Once upon a time, potatoes moved out of Aroostook County on boxcars calling attention to State of Maine Products. The "potatoes" label didn't last long, as the shippers of newsprint or toilet paper objected.
A banner crop of potatoes in northern Maine this year has forced growers along the former Bangor & Aroostook Railroad — a carrier once synonymous with moving spuds — to turn to rail once again.
This winter, reefer cars are being loaded in Van Buren on the Maine Northern Railway and shipped south to Pan Am Railways. On Pan Am, they’ll move west to be interchanged with CSX Transportation and finally Union Pacific, which is moving them to Washington State. At least 33 cars have been shipped so far, according to MaineDOT.
That's right, dear reader, potatoes are being routed past Idaho (coals to Newcastle?) and thence to Washington. For conversion into french fries there, or ultimately shipped to China?
Those model potato cars? The routing back in the day was Bangor and Aroostook - Searsport - State of Maine Northern - Boston - Boston and Albany (NYC) - Chicago - The Milwaukee Road - Seattle.
I wonder how long the contemporary Aroostook County potato rush will continue. I keep hearing about shortages of truck drivers, and yet I fear the railroads will let this business go back to the highways, the same way the short haul intermodal might go.
I'm still working off the backlog from the winter break. The good news is that more people are catching on to the corona tyranny and assorted other failings of Our Intellectual Betters.
When you consider yourself on the Side of The Angels, it doesn't matter that you're a docked tail. Everybody else should get out of the way. "With Joe Manchin pulling the string on Biden’s signature legislation, it’s past time for him to use his own authority to make progress." The doddering ficus has no authority over his own brain, let alone the executive actions David Dayen and the Gimme Caucus are hoping for.
Pramila Jayapal has come around to the right idea, after foolishly putting her trust in Biden to work out a deal with Manchin. She said on a press call today that the Biden administration must now pivot to executive action to make progress, as Manchin has stalled it at the legislative level. “We cannot make the same mistake twice,” Jayapal said. “It is abundantly clear that we cannot trust what Sen. Manchin says.”
It just so happens that well over two years ago, [American Prospect] magazine wrote a guideline to using presidential power called the Day One Agenda. We identified 77 discrete actions the next president could take on their [c.q.] own authority simply by executing laws already passed by Congress. In fact, we wrote it imagining precisely the kind of political gridlock we now face, where there just aren’t enough votes to advance policy.
There’s a lot of energy that will be put forward in the coming days to calling executive action a weak substitute for a wide-ranging legislative package like BBB. And certainly, it’s not the preferred path of congressional reporter tip sheets that measure progress by a legislative scoreboard they can easily track. But enormous progress could be made through executive action. Some already has.
I cannot find that passage in the Federal Constitution that defines "enough votes to advance policy." The point of deliberation is to advance those policies, which includes doing no new harm, that are in the interests of the people of the several States. But the self-styled progressives seem to think that a continent can be governed from an island under the aesthetic preferences of Ivy League common rooms. Even if that governance is an end run around the legislative branch.
For those like Manchin who desire the status quo, a president committed to taking action would put him in the position of wanting to legislate, to ensure he has a say in the process. There’s been no effort to threaten executive action as the antidote to legislative inaction. Between that and the fear that no Build Back Better means reduced economic growth, maybe you can get Manchin to yes on something.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, but executive action is a duty regardless. The function of the president is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. If Biden wants a successful presidency, the only path forward goes through using his own prodigious authority. We wrote the Day One Agenda precisely as a counterpoint to the despair of legislative paralysis. There’s not a ton we can do about the paralysis, but a president can govern. And we know what he can do. We wrote it down and everything.
We can’t wait to act for the Constitution or proper process, they’re saying, because we want what we want and we demand Biden give it to us. Hang the law because other members with sense might shoot down what they want. Do you know what that’s called, progressives? That’s called the legislative process, and if you can’t get it that way, you’re not supposed to get it. The president isn’t supposed to make law; that’s not the way the system works. But Democrats keep trying to twist the system into a pretzel.
The progressives have now issued a statement calling on Joe Biden to act by executive action and impose his (their) will on Americans — even if the Congress wouldn’t pass what the Democrats want. Can we call that an “attack on democracy”? They throw that term around but when they demand that things be done according to their will without passing legislation, it sounds like their actions are a much better fit for that term.
Let them keep their antics up, that docked tail is going to be further docked.
The problem with Democrats is that the most vocal, active, and ascendant wing of their base pushes an agenda that isn't popular. Defunding the police is not popular. No one cares about college loan debt, which is a bailout for the privileged professional elite. And removing the SALT cap on taxes is a giveaway to the rich. This is not a left-wing country.
I'm not sure you can call such a small tranche of the electorate ascendant, but that's a quibble.
To compound this messaging issue, white college-educated liberals have zero patience or tolerance for people who aren't like them. In fact, they hate people who aren't like them. Not only are these people wrong if they disagree with them, but it also goes deeper into questions of morality and character for these people. The level of emotionalism is so high that it leads to tantrums that would drive away any voter with a conscience. Even attempts at debate are seen as enabling white supremacy. And yes, calling everything from math to SAT scores white supremacy is another way to get people to roll their eyes, tune you out, and walk away.
Let us hope that the walking away continues. "The far left is so insane, so fixated on pronouns and problems that aren't based in reality that it's starting to make nonwhite voters vote Republican. And if white and nonwhite working-class voters start to vote for the GOP in near equal numbers, well—electoral pain is what's in store for the Democratic Party."
On one side, the violent visuals of Jan. 6, 2021, insist that this horrific moment was about the denial of one of America’s most treasured ideals — the peaceful transfer of power. On the other, that it was an act of committed patriots desperately fighting to save their country. Bypassing its hard surface reveals that this terrible juncture was also about language.
More importantly, it concerns an invisible relation between language and color that distracts from the true problem — how we are ever to reconcile such profound differences. Yet despite the pain and disillusionment felt by all, if we do not together find a way to articulate a new possibility, no one will be the winner.
If we are to successfully empower ourselves to avoid another event in our political future as traumatic as Jan. 6, we must use this moment to understand that many of the roots of its central conflict can be found in language seemingly innocuous, yet color-coded.
We don’t talk about language in terms of its having a “color.” This idea remains underground, in a noiseless place of assumption and belief that substitutes itself for the authentic reality of human experience. As an African American raised on standard English, I’ve often been asked, “Why you talk white?” by others who aren’t. Efforts to understand how such mainstream speech came to be also often raise the question, “Where are you from?”
I wonder is she omitted the verb between "why" and "you" on purpose, or if I should throw an implicit bias flag right there. On the other hand, that first sentence betrays a lack of facility with clear writing. Stick around, there are even deeper rabbit holes to go down.
