THE ETIQUETTE OF FINISHING A BASKETBALL GAME.

In the closing minutes, if the game is one or two possessions, generally the teams will play it out, perhaps using whatever time outs remain to set up plays.  See the end of the fifth game between the Bucks and the Suns in last summer's championship series.

If the score is a little less close, there comes the ritual of fouling in order to stop the clock, and getting the ball back with the opportunity to score up to three points as against as few as zero, if the player who was fouled is a poor free throw shooter.  (There are, however, limits.  Wilt Chamberlain was a notoriously poor free throw shooter, but I believe he still holds the professional record for free throws made, as part of the 100 points he scored in that game.)  That parenthetical was as long as the last three minutes of a basketball game can become, once the trips to the free throw line and the times out, and if the game is televised, the station breaks, take effect.

It's good form, though, that if the team being fouled consistently makes its free throws, and continues to prevent the trailing team from scoring, for the trailing team to stop committing fouls.  See the end of the sixth game between the Bucks and the Suns.

If the outcome seems clear, it's good form for the team ahead to let everyone play, and the team behind might do the same thing.  But whether the players put full effort forth, or go through the motions, isn't so well codified.  And thus we get the unpleasantness at the end of yesterday's college game between Michigan and Wisconsin.

A post-game scrum in the handshake line led to Michigan head coach Juwon Howard striking Badgers’ assistant Joe Krabbenhoft.

Howard, who will almost certainly be reprimanded, was set off by a late timeout called by Greg Gard.

Howard isn’t the only one at fault here, though he should shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility.

Multiple things can be true.

Howard absolutely should not have slapped Krabbenhoft. Period.

That being said, Gard has no business calling a timeout in that situation.

You’re up 16 with 15 seconds left. I don’t care if your backups are in. Take the 10-second violation, win the game, and move on.

Gard also shouldn’t have physically confronted Howard the way that he did in the handshake line.

Krabbenhoft shouldn’t have escalated the situation.

Another Badgers assistant shouldn’t have gestured a crotch chop toward the Michigan bench.

These are supposed to be the adults in the room. They all acted like children.

Wisconsin partisans will complain that Michigan's coach leaving two regulars in and working on their pressure defense during garbage time is putting full effort forth, which is fine, but then calling time out to craft a response to that full effort ought also be permissible.

The conference will be assigning the basketball equivalent to game misconduct penalties in the next day or so.

THE CORONA TYRANNY IS THE FIRST ACT?

Dear reader, you might be inclined to think of Pajamas Media as excessively critical of what you understand as public health mitigations.

Finding meaning in life by wearing a mask proves Thoreau’s point of the “mass of men living lives of quiet desperation.”

But losing the mask also denotes losing control of the rest of us. For a left-wing authoritarian, that’s got to hurt.

Tou might find Batya Ungar-Sargon overwrought.

Liberal media are on the side of the government and they take political dissent personally. And what leftist elites are doing with their power is setting a new standard for who deserves basic civil rights. If you’re working class and spent the pandemic braving the plague and delivering food to their doorsteps so they could stay at home tweeting, you can forget about your rights. Whatever money you have left in your coffers is theirs for the taking. If the pandemic began with the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich, political power and civil rights seem to be following. The elites are sending a clear message: civil liberties are the exclusive rights of the pyjama class now.

If the past two weeks have taught us anything, it’s how hollow the accusations from elite media leftists should ring, how quickly accusations of fascism are followed by the cheering on of political arrests, and how deep their projections run. It has revealed how quickly support for dissent and peaceful protest evaporates when it threatens those in power. And it has told you exactly who has that power.

You might find the following cartoon too fearful.

And yet, we had warnings. Some of them were general and ancient.  "At a time when those limits [on government power] have been eroded to the point that people can wonder if there are any surviving limits in many areas, we could benefit by relearning the wisdom [Richard Henry] Lee helped pass on nearly three centuries ago."  For example,  "The first maxim of a man who loves liberty should be never to grant to rulers an atom of power that is not most clearly and indispensably necessary for the safety and well-being of society."

Others were specific and recent.

The Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau has become a dictatorship. The leader of that party does what he wants, when he wants, and no one dares question him.

Now that we know that Trudeau runs his party like a dictatorship, we must ask ourselves: is there any indication he wouldn't do the same as the leader of Canada?

Would a Prime Minister Trudeau arbitrarily whip the vote and outlaw certain moral questions? Could Prime Minister Trudeau be trusted to make decisions for the good of the country, not just for his personal self-worth? Would Trudeau call in the police to enforce his vision?

Let's hope we never have the opportunity to ask those questions.

Once upon a time, there was Canadian specific content on Huffington Post, and that appeared in 2015.  We now have our answer.

What will happen now that the ordinary working stiffs of Canada have been so casually abused by their native ruling class; threatened with having bank accounts frozen, their means of earning a living confiscated, themselves arrested, while their pets and children given over to the tender care of animal shelters and the child “protection” authorities? How far will this protest go now, bouncing down the Odessa Steps like a runaway baby carriage? It could be that Canadians, with the ethos of being polite, courteous, and truthful, may be truly shocked, shocked to the point of open rebellion over being consistently lied about and bullied by their ruling elite. In America, our own flyover country residents are perfectly accustomed to being abused as stupid, red-necked rubes by our own elite class. It’s what we have come to expect of NPR, the political ruling class, the New York/Hollywood cultural axis and the inside-the-Beltway-Washington DC denizens; what we have come to expect of them anyway. It may be a new and shocking development to ordinary, working-class Canadians, this contempt for the working class, though.

That's Sgt. Mom from Chicago Boyz, still hopeful that the Normals will stop the corona tyrants.  No, says novelist John Feffer, you will bend over, it is going to come again, and you're going to like it.

The Ottawa variant will pass. Other, more powerful mutations will inevitably appear as governments try to impose mandates of one sort of another, particularly in response to climate change. It's no surprise that immense gas-guzzlers are the vehicle of choice to bring an anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-science message to the capitals of the world.

He's not kidding.  We've already seen people who should know better attempt to turn "freedom" into hate speech.  That includes the alleged president of these United States with his "I have the freedom to kill you with my coronavirus."

Never mind that we could, oh, have a reasoned debate on whether focused protection for older people, and people on prescriptions that suppress immune response, makes more sense than injection passsports and the continued masking of children. 

Likewise, it would not be much of a stretch for the brain-brothers of Mr Feffer to go after those "immense gas-guzzlers" with "I have the freedom to run you over with my suburban assault vehicle."

