against dissenters and religious minorities like Jews.

I'd be amused with the observation that the denial of coherent beliefs is itself a coherent belief, but for the consequences being what they are.  "You know you're dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent."  I conclude with what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "The truth will set you free, and most of it can be found in a library."  The 'library" part is salient: your favorite search engine is too vulnerable to manipulation either by its owners or by clickbait.

TRASHING THE YELLOW JACKETS' NEST.

When a Mid-American football team gets a win against one of the so-called Power Five teams, it's occasion to splice the main brace.

The Northern Illinois win at Georgia Tech didn't get much mention on local sports radio or television, although losses by Illinois and Northwestern (and the Wisconsin failure to put Penn State away) did get mentions.  It's always fun to see a team go into another stadium, take the lead late (going for two with not much time left rather than kick the extra point) and then force a field goal attempt from long range and blocking that.

I'm still of the view that College Sports, Inc. are moving toward sixty-four teams in four power conferences, and another sixteen in the not-quite range.  All the same, if the resulting league structure had flexible conferences with relegation (although that could make a mess of all sorts of rivalry games) these Boneyard wins might serve for making Mid-American teams candidates for elevation, and the teams that think they are buying wins by scheduling Mid-American cupcakes move onto the relegation list with a loss.

AT IT FOR NINETEEN YEARS.

The posts are now longer, and there are fewer in a month, and yet the core ideas seem to be the same.

Thanks for looking in.

THE PUNCHLINES WRITE THEMSELVES.

Shrill Democrats (excuse the repetition) are so prone to claim that if they don't get their way People. Will. Die. that there's even a meme.

There's a class of wisecracks along the line of "They told me that if I didn't vote for Lori Lightfoot Chicago would be overwhelmed by a crime wave ..."  In California, now it's "Vote against the recall or people will die."  Should Gavin Newsom not be recalled and replaced, there are likely to be new wisecracks as people continue to contract Wuhan coronavirus irrespective of the ukases, or as the tent cities and the metropolitan areas continue to decay.

It's possible that the students of electoral design will have more material for their work, as the vote for a replacement governor is a simple first-past-the-post, no runoffs provided for.  "It seems as though the hope here is that recall opponents don't select a replacement. If they don't, then it seems very likely that, yes, Newsom will have gotten more votes than his replacement because so many people didn't cast a second vote."  That's the way California crumbles, despite their three National League teams waging a compelling pennant race.

ULTIMATELY, IT'S ABOUT FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

I found a meme that supposedly debunks the case for serious Passenger Rail in the United States.

The creator had to put the British Isles where they are in the comparison for artistic balance.  Move them such that John O'Groats is at the tip of the Minnesota Arrowhead, and something resembling the Head of the Lakes or the Cities to Chicago suggests a comparison with Edinburgh to London of Great Race to the North fame.  At one time, somebody contemplating a trip between the Cities and Chicago had the choice of Burlington's Zephyrs by way of LaCrosse and East Dubuque; Chicago and North Western's 400 and lesser named trains, calling at Eau Claire with a choice of a Madison or Milwaukee routing; The Milwaukee Road's Hiawathas by way of LaCrosse, the Dells, and Milwaukee; and there were once upon a time services offered by Soo Line, picking up a number of the paper mill cities in Wisconsin; or Chicago Great Western, offering the great way around but getting closer to Dubuque, Freeport, or Rockford than any of the major carriers, with Rochester, Minnesota, or Oelwein, Iowa getting in on the action.  And people in Wisconsin and Minnesota keep asking for a second (!?) Amtrak frequency along The Milwaukee Road to complement the current, overpurposed Empire Builder, and possibly to restore that corridor as far as Fargo.

Alternatively, we could leave that overlay where it is and think about this map.

That idea has been kicking around transportation circles for years.  It's not about the fast trains, though; "When high-speed rail, intercity trains, commuter trains, and buses are seamlessly connected, you can get nearly anywhere with ease, and ridership across the whole network multiplies exponentially."  Whether that exponent is greater or less than one is the more important empirical question.  It's not the speed, though, it's the ability to make connections, which currently suffers from the Illinois Department of Transportation negotiating with the host railroads individually, and what is good for Union Pacific from St. Louis or BNSF from Galesburg isn't much help going on to Milwaukee or Ann Arbor, or what have you, and Canadian National and Norfolk Southern are hopeless anyway.  It doesn't matter, for instance, how fast trains can now run on the Alton Route (90 mph between Alton and Coal City) if the host railroad dispatchers are out to lunch.