On Jan. 6, 2021, this “color” of language was everywhere, and especially in then-President Donald Trump’s speech at his “Save America” rally, where he urged supporters to “stop the steal.” This idea is what Janet McIntosh, professor of linguistic anthropology and co-editor of the book “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies,” calls a “dog whistle,” or a seemingly innocent allusion with special meaning for others.
Here, McIntosh explains, it is racially charged as “the phrase ‘Stop the Steal’ has special resonance for … (Trump’s) followers, because for years … (he) has stoked the idea that racial minorities are ‘stealing’ from ‘decent’ (white) Americans; (and) that immigrants are pouring in to plunder the nation.”
Even more significant is the idea that this “color” of language is also part of a generalized “language” of race in America. And because this “language” is historically both word- and image-based, as professor of literature Robyn Wiegman explores in her book “American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender,” racially determined words and images are often inextricably intertwined in violent and forcible cultural meanings that are also deeply divided.
As the Pajamas Media people frequently note, if you're hearing the dog whistle, you might be the dog. Does trotting out the full arsenal of scare quotes and untestable High Theory to turn a protest of ad hoc alterations to voting procedures into the next coming of Jim Crow persuade anyone? We might expect such foolishness out of a serial plagiarizer who has become a senile figurehead. But a tenured professor at what is supposedly a highly regarded university?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Scrooge or some kind of anti-Santa advocate prone to humbuggery, and I acknowledge that the story behind how NORAD’s predecessor started the tradition is cute: a typo in a newspaper for Sears’ Santa hotline was the number for a secret line of communication, originally designed to give the orders to launch a nuclear onslaught against and/or in response to the Soviet Union. Heartwarming stuff, folks.
"Don't get me wrong" is right up there with "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
No, I’d prefer we end the tradition because it’s about time that we decoupled St. Nick from the world’s most powerful military. American culture is saturated with a desire to associate the military with the saccharine. We get videos of soldiers returning home to their pets or children but never questions about why they were deployed for so long or what threat they were fighting; military jets flying over NFL games give us an injection of jingoist testosterone before more regionally focused battles of testosterone are played on the field; and we get the Netflix movie “Operation Christmas Drop,” a seasonally themed rom-com that cheerfully seeks to boost approval for America’s military base in Guam.
"Jingoist testosterone." Gotta like that; and if Guam could be depended on for three electoral votes for Democrats, there'd probably be somebody at MSNBC wanting to make it a state. The column gets sillier from there, speculating on Santa Claus becoming collateral damage because a tracking computer malfunctioned. I don't know whether Hayes Brown was naughty or nice, but Jazz Shaw has thoughts. "You can debate any of the known issues with war and other broader policies without punishing the children who still have the opportunity to enjoy the Christmas season. So for Hayes Brown, I shall award him five out of five lumps of coal in his stocking. Merry Christmas, sir, whether you manage to find a way to enjoy it or not."
They probably can't trick-or-treat as the Queen, but Kentucky toddlers can. And get something close to the Royal Assent.
Jalayne Sutherland, who just turned 2 on Dec. 30, dressed up as Queen Elizabeth II for Halloween.
Dressed in a blue overcoat, hat, a white wig and the queen's signature pearls, the young girl from Florence, Kentucky, posed alongside her family corgis, Rascal and Jack.
“When it comes to corgis, the Queen always comes to mind,” said the girl’s mother Katelyn Sutherland.
The family did the predictable social media things. They also tagged Buckingham Palace. The Palace's response was definitely not "We are not amused."
The family received a letter with the Windsor Castle insignia from the Queen's lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Mary Morrison.
Dated Dec. 9, the letter reads, "The Queen wishes me to write and thank you for your letter, and for the photograph you thoughtfully enclosed. Her Majesty thought it kind of you to write to her, and The Queen was pleased to see the photograph of your daughter, Jalayne, in her splendid outfit. Her Majesty hopes you all have a Merry Christmas, and I am enclosing a little information about the Royal Pets, which Jalayne might like to have."
Good. There is more than enough crankiness, humorlessness, and excess earnestness, and I enjoy being able to document the occasional item that is none of those.
In [Greg] Gutfeld's America, President Biden is a doddering geezer. The mainstream media is essentially a house organ for the left. And the nation isn't engaged in a necessary national conversation on race, and racial disparities in housing, health care and employment. Instead, he aims to persuade his audience that the nation is consumed by destructive and divisive "reverse racism" and an insidious campaign against Whites.
Seriously? In real life, Joe Biden is a doddering geezer. In real life, the mainstream media is a house organ for the left. In real life, I sometimes fear that some communities might be one looted strip mall away from becoming sundown towns. In real life, Student Affairs and admissions offices occasionally lump "White" with "Asian" (itself a massive aggregation of several distinct ethnicities) as people to be excluded from inclusion efforts. Would he prefer that late-night comedians laugh the Woke into oblivion, or take more direct actions?
What Eric Deggans, NPR's television critic, sees at play in programs such as "Gutfeld!" is an effort to undermine the idea that there is systemic racism in this country.
"Some of the ways you push back against that is through humor," says Deggans, an MSNBC contributor and author of the book, "Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation." "You try to turn the term 'woke' into a joke and a pejorative."
Better that they laugh at the Excessively Earnest People. As well as at Hunter Biden and Brian Stelter.
I really wish politicians of all stripes would devote more thought to, oh, making appeals to broader segments of the public. Instead, they're all about the rule rigging. I've edited each of the following passages to strip away partisan references and other clues. Decide for yourself, dear reader, who is being called out.
I could probably make a post like this once a week. I trust my readers are able to find their own examples and understand the message. Thus, only two excerpts this week, and that will probably be enough for this year.
Excerpt 1: "??? know that if they can’t achieve their goals [of] ???, they are in trouble with an electorate that is increasingly dissatisfied."
Excerpt 2: "??? also argue that ??? are passing ??? in an effort to boost ???"
There is a post-mortem on Charger coach Brandon Staley(*)calling that time-out when it appeared the Raiders would have been content to run the clock out, with the tie putting both participants in the playoffs.
First, apparently football coaches lack the subtlety of chess grandmasters, who can offer drawish positions with their opening moves.
Would the Raiders and Chargers agree to tank the game or suffer through a prisoner’s dilemma and try to win?
“We had jokingly discussed, ‘Oh, man, what if we only need a tie?’” said Raiders kicker Daniel Carlson.
A tie in football is so rare (there was just one in 272 games this season) that it’s nearly impossible to arrange without both teams committing to a complete farce. So both played to win.
That, despite the game going to overtime, and being tied after matching field goals.