Never mind that if you don't run everybody's money through Washington to build roads that the localities are not capable of maintaining, maybe there are fewer people buying motor vehicles, and fewer neighborhoods being platted from scratch for motorists only.

Or, if the second act is incremental, sort of like the "two weeks to slow the spread" led to New Zealand being isolated for almost two years, the likes of Mr Feffer will snark about your "freedom to despoil the air with your leaf blower."

Never mind that the least costly way to get your kids into a school district with decent test scores might come bundled with a granite countertop and a large lawn.  I know that sounds crazy, but compared with a condominium in a big city and a spot at the likes of Sidwell Friends for your spawn, it is.

Now is not the time to be celebrating mandates, let alone calling for more.

WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR THE CORONA TYRANNY?

A lot of discontent, and not much by way of results.

There is no doubt that tens or hundreds of thousands of people died prematurely from untreated ailments, avoidance of healthcare out of fear of getting COVID-19, and to a lesser degree things like overdoses and suicides. Because of all the looseness in reporting, the highest integrity data point measuring the pandemic and lockdown impacts is looking at how many people in total died against expectations. If three million people died annually from 2015-2019 and then 3.5 million people died in 2020 and 2021, the increase is obvious. This is how we measure the pandemic and interventions holistically.

If California had fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than South Dakota, but 3% more total excess deaths during the pandemic from all causes amidst the strictest lockdowns, was it worth it?

It's not that we didn't notice.

That's a yard sign Walworth County Republicans were selling to call attention to the ineptitude of their governor, Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D - Public Instruction).  His corona response was a failure.

Governors John Carney (DE), David Ige (HI), Janet Mills (ME), Tim Waltz (MN), Steve Sisolak (NV), Michelle Lujan (NM), Roy Cooper (NC), Kate Brown (OR), Ralph Northam (VA), Jay Inslee (WA), Tony Evers (WI), Larry Hogan (MD), Charlie Baker (MA), Chris Sununu (NH) and and Phil Scott (VT). Millions of their students were locked out of schools for over a year, thousands of businesses closed and they were defiant in opening up when it was clear where the science stood. The only salvage for Ige, Mills, Brown, Scott, Sununu and Inslee is that while they kept kids out of class and closed thousands of businesses, they did achieve low relative COVID-19 deaths and all-cause excess deaths. They likely would have anyway had they let kids get educated and let businesses function.

That's despite the state legislature and a divided state supreme court holding that emergency powers must be limited in scope and duration.

That report, though, took the view that there were degrees of failure, which makes sense, there are abject failures, listed above, and there are the truly spectacular failures.

Governors Andrew Cuomo (NY), Phil Murphy (NJ), Gavin Newsom (CA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Tom Wolf (PA). There’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.

There is still time, later this year, to turf the Michigan and Illinois governors out.  Whether the opposition parties will come up with credible replacements remains to be seen.

YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION.

Set the Wayback Machine to 2016, Sherman.  "How long, though, until sufficient voters recognize that they're being played for fools by the political class?"

Perhaps two years into fifteen days to slow the spread is long enough.

The embrace of the Canadian trucker protesters by the American right is a sign that the Tea Party spirit circa the early Obama years was never fully extinguished. Since then, everything has changed — most importantly, the rise of Donald Trump and his movement — and nothing has changed. It is freedom that remains the most natural and powerful Republican rallying cry.

That puts together two elements of the conservative coalition that faced down the Stalinists and the blame-America-first San Francisco Democrats.

Jeff MacNelly used to do the title cartoon that accompanied the Dave Barry "Year in Review" feature that is still a thing.  We were willing to be magnanimous to the useful idiots when the Berlin Wall came down, but there's no reason to be nice to the likes of Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau and Mark Zuckerberg, especially if they're covering for Red China.

The Canadian protest is a unifying moment for the American right. To simplify for the sake of clarity, the populists are drawn to the truckers as representatives of the working class, of a rejection of government by experts, and of a willingness to shock and defy the progressive governing class as embodied by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Limited-government conservatives, on the other hand, tend to sympathize with the opposition to the vaccine mandate on truckers as an irrational, completely unnecessary regulation and with the push to begin lifting Covid restrictions more broadly.

Both elements on the right have denounced Trudeau’s invoking of emergency powers. For the populists, the action is a dangerous sign of an impulse to smash anyone crossing elite opinion. For limited-government types, it’s a dangerous sign of a government that can too easily slip free of constitutional constraints.

The social conservatives, however, are not fully on board.

More to the point, [Republican candidates in opposition] don’t even have to do anything about gender ideology or the new wokeified race science of white women teenagers, about how being on time for things and taking pride in your work are vestiges of white supremacy or any of the other new bugbears. All they have to do is mumble along with vague slogans about how what the unspecified other side is doing is bad (and occasionally funny).

Social conservatives should be wary of carrying water for the GOP here. If the last administration showed us anything, it was that we should demand more from Republican presidents—especially those who find themselves with control of both houses of Congress and a de facto majority on the Supreme Court—than pointless uplift. Before, during, and after his presidency, Trump was admired less for anything he actually accomplished in office than for the amusing things he said about his opponents.

In a representative democracy, politicians are not elected to make us feel better about ourselves or to offer some kind of existential affirmation of our chosen way of life. Nor are they in office to attempt to define the nature and purpose of human existence or to debate first-order questions about natural law and morality. Instead they are supposed to apply their minds to an ever-expanding number of prudential questions: What should tax rates be? Should we build more bridges? How about the minimum wage?

Perhaps the proper answers to those final questions are "lower," "treat bridges like productive assets," and "it's effectively zero."  But Matthew Walther is kidding himself if he expects any respect from Democrats on matters of gender ideology or critical studies.  Those are experiments against reality that will fall of their own weight, and a freedom-weighted bundle of less corona tyranny, less taxation, less technocracy centralized in Washington, less, disrespect for law enforcement, and local control of the school boards is likely to get him more than continued governance by Democrats, no matter how bitter the fight between its communist and corporatist wings becomes.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Behold the incompetence of Our Progressive Betters.  Joe Biden is out of excuses.  Let us first count the ways.

The regular roundup of pithy references to Cold Spring Shops themes follows the enumerated list.

MAKE THE PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL CLASS MODEST AGAIN.

American Spectator contributor Auguste Meyrat does not write, "deny coherent beliefs, enjoy incoherence," and yet he notes precisely that.

