THERE ARE STANDARDS.

Years ago, I hung out on a Usenet-style internet discussion list that brought in all sorts of curious people, in every sense of that word, including a bondage hobbyist who rated a reviewing stand seat at the San Francisco pride parade.  The parade was open to all sorts of constituencies from the sexual underground, but when the man-boy-love-association contingent showed up, the people in the reviewing stand turned their backs.

Who knows, these days such a gesture might be oppressive?  An Old Dominion sociologist publishing under the name Allyn Walker is at the center of a campus controversy for his efforts to come up with a euphemism for "pedophile."  Yes.  Seriously.

Walker advocated calling those who are attracted to minors “MAPs,” or “minor-attracted people,” because that is a term that non-offender advocacy and support groups prefer over “pedophile” or other terms.

“A lot of people, when they hear the term ‘pedophile,’ they automatically assume that means a sex offender, and that isn’t true, and that can lead to a lot of misconceptions about attractions toward minors,” Walker told Prostasia.

Walker also recommended affirming therapies, as opposed to conversion therapies, for people who need help navigating their attractions, and made a clear moral distinction between those who are attracted to children and those who act on those impulses. The latter severely harms children, whereas the former does not, they said.

“Having an attraction to minors, as long as it isn’t acted on, doesn’t mean that the person who has those attractions is doing something wrong,” Walker said in the interview. “From my perspective, there is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone, because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all. In other words, it’s not who we’re attracted to that is either OK or not OK, it’s our behaviors in responding to that attraction that is either OK or not OK.”

That's an interesting position for a female-to-male crosser (a real live mangina, to borrow a term from the s**tlords?) to take, given the thinness of the dating market for crossers.  First, you take the stigma away from the attitude, then to take the stigma away from acting on the attitude.  And little kids get hurt.

It puts the university president, a diversity hustler called Brian Hemphill, in a tough spot.

The university statement about Walker quotes President Brian O. Hemphill as saying, “I want to state in the strongest terms possible that child sexual abuse is morally wrong and has no place in our society. This is a challenging time for our university, but I am confident that we will come together and move forward as a Monarch family.”

In a separate statement, Hemphill said, “Many individuals have shared with me the view that the phrase ‘minor-attracted people’ is inappropriate and should not be utilized as a euphemism for behavior that is illegal, morally unacceptable and profoundly damaging. It is important to call pedophilia what it is. As a father, I am troubled by this narrative and its potential consequences for my children and that of future generations.”

Hemphill continued, “Ideally, we would be able to debate even the most challenging issues without disruption or threats of violence, but that is not the world we live in today. Our campus has recently become the target of threats and other unacceptable disruption.”

Further addressing academic freedom, Hemphill said that “sensitive topics and the expression of new or controversial views lie at the heart of academic research. Old Dominion University remains committed to providing an environment in which our faculty can and will engage in rigorous research. At the same time, this freedom carries with it the obligation to speak and write with care and precision, particularly on a subject that has caused pain in so many lives.”

He added, “I am confident that our Monarch family will rise to the occasion in our continuing campus dialogue, and I am equally confident that we share a common starting point for the discussion: rejection of any form of sexual abuse of children.”

It's probably a little late in the game to start defending "care and precision" in academic writing, given the past thirty years of increasingly tight priors and epistemic closure.  Here's a reaction, for instance, that defies parody.

Skye Stephens, associate professor of psychology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, who studies atypical sexual interests and childhood sexual abuse prevention, said Wednesday, “In my field, we distinguish between sexual attraction and sexual behavior, which is not controversial.”

People can have sexual interests or attractions that they do not act on, she said, meaning that “not every individual who is sexually attracted or interested in something will act on these fantasies, which extends to people with sexual attraction to children. Researchers and clinicians are increasingly aware of individuals who are sexually attracted to children who do not sexually offend against them.” Stephens said it was also important to note that not everyone who sexually offends against a child has a sexual interest in children, per se, and may offend against them in this way for other reasons.

Stephens said the term “MAP” is also used “by some who have sexual attraction to children and youth under the age of consent,” and that it appears in some of the academic literature on this topic. As with other areas of research, there remains debate over the best or most appropriate terminology, she said.

Asked how the Walker case might impact research-backed efforts to prevent harm to children, Stephens said the negative attention it’s attracted “could have a chilling effect on those who work in the field. I do wonder if the current climate might impact people who do this type of work or those who might do this type of work.” For example, she asked, “How many people who might be interested in researching this topic see the intense backlash and simply choose to pursue another topic? I think this is very unfortunate if we want to make real progress on important societal issues.”

A few Militant Normals, or fired-up evangelicals, are unlikely to shape the course of research the way the day-to-day pronouncements from Student Affairs, let alone the funding priorities of the foundations and the government agencies does.  In addition, too often have we seen these euphemisms put forth first as a way to make the words less painful and subsequently deployed to define the deviancy down.

RUSHING INTO THE FESTIVE SEASON.

Northern Star columnist Ally Formeller is not a fan of the Christmas songs she's hearing.

I just can’t stand Christmas music.

I used to work retail, and I still do during the winter months when I’m not at school. I’ve heard my fair share of holiday songs— rather, I’ve heard my fair share of the six holiday songs my store would play on loop until February.

Perhaps that's a consequence of what she's been hearing.

Mariah Carey’s classic Christmas song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has nearly 950 million streams on Spotify, with millions of streams undoubtedly coming after the holiday season last year or from those who wanted to celebrate Christmas early this year. The song’s streaming numbers were just under 900 million by the end of the holiday season last year.

Michael Bublé’s “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” has just under 500 million Spotify streams.

These songs are ubiquitous with the holiday season; they’re everywhere. Especially working retail, it’s impossible to tune out these songs for an entire season.

Working retail did not start my disdain for holiday music; it just made my aversion to it stronger. Instead of hearing the smooth, fatherly voice of Bublé, or the impressive, powerful voice of Mariah Carey, I hear grating jingle bells and annoying lyrics.

Perhaps that's because she's being exposed to the "[m]ediocre and etiolated covers" of the traditional tunes, which make up a depressingly large share of what the seasonal cable or radio channels offer.  That "All I Want for Christmas is You" is representative of a recent plague of female pop singers using the festive season to lament their unrequited love, and Michael Bublé takes a lot of the hard words out of the songs he covers.

The current lyrics are annoying because they've been dumbed down.

TODAY ON THE UNUSUAL OCCURRENCE REPORT.

This riverbank isn't wide enough for both of us.  "A collision between a BNSF Railway train and a barge sent coal hoppers and diesel fuel into the Mississippi River on Saturday night, the Burlington Hawk Eye reported. The barge was parked along the shore of the river in a position that left the nose of the barge extending over the adjacent railroad tracks." Two freight cars went in the drink.