Yet here they were anyway, tied at 32, in the final minute of overtime, with the clock ticking. Vegas had the ball, third-and-4, on the Chargers' 39-yard line. On the Raiders' sideline, a discussion had occurred about how, if the scenario arose, they might let the clock bleed out and take the tie. Specifically, if they were stopped on third down (they had to run at least one play), would they risk a lengthy, 56-yard-plus field goal that might, due to the trajectory, get blocked? Or, would they just take the tie and head to the playoffs? Sure, they’d have to play Kansas City, rather than Cincinnati, but a wild card is a wild card.
Raiders interim head coach Rich Bisaccia assumed the thought had crossed the Chargers' mind as well when Staley hadn't stopped the clock earlier in the drive. A tie was everyone’s friend, after all.
“Yeah, it was [a] conversation,” Bisaccia said of the tie. “We were talking about it. We ran the ball [on second down] and they didn’t call timeout. So I think they were probably thinking the same thing.”
The Chargers might have called that time out in order to force the draw.
Staley did call timeout, with 38 seconds left, surprising nearly everyone.
The Chargers coach said the timeout was solely about getting the best personnel on the field to stop an expected Vegas run play.
“We needed to get in the right grouping,” Staley said. “We felt they were going to run the ball. We wanted to get our run defense in. [We made] that substitution so we could get a play that would deepen that field goal.”
Only, the coach pushed the wrong pawn.
Except during the timeout, Staley took inside linebacker Kenneth Murray, who had five tackles in the game, off the field. The Chargers wound up with five defenders (rather than the previous four) on the line of scrimmage, but there was just one inside linebacker, Kyzir White, behind it.
That meant safety Nasir Adderley had to slide down into a linebacker-esque spot. While the Raiders were in 11 personnel (which can be versatile since it features three receivers, a tight end and a running back) Staley said he expected the run.
Taking that extra inside linebacker off the field was the mistake. This wasn't an ideal run-stopping package.
Oops.
(*)I trust everybody has noted that "Brandon" has become a name connoting incompetence. Those of you with long memories will recognize that "Staley" is the original name of a Chicago eleven that sucks. What's that line about preferring coaches who are lucky to those who are good?
I've maintained that from the first stirrings of Cold Spring Shops. "The use of government money to support artistic expression is censorship per se, the use of government money to support academic research is censorship per se, the use of government money to provide access to education is censorship per se. One might as well ask why water doesn't flow uphill."
However harmless and well-intentioned “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might sound, we can see that within those three words, there is often an overarching ideological agenda at play. Rather than supporting fairness, objectivity, and equality of opportunity irrespective of individual differences, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in many cases, has instead become a euphemism for a deeply divisive program―one which upholds extremely controversial ideas while centering falsities, engendering resentful tribalism, and promoting a pointedly political message.
Whether it’s the wholesale redefinition of gender, the notion that individuals are intrinsically either the oppressors or the oppressed based solely on the color of their skin, the view that the U.S. is a systemically evil country, or the conflation of the killing of unborn children with racial justice and gender equality, the proposals often put forth under the auspices of advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are contentious, highly politicized, and are far from universally accepted by the general public.
It takes a great deal of intellectual contortion to suggest that tight priors based on untestable critical theories epitomize scholarly inquiry, and people notice.
Forcing faculty and students to pledge allegiance to this tendentious agenda is thoroughly wrong, and reflects a deep-seated ideological bias within institutions that elect to do so. What university which bases its hiring and admissions decisions, at least in part, on candidates’ conformity to certain predetermined doctrinal parameters can honestly claim to foster a campus environment where freedoms of thought, viewpoint, inquiry, and expression are valued and respected?
Of course, none can. Applying ideological litmus tests to job applications and evaluating potential faculty and students based on their political or social views is incompatible with any serious commitment to academic freedom―a fundamental principle of learning which any institution of higher education should defend.
And thus might the censorship creep in.
Moving forward, university leaders must work to immediately eliminate divisive DEI statements from hiring and admissions criteria, and cease measuring applicants by their compliance with controversial ideological agendas. Should they refuse, state governments and legislatures should step in where they have jurisdiction―for example, at taxpayer-funded public universities―and do what they can to bring an end to this embarrassing blight on U.S. higher education.
I remember when spineless campus politicians (are there any other kind) would contemplate some forms of restructuring "before the legislature makes us do it." Sometimes, though, the legislature can be the campus politicians' inducement to develop a spine. Consider, dear reader, a general assembly bill from Oklahoma.
“No state agency, school district, charter school, online instruction funded in any manner by the Oklahoma Legislature, or personnel or agent of such state agency, school district, charter school, or online instruction shall teach, use, or provide for use by any pupil any curricula, instructional materials, or assignments designed to teach components of the 1619 Project as part of any curricula, course syllabi, or instruction in any course or program of study…”
Naming a specific work of advocacy journalism does nothing. A rebellious schoolteacher or professor could provide relevant readings from more traditional sources. The campus ethos that used to sail under "political correctness" and now is "diversity, inclusion, and equity" can be a limitation on scholarly curiosity. "We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes." All the same, legislative attempts to ban specific bits of content are also to be mocked.
To name a New York Times special section in a bill is to evoke sympathy from defenders of academic freedom of all stripes for the faculty and staff of the various football schools in Oklahoma.
On the other hand, to have public hearings with actual curricular material read into the record might be salutary.
For the first time, the National Football League offered a seventeen game season. I still suspect that such a long season is ultimately going to lead to more career-shortening injuries, although its length is also allowing players who are injured early in the season to return to play for the stretch drive and in some cases the playoffs.
The idea of professional football spilling over into the new year still bothers me. New Year's Day is for the college bowl games, except when that's a Sunday, and the "national championship" ought be for fans to argue about, not reduced to an algorithm. The last time a professional football season ended on December 31 was the Ice Bowl in Green Bay.
All carping aside, the final day of the regular season was a good one for couch potatoes. "Every single television window for 12 hours on Sunday was chock full of drama."
Right to the final gun. Because of the way the schedule worked out, when Pittsburgh defeated Indianapolis (a contest of two teams that were in the National Football League in the Lombardi era) the OaklandLos Angeles Las Vegas Raiders and the San Diego Los Angeles Chargers were in a position to secure their division three spots in the playoffs by playing to a tie.
The Soviet team in an International Chess Olympiad would know what to do. "A grandmaster draw refers to when players engage in a short, effectively uncontested game, often in the last round of a tournament, and then agree to a draw." If you're a club-level player, that might not be a big deal, but if you're Bobby Fischer captaining the United States team, or a Steelers fan, it is. "To summarize: this fish does not give a damn what the sharks do or do not do to one another. I've enough to worry about swimming upstream!"