As much as the Left’s anti-intellectualism (what else can one call it?) hurts conservatives, however, it hurts the Left even more. Because they define intelligence and argue about it so superficially, they end up with embarrassingly ignorant and incompetent leadership. They elect leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both of whom struggle mightily with articulating a single clear thought. They appoint justices like Sonya Sotomayor, who fails to understand the basic facts about a virus that has deeply impacted the country for over two years. They continue to worship experts like perpetually wrong Anthony [der Giftzwerg -- Ed.] Fauci.

Contrary to [Atlantic contributor David] Graham’s claims, it seems that leftists are the one struggling with dumb leaders — except their leaders don’t seem to be pretending. Even if mocking conservatives makes him feel better about this sad truth, he and the rest of writers at the Atlantic would do better to take a step back, consider their arguments, and offer constructive solutions.

In other words, they can use their brains and be “smart” for once.

Apparently, they haven't been mugged by reality enough. As long as they can get away with their heretical incantations, they might keep on keeping on.

In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.

No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words, even though they’re pretty much always bogus.)

Yes, that's the kind of rhetoric you might expect from a Pajamas Media type. The heresy isn't coming from Knoxville alone, though.  "I see a replication of an odious and all too familiar culture war dynamic pitting finger-wagging urban liberals against an ever-radicalizing right wing that pretends to stand up to elites and speak up for workers."It's Jacobin, so you can expect the category errors. But credit even leftists for noting the failure of the professional-managerial classes and their incantations.

Far-right politics do not exist in a vacuum or arrive suddenly like a random weather event. They flourish in conditions of economic hardship and social alienation and are often aggravated by the cynical behavior of traditional political elites eager to distract from their own failures.

The current moment in Canada is no exception. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the country remains in a quasi–state of emergency, but the language of togetherness and social solidarity of its early months are long gone — along with many of the benefit programs that supported people throughout the initial lockdowns. Even as the highly infectious Omicron variant has rampaged across the country, elected leaders (including Trudeau himself) have continued to place blame for the pandemic squarely on the unvaccinated. Though it’s since been abandoned, the premier of Quebec even floated the idea of a punitive new health tax on anyone who refuses a jab.

Why nobody has bothered to note that people who refuse the corona shot are doing so at their own risk, which would be a valid observation if the corona shots worked, the same way public health practitioners and primary care physicians do with the annual flu shots, for which receiving the injection is voluntary, and nobody is panicking, continues to escape advocates of the continuing tyranny.

THE FALSE GOD OF WOKENESS.

Reason's Nick Gillespie chats with John McWhorter.  "McWhorter argues that today's anti-racist crusaders evince a quasi-religious fanaticism that ends up hurting, not helping, the plights of black Americans."  They engage in autos-da-fe, but their motivation is not saving souls, which was the reason behind immolating heretics back in the day.

There is a group of people who are committed to what they call social justice, certain enough of their moral purity that they are willing to hurt other people if they don't agree with their principles. Their notion is that they are saving people who are living under the power of white hegemony. Not only are these people mean and unpleasant to deal with, but in the name of social justice for black people, they often either don't care about black people for real, or they're hurting black people. I wrote Woke Racism not as some boring statement from the right wing about family values and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This is a book saying there are black people who need help. The people who are calling themselves black people's saviors don't understand this. What they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help.

That argument generalizes to other dimensions of the so-called progressives' wildest dreams, but regular readers already knew that.  Let's focus on the empirically empty stances of the social justice warriors, which might better be understood as a faith tradition, if without any pretense of divine influence.

I call it a religion partly because of formal similarities between it and especially devout Christianity, starting with white privilege as original sin. Not only are those parallels important, but I have a heuristic reason for it. Some people were expecting Woke Racism to be an examination of the nature of religion and wokeness and what the parallels are. Nobody would have read that book. They shouldn't have; it's not that important.

I consider it useful to think of this as a religion so that people can understand that we can't have productive exchanges with the particular kind of person I'm writing about. Many people think, "Well, if we could only get them to understand that we need a plurality of ideas." Or people ask me, "How can I get that kind of person to not call me a racist?" You can't. That's what they do.

You're unlikely to try to convince somebody that Jesus does not love them; you're unlikely to try to talk someone out of their religious faith. Framing it as a religion gets across that idea better than just calling it an ideology.

It's useful for public intellectuals not of the traditionalist right to call attention to the ways the so-called Great Society and Woodstock Nation went wrong.

You go to 1970 and there's this whole new mood—the black power mood. The new idea is, "We can't do our best because you won't let us. And therefore you have to accept that we won't do our best, and that sometimes we'll do our worst." Gradually the notion settles in that doing your worst or not doing your best is almost what black authenticity is, because you stand as a totemic demonstration of white racism. 1960s racism is about segregation. By 1970, it's standard in certain circles that racism is still present and indestructable because it's structural.

Because of the welfare revolution in 1966, it starts to become regular for people to just stay on welfare, with no one concerned about whether they get job training. The knocking on the door dwindles in the early '70s, and it becomes this multigenerational program. It's not anybody's fault. Black America turned upside down between '60 and '70.

I think that civil rights up to about 1966 and [black activist] Stokely Carmichael and people yelling "black power" and not knowing what it meant—that's where it went wrong. And we're still stuck talking about these things the way those people did.

And, ultimately, the continued appeal to the forms and rubrics of the late 1960s doesn't speak to contemporary young people.

Some people hearing me say that are thinking I mean that I don't like blackness or that I'm ambivalent about it. But I just think that the category is beginning to not make sense. That includes my daughters. I don't know if they, when they're 40, are going to identify as black women, as opposed to just mutt women growing up in an upper-middle-class world, where everybody has a different flavor. What they're basically becoming is modestly affluent American urban kids.

I worry these days that when people say blackness, what they mean is, roughly, not being buttoned up like Episcopalian whites. I worry that blackness is thought of as, roughly, jamming. I mean this as more than just dancing, but that there's something that black people are in touch with in terms of rhythm. That blackness is not being too exact—we're seeing that in so many educational materials. It runs throughout the culture that to be black is to not be precise, is to not be responsible for getting the exact answer. You have a rhythm; you jam. You don't sit in one place; it's about the beat. And I worry that [this sense of] blackness is primitive, you know?

That way lies a self-destructive notion of authenticity, whose persistence keeps worshippers of that false god poor and alienated, whilst giving intellectual ammunition to people who might not wish Americans of African extraction well.

MORE FROM BILL MAHER.