That's not the first time a barge barged onto the tracks.

Unlikely as a train-barge collision sounds, it does have a historical precedent. Burlington’s Mark Twain Zephyr derailed after striking a barge near Keokuk, Iowa on Nov. 16, 1951, as reported in the book “Mark Twain Zephyr: History, Restoration and Rebirth,” by Kandace and Robert Tabern with John Kelly and Dave Lotz. The prow of the barge had extended over the tracks. Less than a year later, on Aug. 19, 1951, the train narrowly avoided another such collision at almost the same spot, this time stopping short of the intruding barge.

I wonder if it's worth the railroad's while to install bollards at such places.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 13,981.

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 1,182,471 infections and 15,051 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,744,508 infections and 29,032 deaths.

It's really very simple.  Scandianavia has reopened.  A recent report notes, "No one has seemed to notice in less than a year Sweden is now 40th in population adjusted death rate."  That report also provokes a question.  "Why are we looking at COVID-19 infection rates with a disease that is overwhelmingly asymptomatic?"  I'm going to be provocative.  How many people walking around with "asymptomatic infections" ought properly be understood as "false positives?"

The indoor mask mandate and Chicago travel advisories went back into effect just before Labor Day.  Over a thousand Illinoisans have died with coronavirus since our last report.  Illinois is the only state east of the Mississippi River with a mask mandate, for all the good it's doing.

But after the latest COVID-19 data revealed daily hospitalization rates across the state have plateaued ahead of winter, the governor cautioned Illinoisans he would not let them take off their masks anytime soon.

“New hospitalizations are flat. That is not a good sign. That’s not what’s happened in previous dips from surges,” Pritzker said after receiving his coronavirus booster shot Nov. 2 in Chicago.

That's right, despite the Chicago travel advisories and the state mask mandates and other ukases from the governor,  "Illinois public health officials on Wednesday announced 5,044 new cases of COVID-19, marking the state’s highest total in two months and raising concerns about a rise in infections heading into the holiday season."  I'm not hearing the governor or any of the functionaries suggesting that the infections and deaths would be higher still but for the ukases.

As of this afternoon, the state counts over sixteen 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 maybe fifteen thousand Delta, up from around eleven thousand a month ago, and still under three thousand Gamma infections diagnosed.

I repeat, because repeat I must, bet on emergence.  Including the emergence of more civil disobedience.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

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

At Leif Erikson Day, the governor trailed by 13,101.

At the start of the professional football season, the governor trailed by 12,307.

At Roller Coaster Day, the governor trailed by 11,502.

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 was growing by  less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect.  The details for the past seven months are on page 2.

PEAK SOCIOLOGY.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial has gone to the jury, and the early candidate for most perverse take on the situation is a University of Wisconsin sociologist.

John Eason, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said closing arguments and the verdict will be a pivotal moment for America.

“I think the mood in Wisconsin, not just Kenosha, is that they’re over the whole racial awakening. All signs are this is going to be the case that vindicates white people,” Eason said, adding: "If the peak of the country’s social justice reckoning was George Floyd, then this is the pendulum swinging back. This is the tipping point back.”

The article, which is based on a Chicago television interview, missed the professor's promotion.  His research includes a focus on prisons, and he's participating in an Urban Institute project.  But what sort of scholarship is it to suggest that people are "over the whole racial awakening?"  Isn't it possible to be dismayed with the behavior of Minneapolis police without destroying your neighborhood, let alone parts of Seattle or Portland, and what sort of social justice is it to wreck the grocery stores in the poorer parts of Chicago?

I'm encouraged that there are people who might be dismayed with the prospect of Mr Rittenhouse successfully claiming self-defense who are also dismayed with the way the "reckoning" played out.  Consider Freddie DeBoer,  "When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos."

At the time of the Kinosha [c.q.] riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.

And somewhere there might be minor-league Barrington Moores attempting to distinguish the good kind of revolutionary violence (burning down a station house in Minneapolis) from the bad kind of reactionary violence (storming the Federal Capitol while the electoral vote is being confirmed.)  "Moral simplicity and righteous hectoring," indeed.  What sort of a reckoning is it that turns out this way?

You endorsed chaotic violence. In that state, someone you don’t like engaged chaotically and violently. You said “riots are good.” But people get killed in riots! Now two people are dead, another is maimed, and the guy responsible may very well walk, as his actions took place against a backdrop of lawlessness and gunfire that gave him the legal arguments he needs to be acquitted. What else did you expect to happen, in that scenario? How did you think this would all go, this peacocking endorsement of violence for its own sake? Reap what you sow. Reap what you sow.

Amen.

KARNEVAL.

In Germany, Karneval (as they have it in Köln) or Fasching (as it is rendered in Bavaria and in most of the States) begins 11 November.  Ordinarily, Cold Spring Shops commences its Fasching observance with the beginning of carnival season North American style (at Epiphany, as introduced to these shores in Mobile, Alabama.)

This has been another trying year, and perhaps we'd best have some Karneval festivities, even if we don't get going right at the official start time.

OK, sing along with me ...

We might do a Karneval countdown during Advent, or do Advent and then Karneval, or maybe something else.  For this weekend, let it snow.

THEY DESTROYED THE ROARIN' ELGIN AND GOT DISAPPOINTED.

Sixty years later, Chicagoans are still hoping that Uncle Sugar can make the Congress, now Eisenhower, Expressway, work better.

The Eisenhower Expressway/I-290 was intended as an efficient, high-speed thoroughfare to and from Chicago when it opened in 1955.

But in the 66 years since its construction, the roadway has been just the opposite: a slow and often traffic-knotted expressway that is more detriment to the city and region than a benefit.

So we can understand why a group of state legislators and suburban leaders, armed with a new study from the non-profit Illinois Economic Policy Institute, want to rebuild 13 miles of the Ike from Racine Avenue westward out to Wolf Road in Hillside — using $2.7 billion of the state’s cut of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill headed to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature soon.

I glanced at the report and supporting exhibits. Making the rapid transit stations less of a pain to use might be desirable. The downside of having a transit line in the median of a below-grade expressway is that the station entrances are in the middle of bridges hemmed in by frontage roads or on ramps, with the attendant traffic signal clutter. Relocating some of the ramps from their current left-lane to the more predictable right lane has merit. Widening the three lane sections to four gets you nothing.  Converting one of the lanes to high occupancy toll might get you something, but as long as you're going to get squawking, why not take the heat in support of something useful, like making the expressway a toll road.

