WHO ARE THE POOR PEOPLES' LOBBYISTS?

Is anybody surprised that rent-seekers captured public provision of roads?

U.S. transportation policies prioritizing automobile use over public transit are leaving the poor and people of color behind, exacerbating inequality and the climate emergency. That's according to a new report published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The ISP report—entitled How the U.S. Transportation System Fuels Inequality — notes that "for decades, the federal government has allocated about four times as much funding to roadways as it has to public transit such as buses and subways."

"This policy choice has consequences for racial and economic justice, the environment, and more," warns ISP's Basav Sen, the paper's author.

The report reveals that while the extent of U.S. roadways measured in lane-miles increased by 9% between 1990 and 2020, "public transportation systems have an accumulated maintenance and repairs backlog that is estimated by different sources as between $90 billion and $176 billion."

That deferred transit maintenance is a rounding error in the deferred maintenance on those lane-miles, judging by how much money the road socialists (rent-seekers is the politer word) have appropriated for full federal funding of roads and bridges that state and local governments have not been able to properly maintain.

Yes, you can rile up the True Believers with a riff on "women genderquestioning and minorities hardest hit."

According to Sen: "When transit systems are poorly maintained, the frequency and reliability of service suffers, making transit a less viable form of personal transportation. Faced with unreliable (and for as many as 45% of people in the U.S., nonexistent) transit systems, people often have no choice but to drive a personal vehicle to get to work, medical appointments, the grocery store, or anywhere else."

Tou might even be able to make the argument in equity that older, mechanically less reliable and probably less well-maintained cars that poorer people make do with put poorer lives at risk.  The essay (wisely, I submit) doesn't go there, although it hints at the regressive transfer that public provision of roads manifests.

"U.S. transportation policies privileging roadways and personal vehicles over all other modes of travel have not served the economic and transportation needs of all," he adds. "They are a public subsidy for disproportionately white, wealthier households, at the expense of the rest of the population."

The report contends that "transforming U.S. transportation policy priorities from its current overemphasis on (and excessive funding for) roadways at the expense of all other forms of transportation will clearly serve the needs of people of color and low-income people by providing them more affordable and accessible mobility choices that don’t require them to own cars."

You have to dig some, though, to find a simpler explanation than Privilege or Institutional Racism.

Industry lobbying pressure, backed by political campaign donations, are a major impediment to change, the report shows.

"Political campaign contributions by the oil and gas industry over the last five election cycles (2012 through 2020) have totaled $485 million, including $140 million in the last election cycle alone," Sen writes. "In the current (2022) election cycle, a huge share of oil and gas money has gone to just one politician — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va). The industry's campaign contributions to Manchin are nearly four times their contributions to the next highest recipient."

"Manchin was part of the group of senators who came up with the bipartisan infrastructure bill... which continues the long-standing practice of allocating a disproportionate share of funding to highways at the expense of other modes of transportation," the paper notes. "Clearly, fossil fuel interests are rewarding him for serving their interests."

It is too much to ask of a columnist for a socialist tract, who has an Enemy of the People in the form of Senator Manchin to call out, to grasp the notion that a government in a position to deliver favors is going to deliver favors.  The public roads and waterways have long been a federal project, all the way back to the American System of Internal Improvements, and there are still people who labor under the delusion that these can be paid for out of general revenues.  I'm still waiting for the penny to drop.

What Washington mostly subsidizes is rent-seekers, including the infrastructure lobby, and it gets a lot of those rent-seekers. Indirectly, Washington subsidizes traffic congestion, and it gets traffic congestion.  Perhaps in ten or twenty or a hundred years it will occur to somebody at the Post to suggest that the roads be run like a business.

Heck, there might even be areas of common cause among the lobbyists the poor people do have, the mass transportation industry, crunchy conservatives, and libertarians.

PASSING THE TORCH.

Two of my ferroequinology colleagues of long standing are making career moves.

Rob McGonigal is retiring as editor of Classic Trains.

Rob has spent nearly a quarter century building the readership and the reputation of a truly great magazine. Not ever being on his staff, I’ve delighted in picking up every issue and encountering it afresh, just like all of you. I’ve been engrossed, entertained, even thrilled by what’s been in its pages. Once in a while, I’ve even had the privilege of being one of Rob’s writers.

Mike Schafer is retiring as editor of Passenger Train Journal.

I remember an afternoon in 1981 when Schaf and I were putting PTJ together in the rented basement of an insurance company in Waukesha, about the only digs Publisher Kevin McKinney could afford. I was working nights on the Milwaukee Sentinel copy desk and coming out to PTJ during the day, often bringing our family dog, a female named Zorro. The basement was spacious, plenty of space for a dog to roam.

You'll have to click over for the rest of the dog story.

Both Rob and Mike will continue to write about things that run on rails.  Let there be clear tracks ahead.

BRACKETS, BUSTED.

One side of the bracket reads like it might be a holiday basketball tournament, until you get to that score.

The [Baylor] Bears, who were undefeated throughout the entire regular season earned the number one overall seed in the bracket as well as a first-round bye. After beating University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in round two, the Bears narrowly dodged an upset bid by this year’s “Cinderella” team in UNLV by winning 8-to-7 in the semifinals to advance to the championship game.

The other side, though, suggests something else is going on.

The [Northern Illinois] Huskies, likewise, were one of the division’s top teams earning a 3 seed and first-round bye. The dogs were left unchained as they came out ferociously in the first two rounds taking down in-state rival UIUC 9-to-6, and routing UCSB 11-to-5 in the semifinals.

Then Northern Illinois got the best of Baylor. "The NIU Chess Club edged the top-seeded Baylor University Bears Chess Club to take first place in division seven of the Collegiate Chess League tournament."

It transpires that the Collegiate Chess League is one of the electronic sports competitions that have become a thing in higher education recently.  There are eight divisions for competition, which might explain the presence of known basketball schools in the Northern Illinois bracket.  The Ivies and the like, who are not factors in basketball or football, don't seem to be participating in that league, although some of the usual suspects from the Big Ten and Ivy aspirants did play.  In DeKalb, though, there are opportunities for networking and excellence that appear to continue into this year.

“I definitely look forward to every Monday when we meet,” senior chess club member Sean Quirke said. “They’re really nice people and very welcoming to everyone to get involved into the tournaments and playing chess in general.”

Looking forward, the Huskies are ready to take the program to the next level.

“We’ve got the same league, it starts Feb. 12 and 13 and it’s going to be every Saturday from noon to 1 p.m. And then on Feb. 5 and 6, we have another tournament that’s online for college students, so looking to do well on both of those,” [club vice president Ace] Frieders said.

Good.  I wonder if anyone aspires to competing in a higher division, something the athletics department aspires to and I wish the academic departments would think seriously about.

BAD SCIENCE AND FAULTY MODELING.