It's amusing watching the Pajamas Media types respond to Bill Maher simply being ... Bill Maher.  "A dedicated lifelong liberal, Maher has been on quite a roll throughout the Biden administration, earning what many of us would have thought was impossible, over the years: newfound respect from the right." That part of the right got on Mr Maher for his objection to people calling the September 11 pilots "cowardly," noting it took some sort of guts to steal a plane with the intent to use it as a kamikaze weapon, and more recently for expressing some doubts about one Donald Trump (who has been many things, but not a conventional conservative, and not a libertarian.)  We have longer memories at Cold Spring Shops.

Let's conclude today's posts with more wit and wisdom from the onetime host of "Politically Incorrect."

.@billmaher points out the terrible comments Trudeau has made on unvaccinated Canadians pic.twitter.com/l2BQzLlwGp

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 12, 2022

The list Red State's Mike Miller offers of Mr Maher breaking with the woketards of the ficus's so-called presidency would not surprise anyone who watched "Politically Incorrect" back in the day.

PUBLIC RADIO FINALLY CATCHES ON.

Poverty, Dropouts, Pregnancy, Suicide: What The Numbers Say About Fatherless Kids. Not much good, but I suppose finally acknowledging in 2017 what some of us understood in 1980 or 1992 or so is better than continuing to deny reality.

HOW LARGE IS HIGHER EDUCATION'S SUB-PRIME SECTOR?

This large.  "New data from Georgetown show that nearly a third of colleges and universities leave most students worse off 10 years after enrolling than their peers with only a high school diploma." As the newsreader might say, those are the headlines, here are the details.

Most students who attend college earn more 10 years down the road than those who don’t. But at roughly one-third of institutions, a majority of students end up earning less than those with a high school diploma, according to a new analysis from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

The analysis examines new data from College Scorecard and looks at net economic gains for college students 10 years and 40 years after they enroll. The data includes all students, including those who did not graduate.

“College typically pays off, but the return on investment varies by credential, program of study, and institution,” Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center for Education and the Workforce, said in a press release.

Sometimes you have to start with the obvious, and then disaggregate.

Low earnings are often linked to low graduation rates at a given institution, said Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy at the center. At many institutions, the share of students who earn a degree is 50 percent or less.

“At many of those colleges—where students start and never finished—the [return on investment] probably doesn’t offer any more than that a high school diploma would, because if you go to college and you don’t finish, you don’t have a credential that is worth any more than a high school diploma in the marketplace,” Van Der Werf said.

It's probably unprincipled to suggest that maybe there are institutions of higher learning that are signing up a lot of Distressed Material that matriculates but never graduates.  And in some cases, the return on human capital comes in relatively late in one's career.

Two-year institutions offered the best net economic gains after 10 years, in part because students who graduate in two years compared with four spend more time in the workforce and incur less debt, Van Der Werf said. About 15 or 20 years postenrollment, that begins to change.

“Over time, the returns on a four-year degree are quite a bit higher than on a two-year degree,” Van Der Werf said. “Of course, that depends on what the [two-year] degree is. If it’s in a technical topic—like computer science—you can compete with a four-year degree. But a two-year degree in general studies or something like that has some capture in the labor force in the early years after you earn it, but it begins to fade over time.”

That comparison, however, is incomplete: what's the marginal benefit of a baccalaureate in general studies compared with the associate degree?

HAS HE EVER BEEN TO WISCONSIN?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille attempts a comparison that doesn't quite work.

Canada appears to be governed as you would expect of Wisconsin if California's snotty political class were exiled to Madison. This puts generally nice, compliant people under the rule of an especially self-regarding and contemptuous gang. But some Canadians have been driven to revolt against that ruling class's pandemic policies in the form of the trucker-led Freedom Convoy. So powerful are the shock waves of this unprecedented uprising that they crossed the border and flipped the positions Americans of the left and right take on the legitimacy of political protest and suppression of the same. More importantly, the movement cautions the political class everywhere against pushing people too far.

I submit that current Wisconsin governor Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D-Public Instruction) is at least as snotty and incompetent as any of the leading Californians.  There's more legislative oversight, though, which led relatively quickly to an easing of the corona tyranny in Wisconsin.  And the pencil neck at least had the good sense not to antagonize the Packer fans or lumberacks too much.  Where did Canada's prime minister mess up?  I mean, those "nice, compliant people" watch nationally televised fist-fighting on ice on Saturday nights.  Why should a continent be governed by an island, whether it is with the sensibilities of Manhattan or of Montreal?  Maybe they could take an education from their neighbors who wrote the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment into their governing documents.

The more protest-prone United States likely avoided this scenario by not just decentralizing but often ignoring rulemaking. The split may best be captured by the media's constant contrast between locked-down New York and wide-open Florida. Even in restrictive states, many local officials refused to enforce curfews, mask orders, and business closures. Within or in defiance of the law, local policies in-line with local sentiment mean fewer pissed-off people. If the U.S. had widely imposed national mandates, politicians in Washington, D.C., would probably now be wishing the pushback had stopped at traffic jams and honking.

There is that subset of the political class who would like to smear some large segment of the electorate as "insurrectionist," but that's not going to go anywhere.  But that subset of the political class overlaps, substantially, with the corona tyrants, and their future doesn't look so bright right now.

"Two years after the world first heard about covid-19, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a huge extension of state power over people's lives and the erosion of individual freedoms," the Democracy Index 2021 observes about conditions around the world. That loss of liberty inspired waves of popular but disconnected protests in country after country among people seeking the return of liberal norms and respect for their personal choices. Now, improbably, those protests may be coming together under a maple leaf and a #HonkHonk hashtag.

None too soon, either, but it's on voters to recognize that corona tyrants pivoting, relatively recently, toward freedom, ought be replaced wherever possible with office seekers who were dubious in the spring of 2020.

THE FOOD DESERT THAT ACCOMPANIES J. B. PRITZKER'S TAXATION AND CORONA TYRANNY.

I could recommend this Northern Star column as an illustration of Clueless Collegian Privilege.

DeKalb needs more diverse food options.

Lincoln Highway is lined with restaurants and fast food joints. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Culver’s can still be tempting and The Junction is a DeKalb favorite when it comes to comfort food, but it’s not satisfying or particularly exciting.

As a hungry college student, I want more options. I don’t always want to eat unhealthy fast food or quick-to-make comfort foods.

To be fair, DeKalb does have some options: in just the five miles surrounding NIU’s campus, there is a multitude of Chinese takeout places and different Mexican restaurants. Downtown DeKalb also offers a Thai restaurant, which is a personal favorite of mine.