The fastest Chicago-St. Louis schedule resuming in a few weeks is train no. 301, a 7 a.m. Chicago departure with limited stops that reaches St. Louis at 12:20 p.m. This 5-hour, 20-minute trip only matches what GM&O’s Abraham Lincoln achieved in 1965.

Travelers on the route still must contend with potential freight train interference delays in the Chicago-Joliet and Alton-St. Louis terminal areas and situations such as one inflicted on St. Louis-Chicago train No. 300 on July 1.

Trains News Wire learned from a Union Pacific source that the Norfolk Southern dispatcher, who controls a shared UP-NS double-track segment between the Hazel Dell and Iles control points south of Springfield, Ill., ignored passenger train priority. The dispatcher failed to hold two NS east-west trains instead of allowing train No. 300 and UP intermodal ZG4MQ to first pass each other where the UP dispatcher had set up a rolling meet. As a result, the passenger train was 1 hour, 19 minutes late into Joliet after waiting for the NS and UP trains to clear.

Such delays negate any gains made possible by the latest speed increases.

That kind of dependability will undo any efforts to provide additional frequencies, and connectivity, which is what the Illinois Passenger Rail advocates are highlighting as a benefit of that fast train backbone.

When there are high-speed lines running from Chicago to Cleveland and Detroit, for example, New York and Buffalo/Toronto will have strong incentives to connect with them. The same is true in every direction. The incentives of a vibrant Midwestern network will pull the Atlanta/Charlotte line toward Louisville/Cincinnati/Indianapolis. And they’ll pull the Houston/Dallas line toward St. Louis. That trip—which is currently a brutal 10-hour car drive—could be an easy and pleasant five–hour train ride.

There’s an old line from a Hemingway novel about how bankruptcy happens: Gradually, then suddenly. The same is true of building something as vast and ambitious as a national HSR network.

We’re in the middle of the gradual stage, as new lines are being planned and built all around the edges of the country. With the creation of a High Speed Rail Commission in the heart of the nation, we may be approaching an exciting tipping point stage.

The individual pieces will be brought together and connected via the heart of the nation—the Midwest. And then, “suddenly,” we’ll have a national network of high-speed trains.

Perhaps so, although I submit that while the coastal types are throwing lots of money at faster trains that will never recover their construction costs (the same thing is true of freeway expansions, by the way)  the winning move in the Central States might well be in allowing free rein to 90, then to 110 and 125; providing additional frequencies (building additional tracks alongside the freight railroads, with suitable use agreements) and ensuring that the intermediate stops are well served and the connections are dependable.

I'M NOT INTERESTED IN HOW BAD LISLE BLACKBOURNE WAS.

Scooter McLean is now in charge.

EVERYBODY GETS TO SUFFER IN COUNTERPRODUCTIVE CONSTRUCTION DELAYS.

It's not enough that Wisconsin's department of transportation has to work on the expressways south, west and northwest of Milwaukee.  Now they hope to add a third lane in each direction on the easterly expressway running north.  There will be two years of construction delays.  "These changes are being made to address existing and future traffic volumes, pavement and structural needs. It will also improve safety and address deficiencies including clearance at bridges, visibility and merging and weaving distances, according to a state Department of Transportation project overview."  Will it be worth it?  "According to the state Department of Transportation website, I-43 carries 49,000 vehicles per day south of Highway 60 and 85,460 vehicles per day north of Silver Spring Drive, with future projections raising those figures to 65,000 and 112,500 by 2040, respectively."

The induced demand is right there in the forecast, dear reader.  When the work is done, it will be just as congested as it currently is.  There is no discussion of high occupancy toll lanes, let alone toll roads, in Wisconsin.

And yet, those north suburban motorists are of the class of citizens who will call any expenditure on rail transportation toward the northern suburbs a waste of public money.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

There's plenty of foolishness going around, although a lot of it can be reduced to a line or two, or sometimes a compendium of quotes in a paragraph.

THE HIGHER EDUCATION HOTHOUSE PRODUCES NEUROTIC CAT LADIES.

Read the following advice on handling the "why are you leaving academe?" question that might come up in a job interview with a for-profit, non-profit, or government recruiter and try to keep a straight face.

A lot of things may be pushing you out of academe. That’s the case for many of the students and postdocs I meet with every year who are pursuing careers beyond it. They’re facing really bad faculty job markets. They’re sick of the never-ending pressure to chase external funding. They’re frustrated that they spend months writing articles almost no one reads. They’ve experienced microaggressions and bias in academic settings and just feel done with the whole thing. Those are all important reasons for pursuing other paths. But they aren’t the most useful answer to the question at hand.