Alex Berenson might be a troublemaker who occasionally says crazy things, and yet, he's the most public face calling attention to the mindless extrapolation that characterized the corona panic two years ago.

The idea behind locking down a whole country originated in 2005 from a teenager named Laura Glass, the daughter of computer scientist Robert Glass, who “made a model of the way school and business closures might slow the flu” for her school science project. Her father expanded on this idea with more models, which Berenson notes “were essentially not based on real-world data” but nevertheless gained support among public health officials.

Bad models predicting mass deaths justified keeping most of the population locked down and masked for the next few months. Berenson traces much of this to the original projections of Neil Ferguson, which suggested that “over 2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons would die” and “destroy the hospital system” if these countries didn’t lock down. Even after most people understood that these models were wildly false, the Covid hysteria promoting social distancing, lockdowns, and masking “quickly became the most aggressive propaganda machine that democracies anywhere had conducted since World War I, if not ever.”

As the virus became increasingly politicized, it became increasingly difficult to accurately measure or understand. Unless one devoted his whole waking life to the task as Berenson did, it was nearly impossible to get a straight answer about how dangerous the virus really was and who was most at risk.

What might have been worse was the lack of self confidence betrayed by public health officials who could not be seen eating humble pie.

In this dark cloud of media bias, bogus modeling, and scientific half-truths, devastating decisions were made: indoor and outdoor mask mandates, locking down schools and universities, and extending lockdowns. For anyone paying attention, it was evident that these measures were ineffective and destructive, but the media “couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth if it was ideologically inconvenient.”

Instead of learning more about Covid as time progressed, Americans and the rest of the developed world seemed to learn less.

That might be "public health officials," not the population more generally.  That slowness to revise ukases on the basis of new information, however, is the kind of thing that makes references to pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes more popular than might otherwise be.

A NEW QUEST FOR THE OAK ISLAND TREASURE HUNTERS?

In the past few weeks, the Oak Island crew have been getting excited over turning up a bow bulkhead and a few fragments of oars from a rowboat in the swamp.  But now they have to stop digging in the swamp to give the freshwater spring that keeps it wet a chance to refill it, in order to use that fresh water to sift through the dirt they expect to dig out of their ten foot caissons that might, by brute force, reveal whatever remains of what might have been dug into Oak Island.

In the Walker's Point neighborhood of Milwaukee, however, there's legend of a hardware store built atop a shipwreck.

Twenty feet below the building, according in part to an 1874 report, rests the hull of the wrecked schooner Cincinnati.

The steamship collided with the S.S. Milwaukie and was stripped for pieces before being dumped on what is today solid ground. But to create that ground, the ship had to have layers of oak ties laid atop it, mixed with layers of sand and cement. A three-layer stone foundation separates the structure from the supposed ship.

That same 1874 report, written in a boosterish style, notes that Nazro’s new hardware store was “the largest hardware store in the world” when completed. Its location was just a couple blocks from the now-long-gone Milwaukee Union Depot railroad station.

Yes, once upon a time, the 100 block of South Second was waterfront, and the "Union Depot" that article refers to is the Reed Street passenger station, which was about where The Milwaukee Road later built a freight house.

There are no legends of Cincinnati having been buried there to conceal Spanish treasure, or secret machine tool parts purloined by Milwaukee machinists.

THE ICE CREAM IS THE 4-H PROJECT.

No matter how annoying Packer special teams or Washington's professional managerial class are, there's always reason to celebrate county fairs, particularly those where the 4-H projects are a big part of the event.

In America's Dairyland, part of the preparation for the fair is creating new flavors of ice cream.

Cedar Crest Ice Cream Flavor Contest photograph retrieved from WTMJ TV.

As the competition is under the auspices of an ice cream company, what these kids came up with will be on offer come summer.

The Knellsville 4H Club in Ozaukee County is learning the sweet rewards of victory.

The Club was the Grand Prize Winner of the Cedar Crest Ice Cream Flavor Creation Contest. They've won an ice cream party and have been awarded $500.

Their winning flavor, Haystack, features vanilla ice cream with layers of peanuts, caramel and crunch candies. Entries were judged by a panel of ice cream experts chosen by Cedar Crest.

Leaders with Wisconsin 4H say the contest was a great opportunity for 4H youth to work together and develop something unique. This year's winning flavor will be available for purchase this summer. The annual contest has led to other great flavors, like Wisconsin Campfire S'More, Deep Woods, and Deep Space.

Used to be, you were showing off if you put peanuts, bits of crunch candies, and caramel syrup atop two scoops of vanilla.

REALITY BATS LAST.

Scott Jennings of CNN is mugged by reality.

“The nice old moderate Grandpa who just wanted to help everybody get along and compromise is not what we got over the past year,” Jennings explains. “He has no mandate, really, to do much of anything,”

The only mandate was: “Don’t do anything drastic or stupid,” Jennings said, “yet everything about this agenda is extremely drastic. And he’s been angrier than I think people expected, he’s been more divisive, he’s been more partisan. You look at the issues. We built five years of coverage on Trump out of Russia, COVID, and democracy. The president, in his press conference, invites Russia to invade Ukraine. We have more [COVID] deaths under Biden than Trump. And now we have the president and the vice president question the legitimacy of the 2022 election? Are we any better off on these issues that we crucified Trump over?”

Jennings finishes Biden off by noting a recent poll saying only 28 percent wanted Biden to run again and fewer than half of Democrats, “This is a disaster.”

What motivates a politician? Might it be money? Social media companies limited what we could report on Hunter Biden's laptop. Ideology? "C'mon, man, do I look like a socialist?" To adhere to an ideology requires a level of intellectual agility that we didn't see in the much younger Joe Biden.  Conscience?  From a shameless serial plagiarist?  Ego?  Yes, particularly if presidential historians fill what's left of his brain up with visions of Franklin Roosevelt shepherding transformative legislation through, or Jack Kennedy bawling out governors.

WHY IT MATTERS.

I've sometimes suspected Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers of contemplating a political career.  As of Saturday, his off-season began, and the team, and Packer Nation, are again contemplating the succession.  But even before that game, his "unfiltered interview" with ESPN included a dig at the current president, "When the president of the US says, 'pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ it’s because him and his constituents, which, I don’t know how there are any if you watch any of his attempts at public speaking, but I guess he got 81 million votes" to the predictable razzing or cheering.

That interview also included a clarion call for the freedom of expression.

"When in the course of human history has the side that's doing the censoring and trying to shut people up and make them show papers and marginalize a part of the community ever been [the correct side]?" Rodgers said Thursday. "We're censoring dissenting opinions? What are we trying to do? Save people from being able to determine the validity on their own or to listen and to think about things and come to their own conclusion? Freedom of speech is dangerous now if it doesn't align with the mainstream narrative? That's, I think first and foremost, what I wanted people to understand, and what people should understand is that there's censorship in this country going on right now."