What’s missing is variety.

Yes, Lincoln Highway is lined with restaurants, but options are still fairly limited when it comes to ordering. Chicken nuggets, burgers or pizza top the menu in most restaurants close to campus, with the exception of only a few.

Might it be that the places that are still in business had offerings that catered to people other than collegians. Between several years of declining enrollments, and two years of remote college, the correlation of forces has not favored eateries.

Many of the Chinese restaurants in DeKalb and Sycamore are typical takeout places — you won’t find anywhere that offers a more varied menu, like Chinese hotpot or dim sum.

The Mexican restaurants in DeKalb have the same pitfalls. Many of them offer similar dishes, and while they’re delicious, they don’t exactly offer anything special.

Obviously, there has to be a viable market for new restaurants. If there’s not, they won’t make money.

But what’s a more viable market than a university campus? College students are perpetually hungry and usually open to trying new things, especially when it comes to food.

That last sentence steps on the narrative of cash-poor collegians who ought have their student loans forgiven, doesn't it?  But the kind of places that might have offered variety are gone: the pho restaurant by the grocery store, the Panda, Wing Stop, and a local pizza delivery service in a complex that only hosts a Starbucks, and some of the more conventional hot dog and Italian beef outlets have given up.

But even before the current governor started issuing ukases and killing seniors, his tax and corruption agenda was driving productive people out.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 19,533.

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.  I am pleased to report that the indoor mask mandate for eateries and the like will be expiring in two weeks, on 28 February, although children of all ages will still be subject to the Biden muzzles.

The continued corona tyranny is not working for the so-called progressives any more.

To the extent that disruptions are caused by sickness, we would expect to see more disruptions in conservative parts of the country with low vaccination rates. Instead, we see equal if not greater disruptions in liberal parts of the country, even though the higher vaccination rate reduces the burden of disease. That’s because those jurisdictions are implementing Covid-19 mitigation measures with costs that exceed their benefits. And by making high-vaccination places relatively dysfunctional, these mitigations are sending a negative (and inaccurate) signal about the power of vaccination to let people live their lives with confidence.

Tellingly, it’s not just that more liberal jurisdictions have these measures. The rules are specifically strictest in areas of life where left-wing people have the most political clout — universities and public schools — rather than in places with the highest objective level of vulnerability (nursing homes).

Elsewhere, Sweden's corona mitigations are done; they are going away in Germany, and the remaining ukases in Iowa will be going away tomorrow.

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.

The latest report from Sweden counts 2,397,330 infections, up by 836,967 from last month, and 16,465 deaths, a change of 995 from that report.  The logic in Sweden is that the spike of the latest variant is over.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,001,771 infections, an increase of 412,131 over last month, and 35,998 deaths, adding 3,466 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.

As of this afternoon, the state counts nearly 21 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they've updated their talley to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations.  The state no longer counts the scary variants.  The current mix of infections is low on Delta, and hight on Xi Omicron.

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

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 17,062.

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?

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE COMES FOR YOUR CONVOY.

Let's begin by noting that British North America was the refuge for people who for one reason or another had doubts about the notion that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness were rights inherent to all people, that governments existed to Secure those Rights, and that governments required the Consent of the Governed.  Thus Canadian pundits might not see people calling attention to governments abusing their powers the same way as their Stateside neighbors do.

Freedom, of course, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes. It’s been a rallying cry behind great triumphs such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement. But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.

More recently, political leaders, and others, with an unprecedented megaphone in the form of the internet and social media, have used the call for “freedom” to promote bigoted, racist and anti-democratic ideas.

That's a bundle of non-sequiturs, and it strikes me as less than germane to the circumstances that provoked the convoys.  I'm not sure how Canadian emergency powers work, or whether a prime minister can issue ukases and get away with them as long as there's no vote of no confidence in their parliament.  I do know that state governors in the United States have abused their emergency powers, and residents of several states have called attention, or sometimes had the emergency decrees lifted.  And yes, they get slimed by that Critique of Pure Tolerance-adjacent argument to the effect that freedom in the service of Bad Ideas is somehow anti-democratic.  The columnist ought to rethink that.  As should the coot, who again stammered out his silly idea that people were misusing their freedom by not getting vaccinated or by going out in public with a cold.  (It came to this when the Smart People deconstructed bourgeois conventions, but that's too subtle an argument for an addled ficus, let alone Canadian pundits.)

WHEN THE FACULTY LOSES STEWARDSHIP OF THE CURRICULUM, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed posed a question to his "wise and worldly" readers.

Last Friday I asked my wise and worldly readers who work at teaching-intensive colleges what the last step is in the faculty interview process.

The answers varied, but they shared a common denominator: the final interview was always one-on-one, with a high-ranking administrator (dean, VP or president) making the final call.

That was … surprising.

When the final interview for a faculty position rests with a dean or higher, working alone, then that dean or higher is cast into one of two roles: either a rubber stamp for the committee or a rogue. Neither is great. A rubber stamp is a waste of time, and a rogue undermines the work of the committee (and potentially introduces all sorts of bias).

I wonder if what we're seeing is the consequences of forty years of institutions of higher (more or less) learning relying more heavily on cheap and contingent labor.  There are people who value being in a teaching-intensive environment, but as the institutional memory is downsized by attrition, if not by administrative ukase, there might be fewer people available to serve on personnel committees.  The dean might be the only person with something resembling institutional memory the potential hire interacts with.

PURE JOY.

The corona tyranny is lifted in Nevada schools.

A small number of the kids appear not to be reacting. I wonder if those have parents like press secretary Jen "Raggedy Ann" Psaki who are OK with their "rising kindergartener" muzzled ad infinitum.

For the most part, though, the kids recognize that they've been set free.

But the children have not been happy. And if you doubt that, you only have to view this viral video showing children at an elementary school in Las Vegas upon learning that their masks are gone as of the following day (although you'll note that many of the children simply stripped off their masks immediately).

The mask ukases remain in effect in Illinois schools. We'll have our monthly report on the effects of the Illinois corona tyranny tomorrow.

THE BEST YOU CAN HOPE TO DO IS CAPTURE THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS.

I return to a familiar theme.  "Complex Adaptive Systems Do Pretty Much What They Darn Well Please." In that post, I quoted at length from a Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn essay on the difficulties of city planning, particularly if highly disaggregated.

Even scarier, with a complex, adaptive system, the same input in similar circumstances at a different time could yield wildly different results. Just because you were right once – or a thousand times – doesn’t mean you will be right the next time. And when you consider what we’re betting here on being right, well….you should be scared too.