When you spend time explaining the inner workings of academe -- which most employers don’t care about anyway -- rather than talking about yourself, it can seem as though you’re not ready to leave it. Indeed, one of the main reasons they might ask the question in first place is that they’re wondering how committed you are to the job you’re applying for, as it might appear that you’ve spent years preparing for something else. They may worry that if they hire you, they’ll just have to run another search a few months down the line when you head back into academe. Or they may think that they’re your second choice and that maybe you aren’t very interested in the work.

It can also make you seem negative and bitter. Which, honestly, you might be! There’s lots to complain about in academe and lots of problems that may have made it hard for you to thrive in it.

Or, upon encountering advice such as the above, interviewers might justifiably worry that if they hire somebody out of the academy, they'll be getting a credentialed snowflake who will make everybody else in the office miserable, and burden the personnel department with all manner of grievances.

A VIRUS CAN MUTATE FAR FASTER THAN A CARTEL MANAGER CAN ISSUE AUTHORITY.

During the recent outbreak of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, it's the intake of critically ill people in intensive care wards, particularly in sparsely settled areas, that is influencing the tightening of gubernatorial ukases lately.  At first blush, that reaction to that situation might make sense:  hospitals don't want expensive facilities sitting idle, which means that under normal circumstances, intensive care beds and wards are on average pretty full, as there's accumulated experience suggesting what the intake will be, and it's difficult to encourage staff to generate business for an idle intensive care bed (I have private information that such rainmaking activity involving more mundane procedures is not unknown among dentists, physicians, and surgeons.)  Thus when a new respiratory virus comes along, there might be more patients who could benefit from intensive care than there are beds, at least until people stop taking the other sorts of risks that might get them badly hurt.

But the installation of an intensive care ward in a hospital is not a strictly private decision.

An insufficient supply of ICU beds is one of the acute crisis points of the pandemic. When hospitals run out of room to treat patients who need the most help, doctors and hospital administrators must make difficult triage decisions. This affects not just COVID patients but anyone else who might be in urgent need of medical care—car crash victims or those who've had heart attacks—and it almost certainly means that some people will die who otherwise may have survived.

It's a crisis that has been made worse by outdated and ineffective government regulations—known as "Certificate of Need" (CON) laws—that actually& reduce the number of available hospital beds by requiring that hospitals get permission from the state before adding capacity.

That "reduce" might be excessive: at least on a chalkboard we can achieve Platonic perfection in the issuance of permits, which is to say, trade tested betterments would do no better.  Reality generally falls short of Platonic perfection, let alone of Pareto optimality.  There are certificate of need regulations in place in Illinois, and those might have had the cosmetic effect of bending the cost curve down by limiting the construction of intensive care units, particularly downstate, but with the consequence of severe capacity constraints during the coronavirus outbreaks.

It could be worse.

That is the situation in Mississippi, which in 1981 enacted a law that arbitrarily and permanently capped the number of licenses for home health agencies, businesses that arrange for nurses and other medical professionals to make house calls. For 40 years, the only way to legally launch a new home health agency in the state has been to purchase a certificate of need (CON) license from an existing agency—an arrangement that guarantees incumbent businesses won't face new competition.

This was a bad way to run a health care market before 2020. Now it looks like a disaster.

Why the New York taxi medallion model would be attractive to health policy boffins escapes me.  And, alas, it's a lot harder to make the case that a spare bedroom might work as an intensive care unit on the Air B&B model, the way a ride-share car serves as a work-around to the taxi cartel.

So it always is with cartels, and with the Democrats holding sway on health policy in Washington and in a number of the thickly settled states, it's likely that they'll continue to restrict expansion of health services because They. Know. Better, and because that will generate rents for preferred constituents.

WARS ARE NOT WON BY EVACUATIONS.

That, though, is exactly what Washington Monthly's Storer H. Rowley would like you to believe.

By all accounts, it’s reasonable for most Americans to assume this hastily arranged pullout has been an unmitigated disaster. To be sure, the Taliban has already taken over large swaths of Afghanistan, with devastating consequences for the Afghan people, especially women and girls. The scenes around Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul have been heartbreaking. The videos of Afghans clinging to U.S. military transport planes and falling to their deaths were a horrible bookend to the memories of people falling or jumping from the burning upper floors of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11—the event that propelled the U.S. into the war 20 years ago.

But that same media coverage has also overshadowed and under-covered the remarkable achievements of the U.S. military in executing an unprecedented international airlift to save Americans, NATO allies, Afghan partners, and their families. U.S. forces and coalition flights have evacuated well over 100,000 people since the evacuation began at the end of July, most of whom are Afghans who helped our soldiers over the last two decades.