That's a point not well understood by supposedly educated people who took their Critique of Pure Tolerance too seriously.

What matters, dear reader, is the Aaron Rodgers story before he opted to dabble in public life.

The colleges where Rodgers wanted to play football had no interest in him, most of them convinced any high school football played north of Sacramento wasn't worth the effort it would take to scout. Florida State wouldn't even look at him. Illinois told him he could walk on. When he sent Purdue some tape, someone on the staff replied with a polite letter explaining their lack of interest that contained the line: "Good luck with your aspirations in college football." The innocuous line enraged him. Rodgers highlighted it and stewed over it for years. His favorite band, Counting Crows, became the perfect soundtrack for his ruminative teenage brooding.

The interest he did have was from Division III schools such as Occidental College, Lewis & Clark and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. He contemplated quitting football entirely. It wasn't until Craig Rigsbee -- the burly, affable head coach at Butte Community College -- begged Rodgers to play for the Roadrunners, the junior college just south of Chico, that he figured out his nontraditional path forward.

"His mom said, 'No son of mine is going to junior college,'" Rigsbee said. "I said, 'Look, our general ed classes are the same as they are anywhere, whether you're at Stanford, Cal or Harvard. The War of 1812 doesn't change just because you're at Butte College. Those classes will transfer anywhere in the world. Your degree isn't going to say Butte College.'"

Those general education classes might have been more useful at Butte than at Stanford, Cal, or Harvard, because the professors at the latter might have tweaked their course outlines in such a way as to try out more of their own research, to the expense of what might be general knowledge.  More to the point, the story suggests, yet again, that there is more professional mobility in sports than there is in other, supposedly less frivolous endeavors.  I suspect, though, that Butte credits are more likely to transfer to a California State or University of California property than to Harvard or Stanford.  Not that many Harvard graduates are suiting up on Sunday.

A year after leading Butte Community College to a 10-1 record, Rodgers was playing at Cal. Two years after that, he was a first-round NFL draft pick. It's a story that's been told many times, but it's one that is crucial to understanding him. Chico and Butte are where he learned to trust his own instincts and learned that knowledge could come from anywhere. It's where he drifted away from what he considers the dogmatic religious views of his family.

Yes, knowledge can come from anywhere, and perhaps that organized sports seems more open to talent no matter where it develops than business, where a degree from a state flagship university might be the key to success, and both of those seem much more open to talent no matter where it develops than the Coastal Establishment, with their Yale Marries Harvard wedding announcements that read more like a press release announcing a merger, or perhaps the bloodline of a racehorse or a champion dog.  And don't get me started on the academic hiring pecking order.

Ask yourself, dear reader, why there is more respect for the athletic arts than there is for the political arts.  And let Aaron Rodgers be himself.

MODERNIZING THE BONNER RAILWAGON.

Some creative types with Space X experience have been thinking about providing retail intermodal by putting containers on battery-powered bogies.  Union Pacific seem to be interested.

The concept under development by Parallel Systems would see intermodal containers carried by pairs of powered battery-electric wheelsets, moving in “platoons” of cars, but capable of splitting off to individual destinations en route. The company went public with its plan this week, saying it has raised $49.55 million for construction of the vehicles, as reported by CNBC, Fast Company, and other media outlets.

“We are interested in the Parallel System’s technology. We are familiar with it, and it is of interest. It’s of keen interest,” Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz told investors and analysts on the railroad’s earnings call Thursday. “Candidly there are a lot of hurdles in front of that technology for deployment. Having said that, it could potentially be a game-changer if it proves out to be effective and workable. So I’d say keep your eye on it. We’re keeping our eye on it.”

The Parallel Systems proposal also merited interest from Ars Technica and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, to a skeptical Instalanche.  The Ars Technica description provides the bridge between historical railroading and the proposed method of moving individual containers.

Parallel Systems isn’t just taking an existing freight train and swapping its diesel-electric locomotive for a battery version. Instead, it’s taking the traction motors and distributing them to every car on the train. It’s how many electric passenger trains operate, but it's a system that has been slow to migrate to the freight world.

Parallel Systems is going a step further, though. Each of its rail vehicles consists of a battery pack, electric motors, four wheels, and a package of sensors that allow it to operate autonomously. And since a large portion of the world’s freight is shipped via 20-foot containers, Parallel Systems is using the containers themselves to complete the car, bridging the gap between the sets of wheels at either end of a train car, also known as bogies.

Here’s how it works: two vehicles position themselves far enough apart to support the container, which is lowered by a crane. The vehicles then use their short- and long-range cameras to navigate the rails. Because each rail vehicle has everything it needs, it doesn’t have to be part of a long train. In theory, one container supported by two Parallel Systems vehicles could move from origin to destination by itself. In reality, though, they’ll likely end up traveling in platoons. (Parallel Systems doesn’t call them trains because the individual cars aren’t coupled.)

The Institute's writeup explains how platooning by these latter-day merchandise despatch cars differs from the drafting behavior of truckers.

In a traditional platoon, efficiency is unequal since the leader takes the brunt of the aerodynamic forces to make things easier on all of the following vehicles, and obviously rotating leaders won’t work on rail. But Parallel Systems’ vehicles can go bumper to bumper and push each other, meaning that overall energy use can be equalized. Neat!

I made that interurban reference for a reason, dear reader.  The North Shore Line's Electroliner had the seating capacity of three heavy interurban cars, but because it was lighter, it had only eight of its ten axles powered.  There are some constraints of traditional motor control circuitry that contributed to providing them in groups of four.  A train of three powered heavy interurban cars had twelve axles powered, and it had a higher balancing speed than the Electroliner.  Why?  The lead car split the wind, and the additional motors on the following two cars had more oomph to overcome the wind resistance compared to the Electroliner.  But adding a fourth car didn't add more speed, as the current draw of four more motors on a trolley wire of fixed capacity worked against them.  The Parallel Systems people are aware of that problem.

“We think our platoon sizes are ideally between ten and 50 cars,” Matt Soule, CEO of Parallel Systems, told Ars. “With ten, you’re sharing the aerodynamic load over multiple cars, and the benefits of that kind of asymptote out around ten cars. But on the business case side, in terms of serving the volumes that might be there, we think moving in platoons of up to 50 is the max.”

"Asymptote out" is that balance speed phenomenon.  But if your platoon is fifty platforms, aren't you really in the realm of a train, as commenters on all the posts have noted.

NO FRENCH TOAST, NO PROPER BREAKFAST ABOARD.

That's been where I stand.  "Railroad French Toast predates Amtrak, and there used to be regional variations in the railroads' recipes (yes, each dining department had its own recipes, and regional food items). And cutting costs by antagonizing passengers doesn't seem like a sensible business strategy."