The Sun-Times editorialists also ask a good question.  "And, just maybe, there could be serious talk about extending the [rapid transit] line farther west."  The current terminus is where the Chicago Aurora and Elgin exchanged passengers with the Chicago Transit Authority after construction work building the expressway created what the interurban viewed as an unsafe condition running into the Wells Terminal in the Loop.

It's possible the interurban wanted to quit business anyway, and the condemnation and construction provided a convenient excuse.  The last trains connecting to the rapid transit quit just after noon on July 3, 1957, and the Illinois Railway Museum sometimes re-enacts those events.

The same tax money that paid for the expressway, and the relocation of the railroad tracks, also paid to move the interurban's bridge over the Des Plaines River a few hundred feet to the north, clear of the expressway.  No trains ever used that bridge, and it was subsequently dismantled.  There is, however, an interurban right of way mostly in place (as a bike trail) all the way to Wheaton, and dividing there to go to Aurora or Elgin.  Just in case somebody wanted to get ambitious about extending that rapid transit line.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, or perhaps like a cornucopia of aphorisms.

That is, if there are toys in every store.

A DOCKED TAIL ATTEMPTS TO WAG A BIG DOG.

Pew Research have a new crack at stratifying voters by political inclination.  The full report is long, with lots of tables and analysis.  For the moment, a London Daily Mail summary is available without the paywall and registration hassles. The report doesn't come out and say there is an aggregation problem in governance.  But read between the lines.  "Yet the gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one."  The point of research, though, might be to classify and group, and the report offers nine archetypes: faith and flag conservatives, 10% of the population; committed conservatives, 7%; populist right, 11%; ambivalent right, 12%; stressed sideliners, 15%; outsider left, 10%; Democratic mainstays, 16%; establishment liberals, 13%; and progressive left, 6%.  Not only that, it's not easy to construct a bundle that appeals to a median voter, because there's no easy way to construct that median.

Yet the typology study finds that the three groups with the largest shares of self-identified independents (most of whom lean toward a party) – Stressed Sideliners, Outsider Left and Ambivalent Right – have very little in common politically. Stressed Sideliners hold mixed views; Ambivalent Right are conservative on many economic issues, while moderate on some social issues; and Outsider Left are very liberal on most issues, especially on race and the social safety net. What these groups do have in common is relatively low interest in politics: They had the lowest rates of voting in the 2020 presidential election and are less likely than other groups to follow government and public affairs most of the time.

But in the same way that there is something absurd about a continent governed by an island, there is something absurd about a polity being governed by a vanguard.  "Progressive Left, the only majority White, non-Hispanic group of Democrats, have very liberal views on virtually every issue and support far-reaching changes to address racial injustice and expand the social safety net. Establishment Liberals, while just as liberal in many ways as Progressive Left, are far less persuaded of the need for sweeping change." That is to say, dear reader, the faction fight in the Democrat government is a faction fight of two small factions that would like to impose their vision on the country.

So how is such a shorthanded militia this influential? The answer says more about the group’s targets than it does about its membership.

Progressives have capitalized on the cowardice of the country’s influencers and decision-makers. The far-Left may be small in size, but they possess destructive ammunition in the form of messaging. They’ve trademarked terms like racist, sexist, transphobe, bigot, and middle-aged white guy and made them so poisonous that they have the power to ruin almost anyone.

Those epithets are poison only if people go along. Sticks and stones and all that.  It's also worth reminding both the leftists and the establishment liberals that but for Donald Trump injecting himself in those Georgia runoff elections, we would have seated a gridlocked government in January, and whatever combination of Obama ambition and Biden vanity that has led us to where we are would not have happened.  “Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination—and the presidency—because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence.”  No matter what two archetypes of the progressive left might wish for.  Let them get the mugging by reality they deserve.

Biden and the Democrats have been caught once again failing to appreciate why they were sent to Washington, D.C. They underestimated just how toxic their intersection with the cultural curators would be for them — with those constantly telling voters they are insurrectionists and racists and lying about voting laws in Georgia and Texas and Pennsylvania or smearing them because they don't want idiotic ideas driven into their children's skulls. On Tuesday, those voters gave Democrats a piece of their mind, not just here in Pennsylvania but also in Virginia, New Jersey, and nationwide.

Will the curators continue to underestimate and insult the electorate? Look to 2022, an inside-out midterm election. It will not be about Trump — oh, how the Democrats misunderstood that on Tuesday. It will not be about spending more money and passing bills people never requested. It will be about their lives, their children, their communities, and their future.

Never, though, to the self-styled progressives. "There’s no problem America faces that can’t be solved with ever more robust progressivism."  Bear in mind, though, that those are the docked tail on that big dog.  I wonder, also, if the more they push, the larger the voter turnout, against them, might be.

But then, I'm not alarmed by low voter turnouts.  That's evidence that the governing class is staying in its lane.  As a Badger Herald editorialist had it in 1984, when Ronald Reagan's seeming disengagement worried the commentariat, "The average American looks about and sees a robust economy and renewed respect for America, breathes a sigh of relief, and goes back to raising a family and making ends meet with enough left over to take the kids fishing."  Put another way, when the relatively disengaged voters are paying more attention to politics, that's when you have a problem.

YES, THERE IS ADMINISTRATIVE BLOAT.

I've devoted an entire category at Cold Spring Shops to document it, extensively and repetitively, for nearly twenty years.

THE LEGEND LIVES ON.

Our annual Edmund Fitzgerald retrospective.

Paul Michaels photograph.

The 2015 post includes a roundup of previous posts and tributes, and Gordon Lightfoot's song.

STOP BLAMING THE VICTIM.

Democrats don't lose in the suburbs and in the countryside because of false consciousness.

In most of the rural U.S., the only messaging anyone ever hears is Republican messaging. The only points of view people are exposed to are right-wing points of view. Democratic and progressive ideas and positions are not ignored; they are silent and invisible.

And this has been going on for a long time. This is a trend that began during the Reagan Administration, if not earlier. And as people old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman have died off, those areas have gotten redder and redder.

Exactly how this happened would take a book to analyze, but the ending of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of right-wing talk radio have a lot to do with it. The erosion of Union membership also impacts many areas, such as coal mining communities, and is causing rust belt communities to get redder also. Unions were a major disseminator of Democratic Party perspectives back in the day.

Before that, a whole lot of white working-class people abandoned the Democrats because of their support for racial equality, especially Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and corrective policies such as Affirmative Action. Rural areas especially do tend to be homogeneously white.