What drives me insane about most economists is the lack of humility, the supreme confidence in their own ability to understand what they are doing. It is the same thing that drives me crazy about engineers, planners, economic development advisors and the whole range of professions that profess to use simple equations to explain infinite complexity. They don’t know what they think they know.

And now the same reality comes for the climate modellers.

This is especially true of the heart of the matter: the computer climate models we use to make predictions about future changes in the climate. But as our computer climate models are refined with more and more raw data and endless tweaks of the climate simulations, the uncertainties have arguably grown larger rather than smaller. This is not as outlandish as it may seem, given we are expecting scientists to get a grasp of a phenomenon with so many factors and scientific sub-specialties, from oceanography to forestry.

The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is "in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model." There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem, which some Wall Street Journal contributors described thusly.

First, deep in the story is an excellent description of the complexity—and also the defects—of climate models. The main climate models contain over 2 million lines of computer code (much of it apparently still in Fortran). Even after an intensive five-year process to rework the code and acquire better data at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.”

Strictly speaking, you have to write algorithms to capture atmospheric movement almost at the molecular level. That involves way more than two million lines of code, and you're still a long way from done.  (When we've been here ten thousand years, Bright, shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise, Than when we first begun.)

In addition, as we add code, we run out of computing capacity.  That's something where Divine Intervention can't help you.

Steven Koonin’s recent book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, which contains one of the best discussions for the layperson of how climate models work that I’ve ever seen, gilds this point: “Many important [climate] phenomena occur on scales smaller than the 100 km (60 mile) grid size (such as mountains, clouds, and thunderstorms).” In other words, the accuracy of the models is highly limited. Why can’t we scale down the model resolution? Koonin, who taught computational physics at CalTech, explains: “A simulation that takes two months to run with 100 km grid squares would take more than a century if it instead used 10 km grid squares. The run time would remain at two months if we had a supercomputer one thousand times faster than today’s—a capability probably two or three decades in the future.”

Put another way, it would take longer to extrapolate a century-long climate emergency on the computer than it would take for the emergency to materialize. And rewriting the code in something other than FORTRAN would not change that reality.  Let the fun begin.  "The Wall Street Journal reports that the newest models kept spitting out even more dire predictions of future warming than many previous models—but that the climate modelers don’t believe the projections."  In part, that's because the models fail one relatively cheap accuracy check, known in some circles as "backcasting" and in others as "calibration."  If you use observed data from some previous time, and your model gives you something tolerably close to what came after (where "tolerably close" means "isn't so far off reality that even a true believer referee has to reject the paper") you might be able to do some extrapolating.  Apparently, the current suite of models doesn't do well with Ice Ages.  And the modellers aren't even close to capturing some really essential elements.  "One big reason the 100 sq km resolution of climate models is inadequate is that the behavior of clouds and water vapor can’t be adequately modeled—something the [Internationa Panel on Climate Change] reports usually admit in the technical sections the media never read."  The ad hoc modifications you might do to account for clouds tend not to work well.

Maybe, between the corona scares and the environmental scares, it's time to place less confidence in extrapolations, particularly those sensitively dependent on initial conditions, whether on the ground, or in the prior beliefs of the programmers.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, CANADIAN DIVISION.

Failed politician Linda McQuaig attempts to demonize and downplay the pushback against corona tyranny.  How well did it turn out?

The occupation represents an abject failure by the Ottawa police — as well as by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, both of whom have been fearful of triggering a confrontation that might antagonize right-wingers in Western Canada and rural Ontario.

By allowing the convoy to be coddled like this, Trudeau and Ford have given the freedom-bullies a sense of their own importance that is as oversized as their trucks.

Alberta and Saskatchewan premiers have lifted their mask ukases, haven't they?

Now, with a 12-day occupation of the nation’s capital under their belts, the freedom-bullies have been catapulted to the centre of the national stage, looking like a force that’ll have to be reckoned with in the future. Diane Deans, chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board, declared: “This is a nation-wide insurrection.”

No, it isn’t. It’s just a small group of belligerent men with very big trucks.

I’ve been part of much larger demonstrations that got a fraction of the attention. If these guys hadn’t been handed such an easy win in Ottawa, they — and their cause — would have likely gotten no more than a few minutes airtime on the national news.

That's not how it's playing in Paris or Brussels or Wellington, and the homeland security types in Los Angeles are wetting themselves over the prospect of a sympathy convoy in Los Angeles, and it's not that bringing Skyline Chili to the Super Bowl leads to greenhouse gas emissions.  (Too bad the Packer special teams messed up.  A chili throw-down between Cincinnati and Green Bay chili heads would have been epic.)

And what is with the promiscuous use of "insurrection" these days?  Doesn't an insurrection require the storming of a government building followed by drumhead trials of public officials?  Maybe with Eisenstein filming the re-enactment.

Maybe those Russian trucks in the borderlands are massing for a vaccine protest.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, ENVIRONMENTALIST DIVISION.

Dear reader, this, too, is a true story.

Beginning in June, all sunrooms included in new construction projects will be required to show they will not create “unwanted solar gain.” The change, noted Daily Mail, is part of “a raft of measures” aimed at “future-proofing” homes against summers where temperatures are predicted to reach 104º F. Though “well above what is currently experienced in Britain,” such highs would “cause conservatories to become unbearably hot, often increasing the temperature uncomfortably indoors too.”

This is a proposal from the U.K., where they're a long way from hitting three digits Fahrenheit most of the time. As the columnist notes, "More than half of the United States just laughed out loud and said 'Hold my beer.'"

In addition, did anybody even think about how an attached sunroom might come in handy in the winter, when most of the consumption of fossil fuels to heat houses go on?

According to Daily Mail, the objective of the new rules is to “improve domestic ventilation” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. (I wasn’t aware that sunrooms emit anything — least of which, greenhouse gases.) As a result, window sizes will be limited according to which direction they face and whether the home is likely to overheat.

Presumably, the process-worshippers are fretting about people using their central air conditioning more intensively on those two or three hot summer days because of the ambient heat coming from those conservatories.

Did it ever occur to them that large windows facing south and west take some of the load off the central heating in the winter?  There are several such windows at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, including (gasp!) an all-season sunroom, and from September to mid-November and mid-February to late April, the heat contained therein substantially lessens the use of central heating.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, STUDENT DIVISION.

It's generally my practice to cut collegiate columnists some slack, because they're still learning and there is much they don't yet know.  But then you get this complaint.