There are people at Amtrak who recognize, within limitations, the reality of my claim.

In passenger train advocacy circles French toast has come to symbolize what is right and wrong about dining aboard Amtrak.

When it is available on the breakfast menu passenger train advocates tend to be pleased. When it is not, they are upset.

Over the years French toast has come and gone from Amtrak dining car menus.

It made a comeback in traditional dining cars on western long-distance trains last summer and is now available on the menu of eastern long distance trains, too.

It was one of a number of additions that Amtrak quietly made to its flexible dining menu last year that increased the number of hot offerings for all meals.

But not all French toast is the same. Just read the menu descriptions for it on the traditional and flexible dining menus.

It's not wise to make Passenger Rail advocates angry, and yet the people managing Amtrak seem bent on continuing to do so.

What the menus don’t say is that in traditional dining cars the French toast is created on board by a chef. In flexible dining cars all food is created off the train by a catering company and heated onboard.

Some passenger train advocates are still angry about Amtrak’s downgrading of dining service aboard eastern long distance trains starting in June 2018.

It was widely viewed as a cost-cutting move and resulted in fewer choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Further ruffling the feathers of passenger train advocates has been the limiting of dining car service to sleeping car passengers on all trains. Coach passengers were left to buy whatever is available in the café car.

The situation is not much better for lunch, for dinner, for coach passengers on any train, or for passengers on the eastern trains.

ANOTHER FRONT OPENED AGAINST J.B. PRITZKER'S CORONA TYRANNY.

I'll keep pointing out how ineffective and deadly it has been.  Twitchy found another way.  "Illinois high school student mocks the state’s mask mandate in the best way possible."

Watch this Illinois high school student use the power of satire to fight back against the state’s mask mandate. Her first line is, “Thank you for teaching students that our own mental health is much less important than making triple-vaccinated adults feel safe” and it just gets better from there.

Check it out.

This gal. Satirical HERO!pic.twitter.com/9RzOvq0uYK

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) January 19, 2022

Some of the responses suggest the young lady is being disrespectful.  I submit, dear reader, that after the past two years of school boards treating the parents disrespectfully, those boards brought it on themselves.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS.

There's a reason human players agree on bidding conventions in bridge, in order to do such things as count the number of aces and kings the declaring partnership has.  It's been a regular observation in these irregular bridge columns that whatever artificial intelligence is coded in the simulation does some odd things in the bidding.  Consider this position.

It was my turn to "deal," and thus to open.  Balanced hand, minimum point value, protection in the short suit and in two of the other suits.  The Two Spades overcall suggested strength in spades, partner bot properly passes on nothing.  East bot can't support Spades, and I don't understand raising to Three Hearts given that there's a defender with two to five of each suit, but it's too early to call for aces.  Then it gets bizarre.  Four Diamonds rather than three or four Spades?  Five Clubs rather than calling for aces with Four No Trump?  Then Five Hearts with that hand?  I see at least two tricks, and if there's a void in Diamonds, I can promote that ♥9.  The businesslike thing is to double, and here we go.  Because East first named Hearts, I open.  Cash the ◆Ace and the ♥Ace and ♥King, business taken care of, with no more trumps visible on the board.  When East got around to drawing trumps, I got rid of the ♥Five under the ♥Queen and the ♥Nine picked up another trick.  Perhaps the algorithm learned something.

A STOPPED CLOCK THAT'S PROBABLY WRONG.

The "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has become a way for people to use their prestige as, well, nuclear physicists, to lend authority to doomsday predictions of the lunatic left more generally.

The clock is set each January by the bulletin's Science and Security Board (SASB) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. They warned Thursday that humanity is "at doom's doorstep," which "is no place to loiter."

"100 seconds to midnight reflects the board's judgment that we are stuck in a perilous moment—one that brings neither stability nor security," said SASB co-chair and George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni. "Positive developments in 2021 failed to counteract negative, long-term trends."

If those developments "failed to counteract" shouldn't the clock be set closer to midnight?

Never mind that, there are talking points to push, and a revolution to foment.

The bulletin offers 13 specific suggestions that include setting new limits on nuclear weapons and establishing no first use policies; accelerating decarbonization, including shifting money from fossil fuels to pandemic-recovery investments that favor climate mitigation and adaptation; and collaboratively identifying and implementing "practical and ethical ways to combat internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation."

The clock announcement sparked a flurry of demands from outside experts and activists, including the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and Global Zero, a worldwide movement also advocating for the total elimination of such arms.

"Two years after the historic decision to move the clock the closest it's ever been to midnight, nuclear-armed governments continue to run unacceptable risks even while speaking to the importance of restraint," said Global Zero CEO Derek Johnson. "Words are cheap and time is short."

"As we sit at just 100 seconds to midnight, world leaders need to prioritize steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in global and national security, and prevent the risk that they will be used by accident, miscalculation, or unintended escalation," he said, adding that the ultimate goal is to "continue to turn back the clock through more ambitious agreements that set the course to the total, verified elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere."

What was it, six years ago, that the clock should have run out on climate grounds alone?  The warning on the original Earth Day was that we would be done by 2000; and no less than Al "so boring that his Secret Service codeword was Algore" Gore was on record that we would be done by 2016.  I even took a picture to confirm that we were still here.

The late Rush Limbaugh had his own "Algore countdown clock" and that might be why I got the idea for taking the picture.

I'll give David French the final word on doomsday environmentalists, even those moonlighting from their day job as nuclear physicists.  "We’ve taken them seriously for far too long. Now, it’s time to laugh."

CALIFORNIA HAS BECOME A DRAG ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE.

National Review's Andrew McCarthy notes that people in other states are now burdened by the law enforcement follies of Los Angeles prosecutors.

The train ambushes are just one part of the epidemic of robberies and retail organized crime plaguing California — not just in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco, and other commercial hubs.

Obviously, [Los Angeles county district attorney George] Gascón and, in general, California’s state government are disastrous. But what is the federal government doing about this? In many crime situations, the feds can seem superfluous, muscling in on matters that are chiefly local concerns. Here, however, we are talking about interstate and international commerce, the very foundation of federal criminal jurisdiction.

It's possible, as he goes on to note, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Transportation Security are working the problem, although when that blinking twerp who is playing Attorney General in the ficus's cabinet seems more interested in calling parents "domestic terrorists" I'm not optimistic.  But it's our corona tests and our epi pens and for all I know our exercise bicycles being delayed or going missing by the looting of containers.

The people of Los Angeles elected Gascón, so it is fair enough to observe that they are getting the kind of law “enforcement” they voted for. But the train robberies are a national problem that has ramifications throughout the economy — and the country is now having them at a time of rising inflation and empty store shelves. It is for such challenges that we have federal law enforcement. The feds do not need state or municipal permission to act — they can move on their own initiative, and in contravention of the woke prosecutors’ nonenforcement approach.