Sorry, no.  The Thomas Frank of What's the Matter with Kansas?  might have thought so, but the Thomas Frank of Listen, Liberal revised his priors on the basis of new information.  Joel Bleifuss is also thinking about broadening the Democrats' appeal, and although he'd like to turf the corporatist Democrats out, he sees something that matters. "In the past two decades, Democrats have sought to forge a governing majority by winning the support of various (and overlapping) Democratic-leaning demographic groups: Latinos, African Americans, the highly educated, suburban women, union members, LGBTQ people and the Left (always as the junior partner and never in charge)."  There might be some United Front of the urban sexual underground, the welfare recipients, the lumpenproletariat, and starveling farmers that can create permanent Democrat majorities, but I doubt it.  An Economist essay, "The Democrats' Disadvantage," gets to the heart of the matter.  "According to Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist, one reason left-leaning political parties worldwide have been doing poorly with rural working-class whites is that their candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from the party's ultra-progressive elected officials from the big cities.  This imposes the otherworldliness of very left-leaning Democratic politicians elsewhere onto the party's candidates in the heartland."  "Otherworldliness" is being kind.  By the fruits of wilding, wokeness, and welfare dependence do we know those big cities.

THE AUDACITY TO CHALLENGE ENTRENCHMENTS.

The divinity schools that turned themselves into finishing schools for the Establishment managed to co-opt Johns Hopkins and his introduction of the German university model, as well as the efforts of Carnegie, Duke, Mellon, Rockefeller, Stanford and the like into the grift.

But the grift has been too obvious of late, and a number of disaffected academics are launching a new sort of start-up called the University of Austin.  "We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One."  Their reasons are familiar.

The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.

And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one.  We should let that sink in.  Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students.  A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.

That ought come as no surprise to regular readers, and insiders who have more faith in business as usual in higher education have themselves expressed doubts.

It was not unwarranted to pose political questions in [humanities] research. We erred, however, in politicizing inquiry to the extent we did. There is nothing wrong with importing theory into studies of literature, art, cinema, and so forth. It was ill-advised to bring so much theory -- and almost always the same dense and ideologically tinctured brand of it -- to bear on our vast canon of texts and traditions.

But no decision we ever made could have been more catastrophic than this one: Somewhere along the way, we spiritually and emotionally disengaged from teaching and mentoring students. The decision -- which certainly hasn't ingratiated us to the job-seeking generation -- has resulted in one whopper of a contradiction. While teaching undergraduates is, normally, a large part of a professor's job, success in our field is correlated with a professor's ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.

It follows from this contradiction that the more accomplished the scholar, the less she or he is required to engage with students. Prestigious institutions perpetuate this logic by freeing their most distinguished faculty members from classroom responsibilities.

Somewhere Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes is nodding.  "Now, restoring a state of good repair will be more difficult."  And it might require new ventures, such as this Austin operation.

Universities are the places where society does its thinking, where the habits and mores of our citizens are shaped. If these institutions are not open and pluralistic, if they chill speech and ostracize those with unpopular viewpoints, if they lead scholars to avoid entire topics out of fear, if they prioritize emotional comfort over the often-uncomfortable pursuit of truth, who will be left to model the discourse necessary to sustain liberty in a self-governing society?

At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

The founders "expect to face significant resistance."  On the internet, rapid response is the normal order of things.  Although Rod Dreher greets the announcement as "terrific news," while Spiked's Joanna Williams chastises the critics with "Those mocking the University of Austin before it even gets off the ground expose their philistinism," the critics are all over the place, complete with the predictable snark.  "Those associated with the new institution range from former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss to experimental psychologist and one-time Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker." From all the entries on somebody's record, it's always possible to find the most derogatory thing.

John "Just Visiting" Warner has to call attention to the piling on (he is an Inside Higher Ed contributor, so that's required, just like a Hail Mary at Easter) although he raises a number of practical observations.  If this university is a serious proposition, sooner or later it must pass muster with the cartel managers.  "Another unfair criticism is citing the institution’s lack of accreditation. As the system works, you must be up and running, teaching students stuff, before the accreditors will come in and consider a stamp of approval. In those cases, the preaccreditation students are granted accreditation retroactively, so it’s all good—provided you pass muster."  In addition, if it is a serious proposition, somebody has to build it.  "I see a lot of people who are used to working in the spotlight more than the trenches, and who, as of yet, don’t appear to be leaving their current positions to throw themselves into the day-to-day of UATX."  They've got to come up with a better symbol than something that looks like it identifies a tank car.  But there's a reason we speak of "armchair" model railroaders, there are probably many more pikes that exist on paper or in the imagination than there are taking form down cellar or in the bonus room.

Finally, he calls attention to the U.S. News problem.

I want to also note that this proposal has nothing to do with higher education writ large. This is a battle over “elite” higher education, spaces where many of the people who are signed on to the project either attended or work or both, and which they perceive to be less welcoming to people like them than those institutions should be. Rather than fight the internal battle, they intend to take their ball and start their own game.

None of this stuff matters to the vast majority of people who work in and attend postsecondary institutions in the United States, most specifically, public postsecondary institutions. However, what I think the UATX founders get right about higher education does have implications for how we should be thinking about our public postsecondary institutions.

Is he noting that the land-grants, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors are in the same business as the Ivies, and should behave accordingly?  Or is he suggesting that Ivy-envy has infested those institutions in the worst possible way, with the faddish multiculturalism and identity politics combining with access-assessment-remediation-retention to create dropout factories?  Or that the student-faculty nonaggression pact has so many adherents on the faculty that frustrated faculty see no better option than to attempt a startup?

MEET THE NEW POLITBURO, SAME AS THE OLD POLTIBURO.

When these people say "Our Democracy," try hard not to think of "Our Gerontocracy."

Want a little malaise to go with your devalued currency and your cabbage, comrade?

That puts me in mind of another series of Jeff MacNelly cartoons, in which he lampooned the Brezhnev-era Politburo with a cast of Star Wars cantina characters including Lenin in his box, only standing rather than recumbent.

But the communist on corporatist fratricide is taking precisely the form I anticipated.  In the following, "BBB" is the reprise of the Great Society and "BIF" saddles state and local governments with the maintenance of the new bridges and transit equipment they're getting.

Due to the intransigence of a few right-wing House Democrats who made last-minute demands for additional fiscal information that could take weeks to obtain, and the acquiescence of Pelosi and Biden, a planned floor vote on BBB was shelved and reduced to a "rule for consideration," which was approved in a party-line vote of 221-213. Prior to that, BIF passed by a tally of 228-206, with 13 House Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the measure.

Because it wasn't accompanied by a real vote on BBB, six progressives—Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—voted against BIF.

"Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first," Omar said in a statement, "risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship."

Those annoying bourgeois politicians, insisting on regular order. It's more important to pretend that there are free benefits to be had now, and to run out of other people's money later.

Mary Small, national advocacy director at the Indivisible Project, said in a statement that Bowman, Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib "demonstrated enormous political courage in their continued fight to hold the line for passage of the Build Back Better Act."

"They understand better than anyone what's at stake with this game-changing package of investments in children and families and our climate," Small added. "Their votes showed that, unlike the corporate Democrats dead-set on derailing the heart of President Biden's agenda on behalf of their corporate donors, they know what it means to serve the people they represent."

The so-called build back better bill simply builds back more welfare dependency and renewable energy boondoggles. My head hurts. I'll give Reason's Steven Greenhut the final word. "Politics Is Rotting Brains and Making Everyone Mad." Indeed.

THIS IS THE WAY THE INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES.

The Associated Press reports on what's in the latest infrastructure bill that's on its way to Brandon's desk.

What did I tell you, dear reader?  "Unfortunately, too often city governments hope for some future 'stimulus' or 'infrastructure' package to make all the contingent liabilities go away. That way lies nasty reality checks."

Let us count the ways.

The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation's aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 173,000 total miles of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. And the almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system, according to President Joe Biden's administration.

I'm being churlish when I point out that maybe some of that investment ought be written off, aren't I?

It gets better from there.

The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Department of Transportation estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.

How much of that can we lay off on previous capital grants from Washington, which are the large-scale version of Christmas toys, batteries not included?  The bus or rail car comes as a gift from Uncle Sugar, and the local transit authority is on the hook for the upkeep.  Ditto for airports and the air traffic control system.  As far as the power grid and water works, well, we have investor owned electric utilities and water is a commodity.  Maybe the best thing for the govcrnment to do might be to go away, particularly when they're using previous fiscal imprudence as evidence of current prudence.

The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of other smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services.

Let's see, shouldn't preventing current oil patch development and then selling off some of the oil reserve be a firing offense?

WHAT IS THE POWER AGAINST TYPE I ERROR?

Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in trouble for testing positive for Wuhan coronavirus and then for parsing words about being immunized, which meant "not vaccinated" in his case.  It's giving the Packers an opportunity to see how the succession is going to turn out, as, by league rule, he can't play today.  That game starts later this afternoon.

For now, a relatively simple observation.  “I tested over 300 times before finally testing positive. Like I said, it was probably from a vaccinated individual,” Rodgers said.  That's a classic problem in statistical inference, if you look for something enough you'll eventually find it, whether it is there or not.

There's a research project for somebody.  A goodly number of professional athletes in all sports have missed games account a positive corona test.  A few have reported frank symptoms, although the dog that isn't barking is the number of athletes who follow their positive test with the three negative tests that allow them, if vaccinated according to league standards, to return to play, and it's also useful to know how many of the people who did have to sit reported no symptoms at all, even with a second positive test.

THIRTY YEARS AGO.

The rump Communist dictatorship of Mikhail Gorbachev stood on Lenin's tomb for one last wallow in their past.  By Christmas, western style, there no longer was a Soviet Union, and all the free stuff the comrades were guaranteed was worth about as much as a ticket to a Milwaukee World Series.

We could observe the non-observance of the Great October Socialist Revolution, except for the hazy nostalgia that has sprung up since then.

Cathy Young, who once lived there, correctly observes, "Nearly every form of Soviet nostalgia gets the facts wrong."  That might be a Friday short take, apart from the re-emergence of the pernicious notions of free stuff in United States politics.

On social media today, "tankies" with hammer-and-sickle emojis in their usernames and Marx or Lenin profile headers are a loud and proud faction of lefty Twitter. These are overwhelmingly young people, in their 20s and sometimes late teens, steeped in the racial and sexual identity politics of their generation of activists, often sporting gender pronouns and rainbow flags in their bios along with the communist symbology. Many seem convinced that actual Soviet-style communism—not just the "hasn't been tried" utopian ideal—was an admirable vision. "The more I read about the Soviet Union the more obvious it becomes why the west had to demonize it," writes a "queer," "anti-imperialist" Twitter user with the colorful moniker "hezbolleninism." "The USSR's ideology was not only a threat to capitalism, it was a threat to white supremacy."

That's all psycho talk, but that's the point of calling attention to the nostalgia. It's wise to read the article in full. Here's the conclusion.

By the end of its existence, the Soviet Union was an exhausted totalitarian regime trying to maintain its grip on a society that laughed at official pieties, craved consumer goods, was thrilled by the forbidden, and idolized the West. The woman on the bus who had thought it was ridiculous to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire" came to mind, seven or eight years later, when I saw a photo of a rally in Moscow. A sign was being held by someone who, like me, had lived under the reality of communism. It said: "THE USSR: YES, IT IS THE EVIL EMPIRE!"

Let's go, Brandon.

The current issue of Reason is apparently a retrospective on the end of the Evil Empire, and Katherine Mangu-Ward elaborates on why failing to remember the past matters.

It is hard now, in the relative material comfort of the current apocalypse, to comprehend the constant grinding scarcity and existential dread that was humanity's constant companion during the Cold War. And the current manifestations of communism benefit hugely from the material surplus generated by globalization, though perhaps in a way that is ultimately illusory and as unsustainable for them as the Soviet version turned out to be.

The question of whether things are really more dire for humanity than they were in, say, the late 1960s is difficult to answer. Do the hands of the clock capture real threats or just reflect a perverse kind of apocalypse satiation? It may well be that all times are, in fact, the interesting times that the apocryphal Chinese curse wishes upon us.

Those were the days, my friend, and more than a few of us were grateful for the fall of 1989, when there was a Crumbled Communist Regime of the Month Club, and for the peaceful end of the Soviet Union at Christmas, 1991.  The tidying up that remains for people who lived through those days is to ensure that the objective conditions are not favorable for any form of communism.

BIG DEAL, RUTGERS DREW FORTY THOUSAND FANS.

It's always amusing the way the self-styled progressives try to conceal their ad popularum fallacies.

As diplomats from wealthy countries continue to say "blah, blah, blah" at COP26, over 100,000 people growing increasingly impatient with empty promises and inaction marched through Glasgow on Saturday, with thousands more hitting the streets in cities around the world during roughly 300 simultaneous demonstrations on a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.

"Many thousands of people took to the streets today on every continent demanding that governments move from climate inaction to climate justice," Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, said in a statement. "We won't tolerate warm words and long-term targets anymore, we want action now."