There is just one factor that is not included within the push for supporting smaller businesses: fat people. While consumers worry about the environmental costs and capitalistic practices when it comes to shopping at smaller companies, I have to worry about my body size.

That's a Northern Star columnist, and she's offering that complaint in all earnestness. Not even The Onion would dare go to the carbon footprint of plus-sized clothing (which either is machine produced for a mass market, or it has to be custom sewn), although they might serve up something like this.  "Sure, it is amazing to include the size XS, but not including the other end of that spectrum is oppressive to fat people."  Throw in enough buzzwords and nobody notices how solipsistic you're being, I suppose.

Lots of brands purposely make their plus-size clothing years behind on trends due to fatphobia. This leaves many fat women with little to no choices for fashionable clothes, and unable to shop ethically or support small clothing businesses.

As someone who lingers between M/XL and has short legs, it is near impossible for me to find trendy, fitting clothing at any ethical, small business. I can barely find properly fitting clothes at big stores like Target or American Eagle, despite them having an extremely wide range of sizes. I imagine that those bigger than me have an even more difficult time.

While environmental and ethical standards are important factors to consider while shopping sustainably, the idea of size inclusion often goes ignored.

Perhaps it's a poverty problem. The United States are where you find obese poor people.  It's never possible to be too rich, and if you're not too thin, that might be the way to be able to have plus-size stuff that looks fashionable custom made.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association began stratifying its basketball tournament by school size.  I suspect that was reality, the Hebron, Illinois title or plot of Hoosiers just didn't happen often.

The first winner in the big-school division was Milwaukee Hamilton.

In 1972, Milwaukee Hamilton started off as a team that didn't appear state championship bound.

"At the beginning of the season we were not gelling," Kevin Soucie says. "We were faltering. In fact, we lost three of (the) first four games."

Then they reeled off 18 straight wins, rallying from double digits down to beat Neenah for the championship.

There's a video at the link. There was a 35 year gathering, that was an early opportunity for me to use the Elburn rail station. It wasn't until 2005 that the school put up a banner for the event. Yes, the words of the school fight song were set to "The Stripper," even though the school system honchos didn't approve.

REALITY IS A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION.

The formulaic introduction to economics might go something like "the study of how people allocate scarce resources among competing uses."  A person considers a resource scarce if he'd like to have more of it than he currently has.  The competing use takes the form of another person also considering it scarce.

We could allocate the resources by force, the winner of the conflict establishing ownership.

We could allocate by force at one remove, with rulers determining who gets what, and enforcing the outcomes by having a monopoly on violence.

We could allocate by force at a second remove, by establishing and enforcing institutions within which people trade for mutual gain.

The problem of allocating scarce resources among conflicting uses does not go away.  Somebody, perhaps everybody, makes do with less, or perhaps does without.

When it comes to allocating health resources, Our Political Masters have trouble determining whether the second remove is even possible, or if the first remove is still the way to go.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Another week passes, another roundup of reinforcement of Cold Spring Shops themes.

Follow the links for the elaborations on the pithy bits.

IT CAME TO THIS WHEN SHE ROPED OFF THE SEED AISLES.

Governmental excess has been a depressingly familiar feature of the past couple of years, and Michigan governor Gretchen "Schlachterfrau" Whitmer earned high marks for silliness, with her rules on what home-improvement stores could or could not sell, and on how many people could occupy, or even launch, a pleasure boat.  When courts ruled she exceeded her authority, she just kept on exceeding her authority.  She even went so far as to suggest that making the ficus president would mean the end of the corona tyranny.  No dice.

We still live in a constitutional republic, and when the dictatorial governors don't play by the rules, It is the Right and the Obligation of the People to make the necessary alterations.  I mean, it's so bad in Michigan that Kelly Stafford left for California and its corona tyranny.

But the Schlachterfrau's ukases, and the implicit elite contempt for Normals, continue, and some Normals with big rigs have said Enough.  You can't say, Schlachterfrau, that I didn't warn you.

"These governors and departmental secretaries have a better chance of keeping their offices by treating their constituents as citizens with the rights to dissent and to review, rather than as children to be bossed around."  Better to be voted out, which is what constituents who have run out of patience do, than to be subject to what can happen when subjects run out of patience.

In this case, it's Canadian subjects who have run out of patience, but the Schlachterfrau is feeling the pain.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called on Canada to take "all necessary and appropriate steps to immediately and safely reopen traffic so we can continue growing our economy, supporting good-paying jobs, and lowering costs for families."

"Our communities and automotive, manufacturing and agriculture businesses are feeling the effects," she added. "It’s hitting paychecks and production lines. That is unacceptable."

The Anderson Economic Group in Lansing calculated an initial estimate for lost direct wages in the Michigan auto industry as a result of the protest beginning Monday at more than $51 million.

It's a little late for somebody who was willing to cordon off the seed aisles, and allow Illinoisans, but not Michiganders, to go pleasure boating, to fret about jobs put on hold, isn't it?  No more corona tyranny, no more job action at the Ambassador Bridge.

U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Stockbridge, said that she hopes Canadian leaders reach "a safe and quick resolution" but added that "Americans are fed up with government mandates."

"It’s time for the Biden administration to listen to the people," she said. "These mandates are going to cripple our supply chain, and the Democrats can blame freedom loving truck drivers, but the real blame is on the vaccine requirements at the border."

So far, no liquor stores have been burned, no pawnshops have been looted, and no "fiery but peaceful" chyrons have been seen on cable news.

With the public health authorities suggesting the coronavirus is becoming endemic, and pandemic mitigations ought soon end, why the freedom protests now?  Perhaps because sometimes evidence accumulates that public officials are going skiing on that slippery slope.  Slow the spread was the bridge to masking which was the bridge to the shots that were our bridge to freedom, but Nature and the political class had other plans.  This late into the emergency, is a new international vaccine mandate on the relatively few holdouts among the truckers necessary?  Or does it bespeak a pattern of abuse that began with the closure of roadside eateries and truck stops two years ago?  There's not much we can do about Nature, but we must push back against the professional managerial class.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-INFLICTED LOSS OF AUTHORITY.

University of Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank is making a career move.

Blank called the state’s political divide the “greatest existential threat” to UW-Madison.

She said politicians are using the university as chips in “their partisan wars.”

The political divide can translate to less state funding, which can lead to fewer federal dollars dependent on a state match.

She added that the polarization is leading to people losing trust and confidence in the university.

It's long been a talking point from Bascom Hill that those mean legislators are picking on the university.