In that final game, both the Raiders and the Chargers made every effort to knock the other team out. In the concluding minutes, the Chargers had to score a touchdown to force overtime, and that was a grindingly slow drive with lots of incomplete passes, and several fourth down conversions. In the overtime, each team kicked a field goal. Under the new overtime rules, it's only sudden victory with the first touchdown. Former Los Angeles had the final drive of the game. They seemed interested in the grandmaster draw until Current Los Angeles called a time out on third down with Former Los Angeles just out of field goal range. That seemed to fire up Former Los Angeles, so they converted the third down, getting into field goal range, and kicking the field goal. There might have been more cheering in Pittsburgh than in Las Vegas.
The swap-meet bargain-purchase brass cabooses have come along far enough that the Northeastern style buggy ventured afield for a summertime gathering of model railroaders.
There's still detail work to be done. Let the record show, though, that although the pace of work on the State of Maine Northern seems slow, over time things get done.
The Democrats, in particular, seem obsessed with gaining the presidency, forever envisioning an electoral coalition that can garner sufficiently large pluralities in thickly settled areas to offset the effects of the Connecticut Compromise in the rural states. The obsession goes so far as to be top of mind in a Jesse Watters interview with defeated Nassau County executive Laura Curran, whose first instinct is to suggest that a senile old man is not an inspiring president, and trotting him out is "elder abuse." So might it be, but view the full clip.
She suggests her party is "giving Republicans ammunition" because of the coot's weakness. The real weakness, dear reader, is the bundle her party is offering voters. She correctly notes that what matters to voters are such things as "the roads in good shape," "sewage is properly run," and "public safety is there." Any worthy local politician can deliver those things. Perhaps the libertarian will be more inclined to privatize the roads, waterworks, and part of law enforcement, and a sewer socialist might be able to make some money off the sewage and even maintain an investment grade bond rating with the proper industrial base.
As Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin notes, "The problem for Nassau County Democrats goes beyond Biden, of course; it is the overall policy direction of their party." Soft on crime, corona tyranny, weak on counterterorism, take your pick.
It shouldn't matter to a county executive or a mayor what some of those Sunday show categories are.
It should matter that the talking heads would recognize the limitations of the presidency. A few days ago I caught one of those cable television panels where somebody suggested the coot could salvage some of his presidency with a "Ronald Reagan" moment: firing the Chicago teachers. Doesn't anybody understand separation of powers? Ronald Reagan could fire federal employees who were engaging in an illegal strike. Chicago teachers are not federal employees, and so far even the most ambitious of federalisers among the Donks has not introduced legislation to make teachers so. It also cracks me up that some of the panel participants were the same people who would ordinarily raise hell about presidential ukases, such as the vaccine mandates currently before the Court.
The employment status of schoolteachers is not within presidential purview, nor should it be.
The extension to other areas of governance should be straightforward.
The liberties of the people are likely to be safer with less presidential power.
The silliness did not take a break for the Festive Season, did it? I was pleased to hear at least one reference to "asymptomatic false positives," though. A lot of stuff came in, and there might be longish lists well into January.
It is time for a modicum of repetition. Our gerontocracy is depriving young children of a normal life when it has long been clear that focused protection makes more sense.
There are a few other Cold Spring Shops themes that keep coming up.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the political left waged an endless war on the alleged corruption of government and the leadership elite. The 1960s political revolution preached mistrust of government and all governing establishments. In the 1970s, the social and cultural revolution turned against all the nongovernmental institutions in society. The family, the neighborhood, the church, the employer – all were corrupt and in need of either drastic reform or abandonment. Consequently, by the time the 21st century arrived, the political left had succeeded in cultivating the seedlings of mistrust throughout American society.
That claim paints with too broad a brush, for although what Patrick Garry calls "the left" includes people who argued with, but often, out of allegiance to the binary choice logic, voted for Democrats, there's still a lot of technocratic interference by the administrative state that helped undermine, for example, families and neighborhoods. There are still solid criticisms of the technocratic vision from the left. I agree, though, that "It is difficult to be optimistic when the ominous signs have been accumulating for half a century." The self-styled progressives might think they control the federal machinery, but they are kidding themselves, and that's probably going to keep the worst case scenario Mr Garry envisions from coming true.
Now that the left has succeeded in discrediting nearly every American social and cultural institution, it has turned full circle back to where it began – the federal government. Except now, the left wants Americans to place all their trust in the bureaucracies of central government. Now that little if any trust remains toward any social institution, the left wants all Americans to give their unquestioned loyalty and trust to the one institution at which the left first aimed its campaign of mistrust.
That bureaucracy has been a comedy of errors of late, and there are probably some ancient leftists who are not disappointed, although their notion of "the worse, the better" likely involves a different outcome than the libertarian populists contemplate.
The professional-managerial class has discredited itself precisely by being contemptuous.
It is no wonder that wide reaches of American society refuse to trust the vaccination messages of the political left. Those liberal elites who call farmers and factory workers and rural residents the “deplorables” of society now insist that vaccinations are essential to life and membership in democratic society. Even though they once derided people as “deplorables,” the liberal elite now say they want to save and protect them. Is it no wonder that mistrust exists?
But this has been part of the technocratic playbook for a long time: rather than persuade, they talk down. How much compliance do you get from people you've insulted? Not much.
“Democracy” now means not the rule or sovereignty of the people but the fiat of elites and “experts.” When the people can be persuaded, duped, or bullied into ratifying expert insistence, so much the better. That extra pretense of legitimacy helps quiet and discredit dissent. When they can’t, no matter. The “right thing” will be done, come what may, and that too is “democratic” under the new meaning. The cloyingly disingenuous phrase “our democracy” really means “their oligarchy.”
Is that a false idealism at work?
One especially amazing feature of our time is the clear astonishment of those who unremittingly spew hatred when their hatred returns disdain. They seem honestly to expect to be loved and are hurt that they aren’t. Somehow their own sense of self-worth as Reds’ natural superiors is tied to Red affirmation; they are, in a sense, slaves to the good opinion of those they despise.
(That's Michael "Flight 93" Anton writing; there's a fair amount of polemic to go with those excerpts.) He might be right, though, that despising people isn't a winning move.
No one on the receiving end of what Blue America consistently dishes out to Red ever votes for that.
But it’s clear that Blue America is not really trying to win over Red. Rather, its aim is to rally its side to permanent offense (in part to avoid infighting) and to guilt Reds into lying down and taking it.
Sometimes, all it takes is a surprise election outcome to get the technocratic types to stop and think.