Of course, there are questions that still need to be answered about the execution of the pullout—it’s an utter tragedy that this decades-long war ends with the Taliban taking control of the country in just a matter of days as the U.S. leaves—but the military is doing an exceptional job. Despite the hysteria in news accounts and the handwringing by politicians and some allied leaders, a mission like this one isn’t won or lost in a single news cycle.

That writing, which calls to mind a gibe the elder President Bush tossed at Saddam Hussein, something like "claiming victory in the middle of a retreat," detracts from a subsequent observation that people might do well to read and understand.

Biden showed courage in choosing not to pass the decision to end the war on to the next president and avoid international controversy.

Clearly, his administration will be judged on its failure to plan for a rapid collapse of a U.S.-backed government that its own people wouldn’t fight to defend. But the success of the withdrawal, overall, shouldn’t be judged based on what happens to Afghanistan once America leaves. The great failure happened two decades ago, when the George W. Bush administration undertook its misguided approach to nation-building in the Middle East.

Rather, success should be measured on whether the U.S. can continue to successfully evacuate Americans and our allies—and whether Biden can finally extract America from its longest war and allow the nation to move on. Ultimately, that could enable the U.S. to tackle new foreign policy priorities and help restore U.S. credibility and standing in the world.

Disentangling "credibility and standing" from "nation building" might be beyond the capabilities of our Credentialed Betters, particularly if they still entertain visions of that liberal international order.  The blaming of Afghans for fighting according to their local rules of feuding isn't likely to play well outside the gathering places of the establishment.

FIND YOURSELF A CIRCUS AND GO TO IT.

The Culpepper and Merriweather Circus has been touring the upper Midwest, and they played Kingston, Illinois (where the sunset for elephants took place) on Monday.

Around 9.30, the children of all ages started showing up to watch the crew setting up.  That appears to be totally emergent, the moms were not interacting the way they might had they arranged a play-date.

EXPECT YOUR OPPONENT TO MAKE THE BEST MOVE?

A dissatisfied Marine lieutenant colonel has contributed to the field of "quit-lit" with a video challenging his superiors, and National Command Authority.

I'll let others engage the political message, or call to rebellion. Rather, it's the chess position on his board that intrigues me.  The most logical way it arose was with 1 d4 Nf6 2 Bg5 d5.

The other sequence, 1 d4 d5 2 Bg5 doesn't make much sense, with that Bishop aiming at a well-defended king pawn; although there's some analysis.  The moves as I guessed are something called the Trompowsky Attack, and it's a little chess gamesmanship in which the best way to take a queen-pawn opening off the rails is with 1 ... Nf6, and deviating with 2 Bg5 rather than going into one of the Indian defenses or transposing into the Queens Gambit Declined might be a good way to take the second player out of book.

The 2 ... d5 response is daring the first player to play Bxf6, which is the move the colonel subsequently posted.  The best recapture is with the e-pawn, now both Bishops are able to develop, which is often hard to do in a Queen's Pawn opening.  A chess player might have to ask why his opponent is conceding the doubled pawns.

RUNNING EXTRA.  The colonel is getting hammered in some sectors of the internet.  His chess strategy, well, maybe it's not that unconventional.

The ‘Trompowsky Attack’ is a fairly common opening that describes the choice to move the white bishop to the g5 square, which threatens the black knight on the f6 square. This is an aggressive response to the ‘Indian defense,’ which describes black’s choice to move the knight forward. The Indian defense is itself a response to white’s choice to create a ‘Queen’s Pawn’ game with an opening move of d4. ‘Bxf6’ means “Bishop takes Knight on f6,” with f6 referring to the square on the 6th rank and 6th file of the chessboard.

Recently, grandmasters of chess that have played in games with the ‘Trompowsky Attack’ opening include Azerbaijani’s Mamedyarov, Russia’s Kramnik, China’s Liren, and America’s Philippine-born So. There are approximately 2,100 professional games on record that included this exact position, with white winning 27%, black winning 32%, and the rest resulting in a draw, though the powerful open-source chess analysis engine ‘Stockfish‘ determines this position to provide equal opportunity for a victory by each side.

It's useful to have a few offbeat openings, with analysis, to keep opponents guessing, and the Trompowsky probably works well at discombobulating players you suspect spend a lot of time memorizing openings, and an intuitive player can achieve a lot that way.  Even though those 2100 games are a small sample by chess standards (there are probably that many King's Indians in a month) the fact that the second player wins around a third of the time suggests that conceding the minor exchange might be unsound for the first player.

HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN.