I suspect there was more action in the Rutgers offense, which at least managed a field goal.  Elsewhere around the country, there were legions of college football fans in stadia who might view all the environmental activism, whether by the Davoisie or by the environmentalist wackos, as so much blah-blau-blah.

Nowhere in the lengthy report do I see any acknowledgement that the participants in these tailgate parties for people who fancy themselves politically aware were gathering, unmasked, in congregate settings.  Perhaps they understand that calling college football games "superspreader events" is political theater without scientific basis, and they don't even need the kind of Righteousness Pass that was being issued by the public health officials a year ago.

THE WAY TO DEMONSTRATE THE FOLLY OF A RULE IS TO COMPLY WITH IT.

Youngsters have long been clever at coming up with workarounds to prohibitions against cursing.

Let's go, Brandon.

HARD LUCK FOR LOCAVORES.

It's not just the big retailers dealing with logistics.  Local farmers struggle amid shortage of butchers and meat processors.

Local farmers say there are challenges getting their farmstead cattle into meat lockers right now because of the labor shortage brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The impacts could soon impact everyone shopping for beef.

At 4T Acres Farm in Burlington, Jean Gruenert sells Scottish Highland cattle directly to consumers.

"I’ve got them sold, I just can’t get them into the butcher shop," said Gruenert. "They’re not as much of a shortage of meat as there is a shortage of processing."

Note, we are not talking about the industrial packing houses that were corona hot spots early in the pandemic. These are the artisanal butcher shops using traditional craft methods.

Meat processing facilities are backed up - short staffed and overwhelmed amid the ongoing labor shortage brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, the art of butchery is an aging trade.

Over at Ray's Butcher Shoppe on Milwaukee's southwest side, business is booming. But, young people are showing less and less interest in learning about the important craft of butchery.

"A lot of our guys have been here for 15-20 years," said Scott Podd, part-owner of Ray's Butcher Shoppe. "Mike back there in the meat department, he’s been here about 23 years, Andy’s been here about 20 years and I’ve been here about 20 years myself."

It's part of the reason Phil Schmidt, President of the Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors, says groups are pushing to have butchery brought into trade schools and technical colleges.

"Maybe more people would get into it, learn more about it," said Podd, when asked about that idea. "Right now, if you don’t really walk into a place and ask ‘hey do you guys have a job opening,’ it’s kind of hard to get into. Kind of hard to start."

Deer hunting season is about to begin, and the stress on the butcher shops is likely to increase.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's been a pretty good week for pretentious process-worshippers getting smacked around by reality.

Accordingly, there's a long list of Short Takes.  I made the list, you check it twice.

IS THE LONG EMERGENCY UPON US?

Last month, I raised the possibility that President Brandon was simply left holding the bag when resource depletion hit the oil patch.  It might be that what James "Long Emergency" Kunstler (who I refer to in that way for his regular posts on that theme) anticipated back in the days of two weeks to slow the spread is now coming to pass.  "I’m not going to harp on this for now, but our energy supply situation is not what it’s cracked up to be, specifically shale oil, which depends utterly on a reliable stream of loans to keep up the incessant fracking — not a bright prospect with credit markets frozen — and above and beyond that, it’s an industry that doesn’t pay for itself, doesn’t make a red cent. So, watch for carnage in the shale oil patches."

THE GHOST OF PROGRESSIVES PAST.

A schoolteacher called Steven Singer takes umbrage at Bill Maher mocking him.

Maher disagrees with what I wrote.

In fact, the very idea annoyed him as a prime example of namby-pamby liberals taking their agenda too far.

What did I write in the article?

Only that standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

In fact, that was the title of the article, which seems to be about as far as Bill read because he ignored any arguments, facts or historical citations in the piece.

In part, we're still relitigating hoary arguments about the supposed cultural bias of the standardized tests, complete with "runner is to marathon as rower is to regatta," and look who Mr Singer trots out to support his argument.

It’s a real SAT question famously discussed in the infamous 1994 book, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray – a book that tried to use discrepancies in test scores to prove white people are smarter than black people.

The answer is C, and it relies on a test taker’s knowing the meaning of regatta – something more likely to have come up in the daily lives of affluent white students than in the lives of less affluent minority students. If you don’t live by a body of water and/or don’t have much experience with rowing, you’re probably going to fail this question.

Who knew that the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" quizzes in Reader's Digest were hidden tools of white supremacy?  Or that high school English classes attempted to create some familiarity with five-dollar words with the understanding that such words might be common currency in college, and those practice analogies quizzes (which younger readers don't encounter as the analogies don't have much predictive power and they've been off the test since 2005) were both test prep and college prep??

The high schools might not be doing much of anything else, either.

In fact, the College Board, the organization that develops and administers the SAT, tacitly admits its test is biased.

It now provides an “adversity score” for poor and minority students to adjust raw SAT scores to account for high schools and neighborhoods “level of disadvantage.”

In other words, they know that poor and minority kids get lower scores so they’re trying to fudge the results to give them a boost.

Which would be entirely unnecessary if the SAT assessed them accurately in the first place.

They are literally trying to make up for how biased their test scores are.

Am I being churlish to point out that those same school districts might not be assessing the role of misbehaving students in creating that adversity in the first place?  Easier to whinge about those unfamiliar words.

You can fix the tests.  You might be able to fix the schools.  You can reduce the production of Distressed Material showing up at college.

You can't change history.  "But if all this isn’t enough to convince you that standardized tests really are a tool of white supremacy, consider their sordid history. They are literally the product of the American eugenics movement."  Put another way, the self-styled progressive intellectuals of an earlier era created the objective conditions that the current cohort of self-styled progressive intellectuals want to change.

SMALL BEGINNINGS.

The legislation establishing Amtrak provided for state departments of transportation to add trains paid for with state money using Amtrak's rolling stock.  The first such state-supported train was called the Lake Shore, filling in a major void in the national network, namely the old Water Level Route.  That venture didn't last very long, as the state governments couldn't get their act together on continuing payments.  Such is still the case, with Indiana and Ohio being reluctant to put money into Passenger Rail, while New York will put up money in some cases.  Subsequently, the Lake Shore became a formal part of Amtrak's national network, while the Broadway Limited became a mail train with a sleeping car, and some of the trackage it used was sold to a regional carrier.

Fifty years ago, what seemed like an obscure operation began.  Among the passenger trains that ceased operation with the coming of Amtrak were the remnants of the Chicago - Kansas City American Royal Zephyr, known unofficially at the time as the Chicago - West Quincy Quincy Local.  Its discontinuance at the beginning of May stranded collegians in Macomb and Quincy, and a court ordered its continued operation until Memorial Day or so.  (I'm told that for a while, some of the Chicago - Geneva scoots operated by Chicago and North Western continued to DeKalb.   I wonder if that was under similar circumstances.)