After years of declines in rural America, Democrats are now facing the real possibility of losing their House and Senate majorities next year over what many see as a failure to address pocketbook issues; the feeling has contributed to a sense of abandonment among many rural Americans, including many voters who backed Democratic candidates in the past. Heitkamp is one of several individuals with a knowledge of rural issues who spoke to Insider and have sounded alarm bells over Democrats' missteps. In assessing why Democratic support continues to falter in rural areas, Heitkamp said that the decline in ticket-splitting has been a major component. "I think people in general have gotten more tribal," she said. "The willingness for Democrats to vote for Republicans is diminished and vice versa."
And it might be foolish to hope that larger turnouts in thickly settled areas.
Ben Tribbett, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist, told Insider that without concerted voter outreach in the countryside, the party could face deeper losses in future election cycles.
"I've been asked before, 'What's the lowest we can go in a place like Buchanan County and if we have hit rock bottom?' And the answer is zero," he said. "You would think that this happening cycle after cycle would cause the Democratic Party to get out there and go ask voters why and find out how we get them back. But instead, what I've seen happen on the consultant side is because the suburbs are growing, they just say, 'Don't worry about it. We'll go pick up the votes elsewhere.' And I think those people hear that message."
Here's where that punitive approach might have bit the Donks in Virginia. Is it really wise to suggest that parents who object to derivative critical studies thinking in third grade are "domestic terrorists" or that some support for shopping centers not being looted makes one "racist?"
That article notes some opportunities for more conventional Democrats, which is to say, not beholden to the Gimme Caucus, to offer a bundle of sensible schools, crime prevention, and improved internet service outside the metropolitan areas. Whether anybody gets the memo is yet to be determined.
It was the height of urban planning expertise once upon a time to run expressways through central business districts, sometimes putting all those lanes between the high street and a river or lakefront. In Dubuque, Iowa, that created an inorganic amenity.
The latest round of Rail Baron with full-sized trains appears to have produced one transaction, with Canadian Pacific acquiring Kansas City Southern. The merged company will be called Canadian Pacific Kansas City. I kind of like calling it Canadien Pacifique de Mexico, with the herald being a sombrero-wearing beaver, but I digress.
Because of the existing railroad map, the connection from Canadian Pacific's east-west transcontinental line to Kansas City Southern's north-south transcontinental line uses former Milwaukee Road trackage along the west bank of the Mississippi River to somewhere south of the Quad Cities, where it strikes out to the southwest, and nobody is seriously talking about putting back the Midland Continental, a railway mania project to run more or less directly from Winnipeg to Kansas City and Galveston that resulted only in a few miles of track in the neighborhood of Jamestown, North Dakota.
But I digress. The point of the merger is to expedite the movement of goods throughout North America, and that means ... a few more freight trains a day through Dubuque. To the ruination of their city.
The city’s letter says “Dubuque already has challenges with the current nine trains per day. The proposed merger will have real and tangible negative impacts on Dubuque and specifically on the mostly low-income residents to live adjacent to the tracks in the heart of our downtown and the businesses in the same general area.” These include increased problems with existing stormwater infrastructure, vibration damage to historic buildings, risk a derailment would pose to the city’s water plant, and air and noise pollution.
They also include traffic disruptions, an area in which the letter says CP and Canadian National, which shares some track with CP, “have a long and sordid history over many decades of blocking key east-west road crossings … There are regular occurences … when parked trains block road crossings for hours.”
Those are the remaining "historic buildings" after blocks of such buildings were cleared for the expressway, and all the noise and vibration the automobiles and semis bring. Train frequencies, even with the merger, are still low compared to, say, the middle of the twentieth century.
So far, so standard. I want to highlight the basis for her argument, which appears to be that there's a lot of corona profiteering going on.
[A] critical factor that is driving up prices remains largely overlooked: an explosion in profits. In 2021, US non-financial profit margins have reached levels not seen since the aftermath of the second world war. This is no coincidence. The end of the war required a sudden restructuring of production which created bottlenecks similar to those caused by the pandemic. Then and now large corporations with market power have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits.
Fifty years ago, I recall people of a leftist bent griping that the 1971 freezes on wages and prices left profits free to increase, which, presumably they could have because of, oh, bottlenecks, or perhaps creative management. Calling a price control "strategic" does nothing to change such incentives, and it attenuates one incentive employers might have to offer workers better wages and better working conditions.
But logic is to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires.
Although academic departments related to science, technology, engineering, and math, collectively known as STEM, once operated largely unadulterated by the social and political ideologies that plague much of academia, many professors and students in those departments now find that espousing the proper views on a plethora of topics related to race, sex, and the broader Diversity, Equity and Inclusion philosophy has become prerequisite for a meaningful career.
Patanjali Kambhampati, a chemistry professor at McGill University, recalled when he was a student in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“Some of my friends and professors in science were saying, ‘Oh the people in sociology are trying to study us and judge us and tell us how to do better and be better people,’ and we were laughing at that seeing how silly that was because we’re the rational ones,” he said in a phone interview with The College Fix.
Now, Kambhampati said, it’s no longer a laughing matter.
You'd think there would still be some institutional memory of the damage "Marxist genetics" did to Soviet agriculture, or "Aryan physics" to German nuclear energy.
But when a Stalinist terror begins, nobody, not even the most loyal of loyalists, is safe.
For example, in the summer of 2020, the chair of Northern Illinois University’s Department of Biological Sciences at the time sent out an unnecessary but seemingly heartfelt email condemning Floyd’s death.
Ironically, this also got him publicly scolded via mass email by a graduate student because he failed to use this opportunity to call for more race-based hiring and mandatory in-person anti-racism training within NIU’s biology department.
And don't dare to be the first person to stop clapping. "Many Americans working in academic STEM, however, have come to understand what they are expected to say, and, whether sincere or not, make a grand display of saying it as loudly as they can." And, apparently, couch their grant applications in the proper way. What have I been telling you about public funding of research being censorship per se?
Here comes the next tease: now if you say six Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys line up for a leaky vaccine, maybe you get your freedom back at spring break. Seriously.
If more Americans get vaccinated and boosted, the U.S. just might return to a semblance of normalcy by February or March, the country’s top infectious disease expert said on Sunday.
Hopefully, enough people get vaccinated “to the point that when omicron comes down to a low level, we keep it down at a low level enough that it doesn’t disrupt our society, our economy, our way of life,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“I hope that as we get into February and March and such that we will be at that level of control,” he said, adding that he wasn’t making a prediction but voicing his personal hope.
[I]f you have not yet decided that this man is a complete and total fraud, making up facts and theory as he goes and tossing them out as tawdry tactical tinsel to blind and confuse our societal radar, what would it actually take to convince you he’s a charlatan?