Yes, that's click-baitish, even by the standards of a circus impresario.  It's also the title of a song that aired, years ago, on the Dr. Demento show and similar programs, illustrating that being frustrated with woke virtue signallers was a thing long before "militant Normal," "woke," or "virtue signallers" entered the lexicon.  Here's the song, for your viewing pleasure.

I was provoked to look for the song because of a neurotic cat lady called Rebecca Bratten Weiss (again, the pretension of the three names) going after Rod Dreher.  Mr Dreher is quite capable of looking out for himself, but it's the argument the cat lady makes that interests me.

It’s common these days to prefer the artisanal, small business, and farm-to-table food and to reject big-box stores and suburban sprawl.

The ultimate symbol of this reorientation toward the local is the farmers market. No longer just a venue for growers to make a little profit off their extra vegetables, farmers markets are now thriving centers of cultural activity, where fashionable professionals pay generously for heirloom produce and artisanal goods and their children learn about soil science while local bands play live music. A good farmers market gives one a sense of belonging, being connected with one’s community and environment. This is localism in action.

Localism is also touted as a political alternative to the extremes of authoritarian, centralized government on the one hand and anarchic lawlessness on the other. In place of a one-size-fits-all approach to legislation, a localist approach would allow regional authorities to address their own problems in their own way.

I have no objection to rolling back centralized government, and I reject the false dichotomy of Nanny State or North West Frontier. Civilization is emergent.

Rather, it's the tone-deafness about farmers markets that I wish to address.  Maybe in university towns and other places inhabited by cosmopolitan weenies, it's all about the exotic crops.  I wonder what that author would make of the now-gone farmers market near South Division High School: cucumbers for pickling, onions and other root crops, strawberries or corn on the cob in season.  No arugula, quinoa, or heirloom tomatoes in sight.  The last vestige of that era might be the West Allis farmers market.

These days, though, it's not frugal South Siders that one associates with farmers markets.  I repeat, because repeat I must,

Now to drag in farmers' markets (whether alone, or as part of a more generalized gentrification) is enough to provoke a chuckle.    What is a farmers' market in a college town if not the place to get some smug with your artisanal cheese, or to buy a virtue signal with your free-range eggs, and all to the accompaniment of Bolivian folk music.

That's the prior. "I assumed people who were invested in local food and sustainable agriculture must be liberal or progressive. I associated a familiar hippie farmers market aesthetic with ecological responsibility, multiculturalism, and peaceful coexistence." The cat lady is worked up because there were vendors and shoppers who, shall we say, didn't share her prejudices.  That turned into a long discourse and ultimately a barb aimed at Rod Dreher, who gets off a candidate for a Friday short take as the riposte.

It should not surprise anyone that unsavory people enjoy a delicious tomato as well as the next person. If a Communist or a neo-Nazi enjoys locally grown fruits and vegetables, I can congratulate him on his good taste in food while rejecting his politics. This is called being a grown-up.

But being a woke intellectual is the antithesis of being a grown-up. "Perhaps, though, one sign that universities are no longer playpens for really stupid people will be when faculty hirings are not so obviously skewed toward annoyingly self-righteous ideologues."

PROMOTE, DEVELOP, AND BUILD CONFIDENCE.

Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Aaron Ashby continues to reward the faith headquarters placed in him after a difficult debut.  "The offense finally awakened from its doldrums to score in three consecutive frames early on, and rookie Aaron Ashby spun five solid innings to pave the way to a 6-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins at Target Field." That's his first win in the majors, and solid innings have a way of bringing that earned run average into respectable territory, at 3.95.  The way major league managers track pitch counts these days, it's difficult for any pitcher to add more than five or six innings to the denominator in an outing any more.

The baseball playoffs will be here about the same time pro basketball training camps open.

PRAY THAT THEY ARE THE LAST.

Red State's Nick Arama calls the roll, and shares the stories, of the thirteen military members killed by a jihadi in Kabul.

The Marines:
– Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming
– Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City, Utah
– Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosariopichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts
– Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, California
– Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, California
– Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Missouri
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, California
– Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California

Navy Corpsman Maxton Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio
Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee

National Command Authority have ordered military action in Afghanistan brought to an end.  I'm inclined to agree with Reason's Billy Binion that the outcome has been "nauseating."  That is, "You can both support withdrawal and recognize its failed execution."

Earlier, we noted the spontaneous placement of thirteen flags or thirteen empty chairs each served a beer, in this fashion.

Townhall's Spencer Brown offers an illustrated tour of taverns where "Americans are uniting to show their gratitude for those who gave their last full measure of devotion in service to the country."  Taverns, ballparks, pizzerias, casinos.  By the looks of things, that's mostly a populist-conservative thing, despite the alternative lifestyle bars looking for ways to build business.