The scoots never returned to DeKalb, but with the coming of the first Amtrak-as-Amtrak timetable in November, 1971, the Illinois Zephyr became the first Illinois-supported train.

When the court vacated the injunction on May 10, 1971, the “Quincy Local” service was discontinued, and the battle shifted to the state legislature.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4 million in funding for extension of rail passenger lines eliminated when the new Amtrak system became effective May 1, The Herald-Whig said in a June 3, 1971, article, and after the final legislation was approved, the Illinois Zephyr began operations.

Quincy became the western terminus for the Illinois Zephyr on May 1, 1994, after flooding damaged the West Quincy station in July 1993.

The trains still deadhead to West Quincy to turn.  As of October, 2006, a second train began running on the Quincy line.  I have not yet seen announcements of a third train for Thanksgiving break.

REDISCOVERING THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

We've long understood that the cost advantage in freight transportation depends on distance, with railroads, and water carriers where waterways are available, making the longer hauls more cheaply, particularly with bulk commodities.  The cost advantage of rail over highway transportation appears for shipments travelling farther than five hundred miles, give or take.  The railroads, however, have been shying away from much of that intermodal business, that despite signs of strain in long-haul trucking manifesting themselves long before anybody heard of Wuhan, let alone of virology research there.

A week ago, I noted, "There are no short-term solutions, and the railroads have to think about how best to do shorter-haul and retail intermodal trains."  Then an executive with a freight-forwarding company rented a boat to look at what was going on shoreside at Los Angeles and Long Beach and posted his impressions.  Among his suggestions to ungum the works was an all-hands effort by the railroads to get the containers somewhere inland and let the truckers pick them up there.

THE RETURN OF THE MID-AMERICAN'S SILLY SEASON.

I'm no fan of weeknight college football, and Chicago Sun-Times sports reporter Steve Greenberg seems to share that view.  "November — the MAC’s silly season — has arrived. That means games on days of the week the football gods never intended."  That despite Northern Illinois being the first football program in Illinois to become bowl-eligible, with a quarterback named Lombardi.  It seemed like the time to engage in a bit of fun.

State football rankings, current edition: 1. NIU; 2. Southern Illinois; 3. Illinois; 4. Northwestern; 5. Bears.

Get a load of SIU, 6-2 and ranked No. 7 in the Football Championship Subdivision.

When even Illinois sports scribes acknowledge that the Bears still suck, they must really, really, really, really, really, really suck.

Northern Illinois, meanwhile. failed to tackle anybody at Kent State on Wednesday night.

THE PRESERVATION RAILROAD GOES UPSCALE.

Christmas is a-comin' and the cider's in the keg.  "Christmas activities for the kids and wine for you—everybody wins!"  The listing of trains is, as you might expect, curated.  There are other preservation railroads offering seasonal trains, perhaps in a Polar Express vein, perhaps it's Santa riding along.  Ho-ho-ho, who wouldn't go?

Find yourself a preservation railroad and go to it.

THESE TACOS ARE OUT OF THIS WORLD.

Literally.  "NASA has announced that it has successfully cultivated chile peppers in space for the first time ever. It is the latest breakthrough in a project investigating which crops can be taken to Mars."  It's a development I should be over the moon about.  But what do the astronauts do in the absence of bees?

The peppers were grown from the Española Improved chile which is found in New Mexico's Hatch Valley.

NASA has previously said that it is one of the few chiles that can be "consumed in both the green and red stages of the pepper’s development".

The space agency has also explained that peppers are particularly tricky to grow in space compared to other crops as "they take longer to germinate, grow, and develop fruit".

In my experience, hot days are an important part of the growing season.

LOOKISM IS ONLY THOUGHTCRIME WHEN IT'S CONVENIENT.

It's two days after Hallowe'en, try not to think of Pramila Jayapal.

I'm being outrageous to make a point, which is that the representative is characteristic of the sort of ward-heeler politician who exploits the penury of her constituents to get into office only to do nothing meaningful to change that penury because then they might vote differently and she'd be out of a job.  Such politicians have kept up this schtick for at least fifty years, probably much longer.  Thus, the machinations of the so-called progressive caucus are in the service of dumb ideas, and it doesn't matter who is taking point for the latest effort to enact those ideas.

What does it say, though, when the self-styled progressives don't have anything beyond motive-questioning?

It wasn’t that long ago that embattled Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was hailed as a triumph of bisexual representation. After she was sworn in in January 2019, Out celebrated the first openly bisexual senator as a “rebuke to Trumpism,” positioning the “sassy lawmaker” in opposition to homophobic then-Vice President Mike Pence.

But just a few years into her tenure, public opinion has soured on Sinema. Instead of a brash, bisexual icon willing and able to stand up to the far right, she’s now seen as an unreliable centrist, a self-absorbed Democratic turncoat more fixated on getting attention and lining her own pockets than uplifting her community. No longer a bi icon, she’s now held up as a cautionary tale about the limits of representation.

As a bisexual woman — and one who, like Sinema, is white and cisgender — I now cringe every time the senator makes the headlines. Whether it’s fashion columnists dissecting her showy personal style, cartoonists mocking her as a “manic pixie dream senator” or the seemingly endless analyses of her inscrutability, Sinema seems to embody many of the nasty assumptions about bi women I’ve worked my whole life to avoid.

Her "community" is all the voters in Arizona, whether they compete in triathlons or not, whether they might be good to go in a threesome or not, whether her transgressivity is OK or not.  The closest Lux Alpatraum comes to making any statement about whether a policy position might work or not is this.

In theory, electing more bisexuals will lead to better legislation that more thoughtfully addresses bisexual-specific concerns, making sure bisexuals don’t fall through the cracks of public health, anti-violence and anti-poverty initiatives. But in practice, it’s clear that politicians from marginalized backgrounds don’t always act in the best interests of their community. Sinema herself is proof of that. Despite her own history with poverty, she’s worked to gut the social safety net provisions included in the Build Back Better Act.

Might that be because those social safety net provisions will simply enable dysfunction? Should be easy enough to argue a contrary position.

It's not enough, though, to put forth alphabet people as a "rebuke to Trumpism."  If they don't do the woke mob's bidding, they might as well be Trumps.  Seriously.  "Kyrsten Sinema in All Her Bad Outfits Is the New Ivanka Trump."  Seriously.  "Much like Ivanka, Sinema keeps quiet on the issues most people want to talk about, preferring to let her outfits and the smirks she gives photographers do the talking. So whether she likes it or not, the rest of us are left projecting our opinions about Sinema onto her clothing."  No serious policy analysis there.