The Biden administration owes the public an explanation of what it is doing to end this dangerous and embarrassing siege.

The ficus isn't sentient enough to do that, and the blinking twerp will make a hash of it.

JUST DON'T MISS THE FIVE PIN.

Milwaukee television used to include a program called "Bowling With the Champs," and there are still places to test your skill, including the oldest sanctioned lanes in the country, still set by hand.  "Take it from the reporter who just may hold the record as the longest-serving Bowler of the Week columnist in the history of The Milwaukee Sentinel."  Be sure to bring money for the beer frame,  If you have a habit of committing the error noted in the title, it's likely you're buying.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We're still working off the backlog from the Festive Season closure, although it's likely we're caught up on the nonsense for now.

Stand by for more public health panic over the large crowds at the divisional round of the football playoffs.

FIFTY PRESIDENTS?

The latest mockery Our President has exposed himself to is his occasional what appear to be quips about "fifty presidents."  He's really calling attention to two system failures.  "Even an addled brain can call up some old hooks. Direct election of senators creates a class of individuals who fancy themselves future presidents. The 17th amendment is [one] system failure."  The moment direct election of senators became Supreme Law, that created a class of people who fancied themselves future presidents, particularly those representing the heavily populated states.  What the ficus is recalling is a cloakroom joke of long standing, one that the senators might sometimes use ironically about a colleague too full of himself, or perhaps as acknowledgement of facts on the ground.

Direct election means campaigning, and campaign fundraising, and the people who seek to influence politicians expect results.  Paul Mirengoff notes that might include the sort of people who argue with, but generally vote for, Democrats.  "Another possible explanation, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is that the left-wing donors on whom Democrats rely demanded that [Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer make a last stand."  That despite some of the other people whose votes the donors require possibly tanking their careers as a consequence.

Schumer forced a number of vulnerable Democrats to vote against the filibuster. Among the vulnerable Dems who did so were Sens. Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, Michael Bennet, and Catherine Cortez-Masto. One could add the two Georgia Democrats to the list, although Raphael Warnock was probably quite happy to cast his vote and Jon Ossoff isn’t up for reelection this year. (Schumer also caused Sinema to vote for the filibuster, which did her no favors. However, she’s probably finished at the end of her term in 2024 anyway, and I doubt Schumer wants to do her favors.)

I hope there are some libertarian populist Republicans in Arizona and Georgia thinking of ways to put forth candidates who aren't Trumpian crazies to replace Kelly, Sinema, Warnock, and Ossoff.  We were talking about two system failures, though.

The second system failure, also originating in the so-called Progressive Era, is the party primary.  There's a tradeoff at work.  State governments like open primaries, the better to bundle some local general elections and referenda with the state and federal party primaries, and the party bosses prefer to have only the believers advising as to the nominees.

The tension between the party establishments and the state governments, which manage the primary elections, is of long standing.  There's a passage in Theodore White's 1960 Making of the President about how crossover voting "verges on anarchy."  Maybe that's not so good for the party establishments, but if they had their way, wouldn't they prefer to be rid of primaries and caucuses?

That might still be the case even if the primary brings out a lot of true believers in pocket boroughs.  That might be what was on Mr Schumer's mind.  "Schumer is terrified that he’ll be challenged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the decisions he’s making as majority leader reflect that fear."  Gosh, will lightning strike me down if I suggest that choosing a party's nominee for the Senate comes down to placating that docked tail of party True Believers in a few precincts in New York City, in what is often a low-turnout election, even if bundled with local elections for school board, cable commissioner, or dog-catcher.  What could be less democratic than having current office holders behaving so as to stave off a primary challenge from a small tranche of the polity, whether that's the "progressive left" pushing the Donks or the "faith and flag" conservatives pushing the Pachs?  In New York, will the resulting senator really be able to represent the interests of the entire state, including the urban poor, the information technology workers, the remaining farmers, and contractors, in what is a very large state?  Note that the other senator from New York, Kirsten "second phoniest member" Gillibrand, who took one set of stances in the House and another (so much "opportunist tacking") to run for Senate.  It's possible that either of New York's current senators would have made the cut under the pre-Seventeenth Amendment method of being put forth by the state legislature.  Neither, though, would have to tack so opportunistically to the metro True Believers, and the country might have been spared much of the pain Mr Schumer has put it through in the past year.

DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU.

Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty reacts to Jordan Peterson's very public departure from higher education.  Weigh the evidence.

Yet as Peterson’s star has risen in some circles, many academics have questioned the rigor of his analysis—including when it comes to gender (many of Peterson’s followers are young men). He was widely criticized, for instance, for telling The New York Times in 2018 that “the cure” for young men who feel rejected sexually by women and act out against them—so-called violent involuntary celibates, or incels—is “enforced monogamy.” Peterson, elsewhere an ardent defender of free speech, later threatened to sue the feminist philosopher Kate Manne, of Cornell University, for some of her criticisms of his thoughts on gender. One of Peterson’s former colleagues at Toronto, Bernard Schiff, a professor emeritus of psychology, also wrote a 2018 op-ed in The Toronto Star calling him “dangerous.”

Draw your own conclusions.

Over all, the report says, “both the counts and percentages for all appointed faculty categories have increased except for those appointed faculty who self-identify as men (the percentage of appointed faculty who self-identified as men stayed constant at 52 percent although the actual number of faculty who self-identified as men increased from 1,168 to 1,214).”

Across U.S. psychology workforce, 84 percent of psychologists are white, according to information from the American Psychological Association. Sixty-nine percent of those awarded psychology doctorates in 2018 were white.

Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor of religion and political science at Queen’s University in Ontario, tweeted that academic DEI initiatives do sometimes involve “ridiculous” bureaucratic requirements, yet Peterson’s notion that “meritocracy happens in some idealistic void absent socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, gender and other factors is wrong *points to literally decades of research.* There are indeed adult conversations to be had about these issues, but they have to be honest about trying to offer new and better solutions—not more smug op-eds.”

Not all professors are happy to see Peterson go, however. Gad Saad, professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, posted a facetious video, apologizing while hitting himself with “the whip of self-disgust” for “having had a friendship with Jordan.” That’s after he was criticized for wishing Peterson well on social media following Peterson’s retirement announcement.

"Self-identify as men." There's no need to parody higher education, it parodies itself. Apparently, also, some forms of quit lit are preferable to others. I don't recall any Inside Higher Ed discussions of the more usual quit lit (neurotic humanities types, primarily) that bring up personal troubles. "Peterson has had personal troubles in recent years, eventually traveling to Russia and Serbia for treatment of his symptoms from withdrawing from benzodiazepines."