[H]ow many reversals, reversions, and flat out inversions would it take? [H]ow badly would [der Giftzwerg] need to tank a prediction, reverse a claim, or disavow a claim he boldly portrayed as “settled science”?
Der Giftzwerg "has been blighting public health in the US for 40 years."
Do we reframe a campaign slogan from long ago? It's an epidemic when your neighbor gets corona. It's a pandemic when you get corona. And recovery begins when Tony (der Giftzwerg) Fauci leaves his job.
The number of inpatient beds occupied by patients with COVID is currently 93,282, which is below the number of beds occupied in mid-September. And many of those are in the hospital for other reasons, but just happened to test positive for COVID.
What’s more, the seven-day moving average for the number of people who died with COVID is lower than it was on Oct. 24, which was the day that the current wave started – 1,100 compared with 1,323.
That’s strikingly different from previous waves, which as the chart above shows, saw daily deaths starting to climb along with cases, with only about a two-week lag.
If this outbreak had been like the previous ones, COVID-related deaths would have started climbing weeks ago.
What does this mean? Most likely it means that the disease is getting less lethal as it gets more transmittable, which is how viruses work.
That might be good news for most of us, but Giftzwerg would have to work on his fastball.
We can only speculate, but our guess is that power-mad politicians and public health tyrants like Anthony Fauci don’t want this sort of good news getting out. Better to keep the public in a constant state of panic so they can be more easily manipulated and controlled.
I really wish politicians of all stripes would devote more thought to, oh, making appeals to broader segments of the public. Instead, they're all about the rule rigging. I've edited each of the following passages to strip away partisan references and other clues. Decide for yourself, dear reader, who is being called out.
Excerpt 1: "This is all about installing ??? as a permanent majority. It’s not more complicated than that. If they can’t get ??? changed, they are going to lose big, and there’s no reason to believe ??? can otherwise turn things around another way."
Excerpt 2: "The moment ??? takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment."
Excerpt 3: "To the ??? and an increasingly large share of its [voters]1conservative base, there’s no such thing as a “legally valid” vote for ???, and no such thing as a legitimate election if ???."
Damon Linker is fearful. "The last thing America needs is another, deeper cycle of institutional delegitimation." Brace yourself, though, he sees the conditions that will bring it.
A pandemic involving a novel coronavirus, including a series of distinct variants with different fatality rates and levels of contagiousness, will inevitably produce a high degree of uncertainty among doctors and epidemiologists. At the same time, public health professionals tasked with communicating to the country how best to respond to the risk at any given moment in the pandemic understandably feel like they need to speak with authority and simplicity to be taken seriously. The tension between those poles — uncertainty in a fluid situation vs. an aspiration to authority and simplicity — is bound to produce mixed messaging and even, at times, the appearance of incompetence.
When that predictable outcome gets mixed up with the culture war, the result is something even worse — namely, the suspicion of bad faith on the part of public servants, along with the spread of corrosive distrust in experts and the institutions they lead. At its worst, this distrust can bleed over into the embrace of conspiracy theories about the government intentionally stamping out individual freedom and infringing on our bodily integrity for nefarious purposes.
Taking a broader view, the failure of the Wise Experts is yet another failure. It's been a long time coming, according to Andrew Bacevich.
A comprehensive narrative of the post-Cold War era, spanning the period from the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 through the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan just weeks ago, remains to be written. But even a preliminary account of that period will necessarily highlight its own trio of high-profile events. None of the three compares in scope or scale to the Great Depression, World War II, or the Cold War. Even so, the cumulative impact of the Iraq War, the coronavirus pandemic, and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 makes this much abundantly clear: Yesterday may be gone, but we find ourselves in a helluva mess today.
The stores of capital accrued by the exertions of the Greatest Generation have now been depleted. Mom and Dad aren’t around to bail boomers out of the fix they’ve gotten the nation into.
His conclusion? "As the calendar turns to a new year, we Americans are in for a long, hard winter."
No one man can kindle the ekpyrosis. The old institutional order, though, is out of ideas.
The party structures, the governing class, all the rest? Perhaps one of the lessons we've learned after fifty years of social change and the accretion of power by Wise Experts is that the Wise Experts don't control as much as they think they control. It's not so much a new establishment, as a chastened and less hubristic one.
I wrote that before I ever heard of Wuhan, and if anything, the past two years ought to have demonstrated that the lack of control by Wise Experts is universal. There's nothing quite like the hubris of The Best and the Brightest to accelerate the spread of distrust.
The recent surge in COVID-19 cases will sideline Illinois lawmakers for most of January.
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Senate President Don Harmon announced Thursday that the General Assembly will start the 2022 session on Wednesday. However, they have canceled session dates for Tuesday and Thursday next week.
I hear Florida is a good place to visit this time of year. If word reaches me of any legislators going on an extended fact-finding tour, I'll let you know.
Arvid Haag signed up for “Critical Whiteness Perspectives on Nordic Culture” at Stockholm University because, he said, “local pandemic grant rules had equipped him and other students with an unexpected financial aid windfall.”
Haag thought he’d “get something fun” out of the “harmless” and “absurd” class, but he soon realized many of his peers took the “American-born ideology” seriously.
Arvid bided his time, occasionally offering some “critical” comments here and there, but saved the best for last: an essay titled “Black and White Drinks,” described as “an account of what had happened from the early 20th century in the struggle between coffee and milk.”
According to Fria Tider, Haag related “how the marketing of the coffee has been characterized by highlighting ‘black and exotic elements’ of the drink. When it comes to milk, it has instead been ‘the local and white’ that has been emphasized.”
I don't know if the paper was submitted in Swedish; the rendering into Woke English is spot on.
The question one can ask is whether it is really a reconciliation between milk and coffee that has been implemented or whether adding milk to the coffee is a way to take away from the coffee its unique properties and instead impose the black drink white properties.
Milk in the coffee can with critical glasses be seen as a drink-based colonization. The hot and strong coffee cools and is rounded off in taste with the help of the milk, which thereby controls and domesticates the coffee.
Good enough for a B. Do I laugh, cry, or pop more popcorn?
Seattle socialist Rep. Pramila Jayapal takes the proverbial cake for losing.
She is the vicious chair of the “Congressional Progressive Caucus,” and the public face behind a radical mission to use the bipartisan infrastructure bill to force Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other potentially reluctant Democrats into passing the “Build Back Better” social welfare extravaganza.
During the summer and fall, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed numerous infrastructure votes because of Jayapal, who once ranted, “We will agree to the bipartisan bill if, and only if, we also pass the reconciliation bill first.”