PLAY STUPID GAMES, WIN STUPID PRIZES.

A Williams professor who wrote "This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated" gets fitting recognition.

Trofim Lysenko would be pleased, although he likely would have formulaically dismissed the need for academic rigor and debate as being the product of fascist-bourgeois-imperialist-capitalist culture, instead of the current wokeism of “straight white men” as the source of the world’s problems.

So congratulations, Williams College Professor Phoebe Cohen, you are the first recipient of the Minding the Campus Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech.

Williams personnel have not yet acknowledged the honor.

THERE'S MORE TO GOOD GOVERNANCE THAN WINNING ELECTIONS.

Nine months into the current presidency, the cascade of failures has become clear, and voters are looking for a prettier pig.

That had to cause Meet the Press moderator Chuck "Truculent Chipmunk" Todd some anguish.

It's not, though, that we haven't heard this song before.  Remember when Barack "Fake Outrage" Obama got shellacked in 2010?

Presidents come, presidents go.  Speakers of the House come, Speakers of the House go.  Senate majorities come, senate majorities go.  The major parties trade places in these "do a better job" polls, and yet, the discontent continues.

Jeffrey A. Tucker identified the root cause of the discontent, in the middle of a meditation on what happens when politicians refuse to accept the results of elections.  "Democracy with a huge and entrenched permanent bureaucracy, a deep state that is impervious to election outcomes, a thicket of laws and regulations created by people long dead that still exist on the books, and spending commitments that do not change regardless of who is in charge, is not really providing peaceful transition at all. It becomes a veneer that the ruling class uses to entrench the status quo."

The problem, though, is that the permanent bureaucracy is the Croly Ghost Incarnate, permanently carrying out the Intent of Congress as codified by Congresses long since adjourned and signed by presidents long dead.  Voters are merely sheep to be herded, and neither political party is willing to campaign on restoring Congressional or popular authority.  Thus the Experts Misrule.

[Associate Justice Stephen] Breyer and his political allies on the left and throughout the Democrat Party have unfailing faith in the technocracy; it’s near-religious, and we’re all living in it.

For the past 18 months, we’ve suffered under the thumb of this sort of unchecked bureaucracy: Closed schools, masked children, shuttered businesses, canceled weddings, restricted hospitals, forbidden funerals — even the public drug dens and homeless camps now filling major cities are products of CDC “guidance.” For “public health and safety,” we’re told.

But while it’s been in full public view these past 18 months, the reality is we have increasingly suffered under the thumb of unchecked bureaucracy since President Woodrow Wilson; its power and influence growing stronger each year, while the executive and congressional power and will to curb it have lessened.

Some of that growth is natural: influence craves influence, power craves power. But much of it is the result either of active policies in favor of it (or a failure to enact policies restricting it), driven by men like Wilson and men like Breyer — highly educated and seriously intelligent men who think that we, the people, ought not rule ourselves; the experts will take care of that.

The Democrats are more prone to create commissions and enact new regulations, but Republicans in Congress have figured out that pushing the citizens around is a pretty good gig.  That leaves the Permanent Government with destructive powers.  It takes an Act of Congress, and a lot of Presidential Influence, to clear out the real clutter.

Most of the authors cited today correctly want federal judges to fix the problem by limiting the power of bureaucrats to make and enforce law.

That would be desirable, but I’d go much further. We should eliminate almost all of the agencies, programs, and departments that clutter Washington. Then the problem of the administrative state automatically disappears.

That's asking a lot of either major party.

Until voters reject the false binary choice the pundits keep pushing at us, we're likely to see the "better able to fix things" honor going to the out-of-power party until it becomes the in-power party.

NO ONE IS OBLIGATED TO SLEEP WITH SOMEONE THEY AREN'T ATTRACTED TO.

That sounds like common sense, but these days, if you frequent the sexual underground, your selectivity is oppressive.

Pressuring people into sexual relationships they aren’t comfortable with is a very bad idea, even if you’re doing it for the greater good of trans inclusion. I’m sure there will be some people who are attracted to trans women and that’s great but it’s not going to be every straight man or every lesbian. Sorry but that’s just not how this works.

The story comes by way of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Jennie is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.

Jennie doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a "terf" - a trans exclusionary radical feminist.

It gets better, or worse, the further you read. Who knew that cissexism was more evil than heterosexism?

One compared going on dates with trans women to so-called conversion therapy - the controversial practice of trying to change someone's sexual orientation.

"I knew I wasn't attracted to them but internalised the idea that it was because of my 'transmisogyny' and that if I dated them for long enough I could start to be attracted to them. It was DIY conversion therapy," she wrote.

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

While welcomed by some in the LGBT community, Angela's report was described as transphobic by others.

"[People said] we are worse than rapists because we [supposedly] try to frame every trans woman as a rapist," said Angela.

"This is not the point. The point is that if it happens we need to speak about it. If it happens to one woman it's wrong. As it turns out it happens to more than one woman."

It's only a matter of time before the woke mob changes its mind.  Consider the status of what we called "interracial" dating.  It's a thing.   But the critical theory types still have to run it through the logic-chopper.  Date only within your race?  Clearly racist.  But date across those lines?  Might be a power move, depending on who stands where in the Oppression Olympics, and the person holding more power in that competition might be patronizing or otherwise infantilizing that partner.  Never mind that the vice president might come off as more likable had she described herself as "cablinasian" or something similar.

The best thing to do might be to enjoy the silliness.  Mental health professionals will get a handle on what induces youngsters to think of themselves as crossers, and perhaps, in common with religions that delay baptism or confirmation to young adulthood, give the preadolescents more space to think.  Meanwhile, the dating difficulties in the sexual underground will have their effect.  Years ago, the time came when hippies started having more trouble getting dates.

FISH HEADS, FISH HEADS, EAT 'EM UP, YUM!

Oh, wait.  "A Pennsylvania woman was in for a surprise when she ordered wings for dinner and found a chicken head included in her meal."  The order, from Old School Pizza in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (not takeout Chinese, where using everything but the squeal is de rigueur) is making amends.

In a statement, they apologized for a "truly … unfortunate situation that happened."

"We've been open nearly 13 years, and have sold TONS of wings every week and have never seen anything like this … The supplier is looking into how such a thing could have happened and how it could have passed through so many checkpoints and gone unnoticed," the statement reads. "We thank all of our loyal customers and thank everyone that understands that accidents do happen, and some things are just out of our control."

I'll accept that wings are a popular item, but question whether they're being sold by the ton.