I submit, though, that it's better for disaffected faculty to walk away, whether angry or not, rather than engage in sullen participation, something that the house organ for business as usual just discovered.  "Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away."

KITBASHING IN FULL SCALE.

The electric interurban railways might have been the dot.com bubble of the early twentieth century.  Before it popped, though, we saw some splendid examples of the carbuilders' art.  In the days before Federal Express and United Parcel Service, the interurbans offered their own version of fast package service, often with combination cars capable of handling passengers and those packages, which might include milk cans or hatchlings (preferably before they were fed.)

Some of those cars were substantial steel arks unfazed by a few milk cans being put aboard, and impressive enough to shoulder their way through those flivvers and horse-drawn vans where the interurbans shared city streets.

Indianapolis and Southeastern bought those cars from Cincinnati Car Company.  At one time the railroad hoped to run between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, but that never came to pass.  None of those cars survive in any form, although we are aware of similar cars built for Indiana interurbans that are still in preservation.

By the end of the 1920s, a substantial steel car with parcels capacity didn't fit in with the business model. particularly if it required a motorman to operate it and a conductor to collect the few cash fares or tickets from people not yet enticed onto their flivvers.

As an economy measure, you might reconfigure the car in order that the motorman could both run the car and collect the cash fares.  Indiana Railroad mostly gave up on the baggage business.

There are steps on the opposite side, and the larger window that replaces the door on the nearest corner is for the motorman's compartment.  At the far end, the motorman's door forward of the baggage door has been removed.

Another way for the interurbans to reduce expenses was to invest in cheaper, lighter cars that could be operated by one man.  What, then, happens to the heavy cars that are surplus to your requirements?

In the case of Indianapolis and Southeastern, eight of those cars migrated to The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, where the management were still anticipating increased passenger riding, and they went into Cold Spring Shops as a combination car and emerged as a three-truck train.

The motorman's compartment and baggage area have been rearranged, a new window cut into the body ahead of the paired windows; the original car cut in two pieces in the middle of the fifth pair of windows, with the rear part extensively rearranged, including the placement of the rear truck center closer to the rear of the train.  The middle thirty feet or so of the car, including the double doors, is all new construction.

Those cars provided more than enough capacity during the Depression, although the interurban still found itself short of seats during the War.  But they were not able to make the cars longer, the way the South Shore Line did (there's a story about why those South Shore cars were built so short, for another day) because as modified the cars used all the clearance diagram available.

JOHN GALT COMES FOR THE CORONA TYRANTS.

Many years ago, The Washington Monthly ran a short article titled something like "The Gold in the Garbage:  What the Left Can Learn from Ayn Rand."  The article is really old, dating to the Carter administration.  [Late Ford administration, actually, and James Fallows to boot -- Ed.]  Neither has the magazine made it available in their digital archives nor did I in a few minutes noodling with search engines locate any references to it.  [A colleague found it -- Ed.] I dig into these memories, though, as a way of introducing a contemporary story.

That old article devoted some time to the behavior of bureaucrats.  The short form of the story (in Randian fashion, it runs nearly a hundred pages) is the episode of the diesel failures on the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, and the issuance of a ukase permitting a steam locomotive to run through the eight mile long Taggart Tunnel.  The steamers were in even worse shape than the diesels, and, predictably, everybody died.  Not, though, before the relevant bureaucrats, whether in government or among the rent-seeking management of Taggart, issued memoranda demonstrating their blamelessness in what happened.

Discussing new rules for risky virus research when they were finalized a few years ago, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci acknowledged, “I don’t think this is going to be foolproof, things are going to slip through.”

As senators sparred yet again with Fauci at a congressional hearing last week, he stated that his agency has followed the regulations for funding “gain of function” research, which can make certain viruses more deadly or transmissible. But he obfuscated how he played a role in creating those same regulations, which officials and some scientists say are too weak.

Ayn Rand at least credited Wesley Mouch's bureaucrats with a modicum of good sense. The original rule was "no steam locomotives in the Taggart Tunnel."  Somebody had to authorize the work-around.

“The guide rails for what can be done were not established by me, they were by a three-year process led by the Office of Science and Technology at the White House,” Fauci said of gain-of-function research at the hearing.

After some high-profile lab accidents, in 2014 the U.S. government paused federal funding of gain-of-function research. In 2017, the research resumed under a new Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, with a review committee established within the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) to oversee federal funding of such research.

But during those three years, with Fauci’s input, the review committee was stripped of its power to veto proposed research, as The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Willman and Madison Muller noted in an in-depth investigation last year. The definition of the research the panel reviews (the definition that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other senators keep arguing about with Fauci) was also narrowed to exclude some potentially dangerous viruses.

And thus, dear reader, does the steam locomotive couple to the Taggart Express, while there's no ultimate responsibility for the disaster that follows.

IT'S ONLY GOTTEN WORSE.

Eight years ago, when I said goodbye to higher education, my complaints were within the normal bounds.

The legislature has not chosen to fund the universities adequately, nor has it corrected the ham-handed pension reform that has driven about one-fifth of the faculty and staff, along with the institutional memory carried therein, into retirement.

The university has not chosen to properly staff the academic departments, nor has it recognized that making increased demands on the fewer remaining faculty in the absence of any merit money is unlikely to yield enthusiastic participation on committees or a harvest of high-quality publications.

And the subtle denigration of mainstream white guys as less desirable hires or as majors continues.

But I no longer have the opportunity in meetings or other forums to argue against those follies.

Nor need I be complicit in them any longer.

These days, I put it more pungently: too many administrative fads, too much special education, too much affirmative action.

THE BRAIN FARTS JUST KEEP ON COMING.

On the transcript, it reads like a perfectly normal press conference.

Allison Harris, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Speaking of voting rights legislation, if this isn’t passed, do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and its results will be legitimate?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election. And it’s one thing — look, maybe I’m just being too much of an optimist. Remember how we thought not that many people were going to show up to vote in the middle of a pandemic? We had the highest voter turnout in the history of the United States of America.

Well, I think if, in fact — no matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and — and defy the attempt to keep them from being able to vote. I think you’re going to see the people who they’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to make in order to change the law back to what it should be.

And — but it’s going to be difficult. I make no bones about that. It’s going to be difficult. But we’re not there yet. We’ve not run out of options yet. And we’ll see how this moves.

Watch this clip, or the first few questions once the coot finished reading his statement, and tell me I wasn't being harsh last week.

REPORTER: "Do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and the results will be legitimate?"

BIDEN: "It all depends depends on whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to alter the outcome..." pic.twitter.com/COdhiTEYhh

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

Powerline's Scott Johnson described the ordeal as "a senile phantasmagora" and his post embeds all two hours of the show, should you wish to relive the horror.