Try not to think of a jack o'lantern in the first week of November. Or the spectacle of an even larger omnibus bill in Congress, which would have enabled the Gimme Caucus to avoid having to stake out that position.
Now for the pedantic point: in logic, "if and only if" is synonymous with "necessary and sufficient" or "implies and is implied by." We can talk about passage of the "reconciliation bill" (the latest porkulus) preceding the Gimme Caucus agreeing to the "bipartisan bill" (that saddles municipalities with yet more roads and sewer mains they can't maintain). Porkulus thus implies infrastructure, meaning porkulus is sufficient for the Gimme Caucus allowing a vote on infrastructure. I can envision a House of Representatives in which porkulus passed without any consideration of infrastructure, thus infrastructure could be necessary for porkulus, but not the only way to get porkulus.
The converse proposition, the way the representative worded it, cannot be true. The whole point of the Gimme Caucus blocking a vote on infrastructure all summer was to pass porkulus first, meaning infrastructure was not sufficient for porkulus in the House. It's a logical error commonly made. "As you may imagine, with the logic of conditions being so entwined, it is very easy to get tangled in a mess of necessary and sufficient conditions. This is especially the case when attempting to state whether one thing will cause another to happen." But logic is to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires.
Wisconsin played Arizona State in the Las Vegas Bowl. Both teams were short a few players owing to coronavirus concerns, injuries, and perhaps Combine candidates holding themselves out. Wisconsin took a 20-6 lead at halftime, and they would receive the second half kickoff.
Three and out. Three and out. Three and out. An Arizona State touchdown somewhere in the third quarter.
Thus, when Arizona State downed a punt on the Wisconsin three with about ten minutes to play in the game, you had to like Arizona State's chances. That punt play was kind of weird, with Wisconsin special teams committing a five yard "running into the kicker" penalty that rendered the primary punter hors de combat, and the replacement punter getting that second punt in a good place.
Auburn's special teams downed a punt inside the Wisconsin 1. (Yes, some replays showed that ball in the end zone, but I'm persuaded that instant replay is leading to sloppy refereeing, as the on-field guys are counting on the upstairs guys to bail them out. That's for another season.)
No doubt the Auburn fans were still hanging onto some hope at this time. Despite Wisconsin's two-touchdown lead, there were still six minutes or so to play, with the SEC's best defense and a potent offense waiting for some more snaps. And that defense came within a second of sacking quarterback John Stocco for a safety, but Stocco completed the pass for a first down. A few more runs, a few more pass plays, a few more first downs, and now it's first and goal with under two minutes to play. Auburn's coaching staff didn't prolong the obvious with spite times-out (one wishes there was some equivalent to tipping over the King in football and basketball games with the result decided), and two more running plays and a game-ending take-a-knee ends it.
Those long drives that kept the ball out of the hands of the other team's offense and ran out the clock were a key feature of the Rose Bowl seasons. It is difficult to conceive of a more fitting end to the Alvarez era at Wisconsin.
Play after play, yard after yard and second after precious second.
“They’re scary,” said Arizona State coach Herm Edwards, whose team finished 8-5. "Because when you watch them on tape, that's what they can do, they can chew up some drives. They can chew up a lot of time.
Eighteen plays.
“I kept looking up at that clock, trust me. Every time they made a first down I kept looking at the clock, I said: ‘We’re running out of time.’ ”
Ninety yards.
“We came out with the mentality that we were going to own this drive, make it ours,” [right tackle Tanor] Bortolini said. “There was nothing they could do to stop us if we all clicked.
"It was just Wisconsin football.”
Nine minutes, 57 seconds, and one first down when the defense jumped offside, which is something we know a little bit about in Packer Nation.
The game ran too long into the night for my liking, but it was worth watching, and hoisting a Sprecher in victory afterward.
Let us be grateful the Grinch didn't study critical theory at Antioch, otherwise his dislike of Christmas might have read something like this.
I don't mean to minimize the pain that we collectively (and you personally) may be experiencing as I type these words on my computer. My computer itself is one of the contributors to much of that collective pain. Its components have been mined in unsustainable and destructive ways. It was assembled in a factory where people may have suffered terribly. The fossil fuels used in its production and operation are contributing to the dire heating of our planet and the rapid extinction of species. And that's just my computer. If we take a moment to examine the impacts of the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, and the products we buy on other people and animals, the misery we leave in our path can take one's breath away.
On the Grinch’s trajectory toward redemption—from evil to good, shrunken heart to rebirthed soul—we often forget that it is the Whos’ persistent joy, their determination to sing in the face of material disaster, that makes his redemption possible.
We expect a certain degree of joy and material comfort during the Christmas season. We’ve watched enough movies to know what Christmas “should” look like: perfect tree, beautiful presents, immaculate feast. Even when these things fail us, we want to be assured of cheer and good health, familial wholeness and communal peace.
Unless you're Zoe Weil, the Grinch's soul sister.
Let us be grateful that the sourest of "cultural appropriation" scolds have not yet come for public television. Chicago's WTTW filled in the eleven p.m. block with a Christmas concert from Belmont University (in Nashville) that included a chorus of white girls performing "Go Tell It on the Mountain" in an enthusiastic gospel style, and a steel-pan and marimba version of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." Let that be your seasonal reminder that no matter the location, mission, or ownership of a college or university, all serious institutions of higher education ought consider themselves in the same business as the Ivies. And note, dear reader, that public television's Christmas programming (and yes, they still use that term) features Wheaton and DePaul and St. Thomas and St. Olaf: maybe people with high college board scores (whilst that remains a thing) never mastered the hand-bell, let alone the steel pan or the violin.
As in the past few years, the Vatican talking point remains the "marginalized shepherds." Note, though, the mask rituals. If you're playing the violin, it stays on. If you're swinging the censer, it stays on. If you're playing a wind instrument or brass, it comes off while you're playing and then it goes back on. If you're reading something, you have leave to take it off. But if you're the congregation, you have to keep your Biden muzzle on while you're reciting the Credo. Somehow, that keeps people safer than they would be, if they were breathing freely, the way the Belmont and DePaul performers were on their shows.
The differences in mask rituals strike me as contemporary parallels to formerly fraught religious practices. If you grant the premise of Christmas, which is God taking human form with the intention of being sacrificed in a cruel way to redeem the sins of humans, in order that those who believe will be in the company of the saints and angels once their earthly life ends, have you really talked yourself out of that redemption (or into that redemption) every time you conclude the Our Father with "For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever?" Likewise, do you cross yourself with two fingers extended or three, or is genuflection not part of your Christmas service? When you face the final curtain, what difference, at that point, will it make? The premise is the same in all the churches, whether they're swinging censers or handbells, crossing themselves or not, or holding services according to the Gregorian calendar, or the Julian.