Biden rambled, blundered, lied, dissembled, and streamed his consciousness like Molly Bloom in the last chapter of Ulysses or Benjy Compson in the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury. He searched his notes for talking points. He lost his train of thought, such as it was. He put his senile phantasmagoria on display for all to see. Does he have more than 26 cards to deal from his deck? It was appalling.

And all in service of firing up that docked tail of self-styled progressives.

Biden and his party have painted themselves into a rhetorical corner by endlessly comparing the modest voting reforms in Texas and Georgia to Jim Crow. If you’re going to go that route in hopes of demagoging Manchin and Sinema and getting your base juiced to vote in November, you’re necessarily committing yourself to arguing that an election held under the auspices of those laws is illegitimate. There’s no such thing as a “fair election” in a Jim Crow system, after all. This is another example of the White House’s embarrassing strategic shortsightedness, committing to a Trumpy position on election integrity in service to a legislative push that was all but guaranteed to fail. It would have been malignant but understandable if they had gone crazy with the Jim Crow analogies because they had reason to believe that doing so might flip the two Dem holdouts from no to yes on nuking the filibuster. But to go crazy with them knowing that the reforms they sought weren’t going to happen is political and civic malpractice. It’s inflammation for the sake of inflammation.

It's almost as if the major parties are less interested in expanding their appeal than in containing their opponents' appeals.

The President of the United States says that whether or not he'll respect or trust the outcome of the midterm elections in which his party is expected to suffer significant losses just "depends" because someone might try to alter the outcome, but if his election power-grab passes, then there's no issue?

Yes, we can play that fill-in-the-blank game with both major parties, but when the Leader of the Free World who ran on a platform of Unify the People No Mean Tweets plays the game, that can't be good.

After all, it is something of a mortal sin to those on the left when someone questions the results or methodology of an election. Like most other things, that rule of course only applies to Republican doubts. Democrats have a track record of doubting GOP victories at the ballot box, one that began long before Donald Trump ever ran for office.

It's not as if people aren't on to the con.

So, elections were secure, fair, and legitimate when Trump was president, but won’t be secure, fair, or legitimate unless the Democrats’ voting legislation is passed.

In other words, elections are only secure, fair, and legitimate when Democrats win.

As Twitchy's Brett T. quips, "Nice to know the man who won the presidency with 81 million votes is concerned about voter suppression keeping Democrats from winning."  Nothing like getting the excuses in order now in case the campaigns later, when normal people are paying attention, don't end well for your side.

That is, if all the wrangling over process doesn't antagonize the Normals.

If you dislike the laws governing elections, of course, you're free to try to change them. That's exactly what Democrats are trying to do with their various reform proposals in Congress—and what Republicans are trying to do in various state capitals. There will always be debates over the proper way to conduct elections, but declaring marginal changes in either direction to be so far out of bounds that they render entire elections illegitimate is accomplishing nothing except eroding the actual legitimacy of the democratic system.

If the wrangling is primarily over the outcome of the presidential elections, the country might pull through. Morale Conditioners from both major parties have noted that turnout, and House voting, seem not to be tainted.  So, too, let it be with school boards and highway commissions.

EVERYTHING IS NOT AWFUL.

‘Saturday Night Live’ Cold Open Spoofs Joe Biden With His Plan To Curb Covid.

The show opened with Johnson’s Biden at a lectern, in another speech to the nation, as he leaned into the microphone and said, “There’s one simple thing you can do to make this whole virus go away.” The he whispered, “Stop seeing Spider-Man.”

There's more, including what might be a link to the show segment, at the link. The writers might be lampooning a most-lampoonable public figure.

The skit concluded with a visit from Pete Davidson, playing “Joe Biden from the real universe,” who told the press that “the timeline you are all living in is about to collapse. It was created as a joke starting in 2016 when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Now it spiraled out of control and could explode at any minute.”

“Am I the president in this real world?” Biden asked.

Good thing yelling at the telescreen isn't a thing.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,062.

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.  Despite the Supreme Court vacating the federal vaccine mandate that was supposed to be enforced by the national Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Illinois businesses subject to the review of the state department of labor will still be under that mandate.  With businesses already leaving Illinois, I have trouble envisioning the continuance of that state order persuading wavering businesses to stay.  In addition, the governor's ukases remain in force.  "This marks the 22nd month of disaster proclamations that have brought dozens of executive orders ranging from a stay at home order, to closing schools, to closing businesses and requiring vaccines for educator and masks indoors."  Our Supreme Soviet legislature continues to go along with the tyranny.

We're also back to elective surgeries being postponed.

Pritzker issued the hospital edict Thursday as the state set yet another troubling record with more than 30,000 confirmed infections in a single day. Hospitals are already treating the most coronavirus patients they’ve seen in more than a year, with nearly 5,700 beds occupied as of Wednesday night — fast approaching the peak of last fall’s resurgence, when nearly 6,200 beds were filled.

“We’re asking our residents to temporarily hold off on important medical care like tonsillectomies, bariatric surgeries and hernia repair,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As we work to keep ICU beds open, I continue to applaud the efforts of our hospitals and health care workers across the state, who have been heroes for us all.”

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

David Marcus has a pessimistic projection.  "It didn’t end five hundred and eighty-one days ago. And today, there is reason to fear that it never will."  That's the foolish ukases, not the virus.  So how's the corona tyranny working out in Illinois?

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,560,363 infections, up by 331,146 from last month, and 15,470 deaths, a change of 312 from that report.  

The latest report from Illinois counts 2,589,640 infections, an increase of 685,381 over last month, and 32,532 deaths, adding 2,578 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.

As of this afternoon, the state counts nearly twenty million doses of the various vaccines administered; theyve updated their talley to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations.  The state's total count of the scary variants includes around twenty-four thousand of the primary strain of Delta, up from around twenty thousand a month ago, and about two thousand Xi Omicron being reported.

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

At Beethoven's birthday, the governor trailed by 14,796.

At Veterans Day, the governor trailed by 13,981.

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.  Now we're adding over a thousand in a month.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.  Tell me again how all this micromanagement is for our benefit?

WHAT WILL THEY LEARN?

The latest American Council of Trustees and Alumni performance reviews for higher education are out.  Northern Illinois University failed to impress.  Of the seven dimensions the organization views as necessary for a proper core curriculum, there's only a composition requirement.  Given all the fulmination I'd engaged in over the years about that composition preparation leaving much to be desired, I have to wonder if that requirement is present in name only.  As, apparently, it was ten years ago.

OMAHA SPEAKS.

Somebody in Union Pacific's communications office gave up part of Wild Card Weekend to comment on the news reports about looted container trains.

Union Pacific has 1,600 employees covering 275 miles of track at its nine rail facilities throughout Los Angeles County. The railroad mobilized an aggressive response, increasing the number of police assigned to protecting the targeted areas in Los Angeles County, as well as leveraging technology, such as drone surveillance, specialized fencing and trespass-detection systems.

Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, but less than half are booked and some are released in less than 24 hours.

In addition to Union Pacific efforts, partnership with local and state law enforcement and elected public officials is essential. Over the past year, rail thefts have increased by 160% in Los Angeles County and have spiked in the past three months during the holiday peak season. In October 2021 alone, thefts from Union Pacific trains increased 356% compared to October 2020.

Thefts over the past two weeks left Union Pacific rail property littered with debris, as reported by numerous media outlets.

The railroad called attention to their problem before Christmas. If you're a George Soros-backed prosecutor, you don't have to bother.

“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The letter goes on to say criminals are boasting to Union Pacific officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence.

The letter urged the District Attorney to reconsider the policy applied to these cases: “While we understand the well-intended social justice goals of the policy, we need our justice system to support our partnership efforts with local law enforcement, hold these criminals accountable, and most important, help protect our employees and the critical local and national rail network.”

Apparently government jobs programs aren't bringing relief to the hobo jungles, but organized crime workfare is.

A bottleneck in the supply chain and the presence of homeless encampments near rail lines have contributed to the thefts, officials said.

"Organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft ... impacts our employees, our customers in the overall supply chain industry," said Adrian Guerrero, a director of public affairs for Union Pacific.

Guerrero estimates that about 90 cargo containers a day are compromised, sometimes by an organized group that has halted trains and recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

Los Angeles officials, however, seem to be taking a similar line to Chicago's mayor. In Chicago, she took Magnificent Mile retailers to task for not investing enough in security (wait, what happened to the talking point that in-store security is all about the profiling, with those security people following lawful shoppers around?)  Likewise, it's apparently Union Pacific's fault that there aren't enough railroad bulls on the property.

Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

"We have millions of dollars of items and equipment, but it is unpoliced," Hurtado said. "There are even sometimes weapons on these trains. Everything goes by train, you learn."

It's not as if the city fathers haven't been aware of the situation.

Dumping, trash and encampments around railroad tracks last year prompted Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino to call for the city to declare them a public nuisance. But the effort was dropped after Union Pacific cleaned up a swath of tracks, said his spokesperson, Branimir Kvartuc.

Still, Buscaino said, Union Pacific needs to hire more agents to patrol the tracks. "It's no surprise we are seeing the additional crimes," he said in a text, adding that the problems had been "unabated for years."

I wouldn't put it past California politicians to suggest that cleaning out hobo jungles is somehow not equitable. Meanwhile, the pilfering continues, and apparently local residents pick over the stuff the first wave of container robbers toss out.

No, I'm not joking about any of that.

In a hard-hitting social media post, Buscaino accused Union Pacific of not spending enough money and employing too few people to keep the areas around the tracks clean.

“I join the affected communities who are fed up with the lack of basic standards of maintenance along these tracks from a company who made $6.3 billion for their shareholders in 2020,” Buscaino wrote on his Facebook page, “and who boasted that Trump’s tax cut bill saved them $5.9 billion in 2017.”

In California, there are no limits to what you can blame on Donald Trump.  Even though Los Angeles's soft on crime policies are making conditions countrywide worse.

LET THERE ALWAYS BE MORE STORIES TO TELL.

It has not been a good couple of years for posting entries in the 50 Book Challenge.  We'll see if my resolution to file more book reports and fret less about national affairs that I can't influence stands up this year.

Book Review N^o. 1 is Giles Milton's Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy: How the Allies Won on D-Day.  Mr Milton had access to Cornelius Ryan's files, and some of the stories help square some of the scenes present in The Longest Day on screen with their absence or at best passing reference to in the book of the same title.

I'll recommend only that people pick up the book and read it through.  OVERLORD was a project of such magnitude that there ought be no end to the retelling of stories.  I'll only tease a few things.  Soldier, Sailor begins with Eva Eifler, a German girl conscripted into the Luftwaffe Ladies' Auxiliary to transcribe radio reports, who reported for her graveyard shift the rainy evening of 5 June, 1944 anticipating, owing to the weather, a quiet evening.  Around midnight, though, the radio reports kept coming and coming and the anxiety level in her office kept rising.  Toward the end, when the German air force had been invisible most of the day, British troops and French civilians heard airplanes, and interpreted them as Boche avion!  The Germans, a few of whom had managed to get close to the Channel in the gaps between the beach-heads (it is worth making a visit to Normandie, dear reader: on a clear day you might be able to pick out Pointe du Hoc from Ouistreham) knew better.  Those planes had the piano-key striping and the Germans became fearful before the French relaxed.

What, then, of the infamous bespoke shoes that gave Erwin Rommel cause to be away on 6 June?  They didn't fit.  Was the Field Marshal not aware of his wife's shoe size?  Was she vain?  Or might some as yet unknown Parisian cobbler have cocked a snook at the Herrenvolk by getting the order wrong?  Let there always be more stories to tell.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BEER CARS GONE?

I'm not referring to the first generation of billboard refrigerator cars, which were a casualty of prohibition and depression.

There's a simple enough explanation for their disappearance.  Suppose some proto-hipster four generations ahead of his time had kegs of Old Frothingslosh delivered to a Third Ward team track for his watering hole in the ward or across the river in Walker's Point.  Now there's an empty refrigerator car, and Milwaukee is the Beer City, so why not send it back home loaded?

THAT'S THE WAY THE INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES.

The coffee and Adderall must have worked well enough on Friday for the coot to dodder to his pretend Oval Office stage set and offer remarks on the infrastructure appropriation that got through Congress despite objections from his party's Gimme Caucus.  There was the curious incident of the freight railroads in the remarks.  You say there were no remarks about the freight railroads.  That is correct.  Somehow, the freight railroads have managed to replace main tracks from the ballast up or run double tracks through canyons that look like something a coyote should splatter into or replace a viaduct with one capable of handling heavier trains at higher speed.  I suppose it's impolite to note that  "No Federal stimulus funds were appropriated for this project. Your tax dollars go to repairing the damage the trucks cause to Interstate 40. Fifty additional trains mean capacity for up to 5000 additional containers on the rails rather than on the roads" or that "No transportation bill or stimulus money [was] involved. The railroad recycled some spans from a redundant Milwaukee Road high bridge further south."

GREAT MOMENTS IN PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES.

Anybody with a functioning brain and a modicum of empathy can distinguish between a stammer and a brain fart.  The coot is clearly in brain fart territory.

What you are hearing in that clip is not a stutter either, and it’s insulting to people who deal with a real stuttering problem for Democrats and the media to keep claiming that. Forgetting how to pronounce things, going “uh” over and over, and losing one’s train of thought is not what a stutter is. Rather, those are the symptoms of a man who is clearly losing what little mental capacity he had left.

Harsh, but fair.