With the Wuhan coronavirus proving to be good at swapping components with other coronaviruses, what difference will all that mask wearing and standing at a distance make? That's a point Ben Shapiro made. "[B]ad stuff happened to Job despite Job following all of God's requests, and that it was the pagan priests who would scold the tribe for not rain-dancing enthusiastically enough or otherwise not doing enough to propitiate the gods. It was never bad advice from the elders, no, never." Newsweek's L. R. Cohen raises a similar point. "The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested."
Unlike the Whos' Christmas, the winter cold is not pleasant, but it comes all the same.
It's the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. "Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned," they cry out. And it's not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It's politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it's really weird.
These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the "fight" against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn't care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.
It's amusing to see the people who profess the most confidence in Science and Logic disporting themselves like primitives who sense the Rain Gods are displeased.
People with little sense of history might treat the automobile as a Faustian bargain, in which people gain mobility at the cost of thousands of lives lost each year in the United States alone. I deliberately used the archaic expression "horseless carriage" to call attention to the possibility that the absence of a horse was a feature. That hearkens to a wisecrack somebody made about doomsday environmentalists years ago, something to the effect that a Gilded Age version of the Club of Rome would have extrapolated humanity smothering in horse dung by the turn of the (nineteenth to twentieth) century. Or if not smothering, perhaps being sickened: the dawning of the germ theory of disease brought with it recognition that all that horse poop in the streets had to be hazardous to your health. Yes, and the urban infrastructure of carriage houses on alleys behind the house rather than facing the street in the manner of today's snout houses might have been a way to conceal some of the stink and the slop, although that placement of the stables might have made the spread of epizootics more widespread.
But then comes Reason's Chelsea Follett with a further reason to go horseless. "Crashing Through the Snow: The Grim Sarcasm Behind 'Jingle Bells.'" Yes, I recall the full version of the song, not the etiolated cuts that fill the airwaves these days (it's so bad that some young radio guys couldn't figure out "Parson Brown" in "Winter Wonderland" despite the stanza itself providing more than enough context to puzzle it out without puzzling for three hours until their puzzlers were sore.)
In the full version, the sleigh gets into a drifting bank, and all aboard were upsot.
In the next verse, which is [these days] often skipped, the narrator relates being thrown out of the sleigh onto his back and getting laughed at by a romantic rival. His misfortune was relatively minor, but being thrown from a sleigh or carriage was not always a laughing matter.
During the time of horse-drawn vehicles, accidents frequently caused not only delays and inconveniences but also injuries and deaths. The British historian Paul Hair called the horse "one of man's most dangerous tools," arguing that "it is likely that per unit of travel the horse was more dangerous than the motor vehicle."
He quotes Britain's registrar general as noting in 1865 that "street accidents by horse carriages kill more people in a year than railways" and estimates a horse-related mortality rate of around 55 deaths annually per million people in 1874. In 2020, there were 1,516 road deaths in the United Kingdom. Divided by the current U.K. population of 67.2 million, that translates into a mortality rate from motor vehicle accidents of about 23 deaths annually per million people, making modern car rides more than twice as safe as Victorian horse carriage rides. And car deaths are becoming more rare almost everywhere.
The full study looks at a variety of violent deaths in Britain. The sources do not allow the authors to work out the death rates per passenger mile. Sometimes it's solo riders thrown from their horses, that's the nineteenth century's analogue to motorcycle fatalities. Sometimes it's multiple people hurt or killed when that surrey with a fringe on top, or that one horse open sleigh, turns over.
In the United States, that motorcycle is still a relatively dangerous way to travel.
If there were ever doubts as to the inherent dangers of riding a motorcycle, figures from Ian Savage at Northwestern University should put paid to them. In his research paper entitled 'Comparing the fatality risks in United States transportation acrossmodes and over time', Savage analyzes the number of passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009.
With a rate of 212.57, riding a motorcycle is by far the most deadly way to get around - an enormous distance ahead of the second-most dangerous mode of transport - a car or light truck - with 7.28 fatalities per billion passenger miles. To give this some more perspective, Savage writes: "A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks."
It was my practice to offer my graduate price theory students extended time for their high-stakes midterm exam. That sometimes meant a change of venue, depending on when the evening classes would arrive at our assigned classroom. One year, the only room available for the full time slot I requested was in the fieldhouse. That made for an interesting experience, as the basketball team was practicing scoring a lot of points in two minutes, and the horn kept sounding. (That team also practiced cutting down the nets for their conference tournament. The opportunity to do so arose more frequently in those days.)
The room was apparently used for health and safety briefings for the athletes, and the notion of safe sex was apparently of some importance, with condom use being something much encouraged. It's hard to at the same time urge students to take precautions and at the same time contain the rabbit culture that collegians would be tempted by simply because of their age, let alone counsel athletes to refrain from sexual harassment and other secular sins that their previous experience, possibly including during recruiting when an implicit promise of access to women was part of the pitch. That's all familiar turf. It was the juvenile art that accompanied the briefings that provoked this post. A few students put together drawings with a rubber stapled to a sketch of a cemetery or a gravestone to reinforce the message that fooling around could prove fatal, and not from some jealous rival's pistol.
These veterans of the federal bureaucracy [Doctors Birx, Fauci, and Redfield] had worked closely together during the AIDS epidemic, and their track record was hardly reassuring. Their long and costly quest to develop an AIDS vaccine ultimately failed, but they did manage to persuade the public that AIDS would spread widely beyond gay men and intravenous drug users. Redfield, with some help from Fauci, was the chief prophet of a “heterosexual breakout,” a threat that terrified Americans for more than a decade but never materialized.
But we got some scary student art out of it, as well as the playbook for the latest fearmongering.
Fauci still wasn’t satisfied, as [Stanford's Scott] Atlas discovered when Fauci complained during one meeting that Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. “I challenged him to clarify his point,” Atlas writes, “because I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘So you think people aren’t frightened enough?’ He said, ‘Yes, they need to be more afraid.’ To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. . . . Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”
Particularly once evidence of who was really at risk of a bad experience with any of the coronavirus variants emerged. By Fauci's flawed fruits shall we know him. Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis renders his verdict.
Dr. Fauci has been the man behind our nation’s COVID response from day one, and he repeatedly gives us reasons not to trust him or his judgment. I think it’s about time Fauci steps aside. He’s failed us.
Turf him out. Or maybe send his office those graveyard-and-rubber drawings, and suggest he step out of line and disappear.
In Naples, Italy, the mayor cited COVID to announce a ban on fireworks for a second straight New Year’s Eve. This was the response from citizens.pic.twitter.com/duu7Jkb7yK