Sometimes, those talking points might be valid, but too often, the university comes off as taking sides in ways that might make legislators join me in being reluctant to continue to cut checks.

IMAGINE NO COMMUNISM.

It's easy, if you try.

Enjoy.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SOCIABLE?

If there's broad consensus on what the common schools ought be teaching, the school board election is probably no big deal, and it doesn't much matter who runs, or who turns out to vote.

That, however, is not reality for school boards.

“We’re certainly seeing the nationalization of school board races here in Wisconsin and across the country,” UW-Oshkosh associate professor of public administration Michael Ford said. “You’re seeing a heck of a lot of talk about things like vaccine mandates, critical race theory, things that are actually pretty disconnected from the reality of being a school board member.”

Yes and no.  Are school boards approving curricula that don't sit well with parents?  Have they been captured by public employee unions?  Have the public health measures been debated in Congress, in legislatures, in the city council?

While more civic engagement is always welcome, politicizing such historically nonpartisan races threatens to make governing more difficult, Ford said.

“The worry is obstructionism,” he said. “You have a one-issue candidate or, more importantly, if you have a few candidates who are just hellbent on conflict, you really start to mess with the group dynamic of a governing board and grind the process to a halt. That’s the real fear.”

Recent efforts that have gummed up the workings of government, Ford said, include more than a dozen school board recall elections, launched in response to COVID mitigation policies, that took place across the state since the pandemic began. A parent group in Oshkosh that was vocal about the school district’s mask policies had a few candidates throw their name into the hat to seek seats on the School Board.

“Just about every major school district in the state has at least one candidate who is running on an issue like critical race theory, and if you had gone pre-COVID-19 that was not a thing. That was never an issue anybody had talked about,” he said.

“It’s more of a frustration that some folks have with state and federal government and their inability to gain traction at the state and federal level has brought some of these more social issues to the surface at the local level.”

Put another way, had Congress or the state legislatures or the city councils been involved in approving the public health measures, the school boards might not have become contested territory.  Whether parents were quicker to find out about critical studies or other intrusions into the curriculum because they could see the indoctrination on their kids' computers is an area for further study.  But it is not a defense of the status quo to complain about "gumming up the works" of making policy.  That's a valid outcome where there is consensus, but where has there been consensus on anything, lately?  Well, maybe in ultra-woke Madison.  Not so much elsewhere in the state, or nationwide.

[Madison political scientist Barry Burden] said some of the people seeking public office in Wisconsin are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden and Gov. Tony Evers and motivated to enter the race by issues such as COVID mitigation policies and equity initiatives in K-12 curriculum.

“It’s anger more than enthusiasm, and the people who they’re angry at are the incumbents,” he said.

In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again.

Yes, if the public employee union endorses a slate, and the city is full of ... public employees, that's not a surprise.  They deserve the indisciplined schools and the children rendered illiterate by woke education that they'll get.  Voters elsewhere in the country can also see that outcome, and they get to say no.  If that means a loss of consensus and comity for the time being, so be it.

REVISITING THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE.

I've long taken a dim view of the REMFs in higher education converting the course outline into something akin to an end user license agreement.

Now comes M. S. Stewart, just in time for the end of the academic year, offering advice to Inside Higher Ed readers.  "Print the syllabus out and return to your own student days in your mind. Is this a course you would have wanted to take yourself?"  That comes, only after blocks of text that includes nuggets such as this.  "If offices such as campus security, disability services, the registrar and so on require boilerplate sections, do explain to students that the voice may be different but the shared values are there."

It's gotten to such a state in higher education that when a professor calls attention to the folly of the deanlets' micromanagement by complying with it, the best one J. B. Field could do was somehow defend the micromanagement.

A recent occurrence that bubbled out of the world of higher education and onto the radar of national news media like The New York Times and CNN concerned a stunt by Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who hid instructions in his syllabus for locating a $50 bill hidden in a library locker. At the end of the semester, he shared an image of the $50, still in the locker.

Whatever the professor’s motivations were, many observers quickly concluded that his students should hang their heads in shame for their failure to read the syllabus. Others took a different view and suggested that the professor was setting his students up to fail just so he could gain clout on social media. As Kevin Gannon pointed out, the putative clue was terse and buried in one of the many paragraphs that universities require faculty members to include in every syllabus.

Most of that verbiage is useless.  But if you write for the generally less paywalled house organ for business as usual in higher education, you might have to defend the rule, no matter how foolish it is.

I continue to be uneasy with the idea of a professor showing his students up the way that Wilson did and think sharing his trick on public social media is tacky, for lack of a better word. More generally, though, I believe this moment demonstrates that the problem is not with our students but with our syllabi.

As it stands, the syllabus is a document that has to function in at least three different ways. For the professor writing the syllabus, it is an introduction to the course and a sort of intellectual itinerary for the ground the course will cover. That’s important to many students, but they also approach the syllabus as something like a contract that stipulates the work they need to do to earn the grade they desire. And while the university may be concerned with those intellectual and academic aspects, the syllabus also functions for it as a space to share statements about various university policies that deal with issues such as academic integrity and compliance with Title IX, the Americans With Disabilities Act and COVID-related policies. My employer, for example, requires faculty members to append a 10-page document concerning university policies to the end of each syllabus or to share it with students as a separate document.

Many colleges and universities mandate what seems like an ever-expanding litany of material that must be included on every syllabus. Unfortunately, that approach can make the policies seem less rather than more important. When the same text appears on every syllabus, and students see it four or five times in short order, they often start to ignore it. If you have ever skimmed a rental car contract or clicked “Agree” on terms of service for a piece of software without reading it closely, you are familiar with this dynamic.

Presenting institutional policies in this way can have the unfortunate effect of trivializing them. The principles enshrined in Title IX or the Americans With Disabilities Act are more than “fine print” for survivors of sexual assault or people with disabilities. We do our students a disservice if we think of them as “boilerplate.” The academic part of a syllabus is important, but the due date for Essay No. 1 or which edition of McTeague to use fade into irrelevance if a sexual assault survivor finds themselves newly traumatized because they disclosed their experience to a mandatory Title IX reporter without realizing what that might mean for them.

The compromise he came up with was to create two documents, a course outline and a separate supplement that I would be tempted to call "navigating the therapeutic bureaucracy."  Apparently, though, all faculty have been conscripted into the role of "mandatory Title IX reporter" even though they're not well briefed in on the dos and dont's.

POWER PLAY BASKETBALL.

The box score for a collegiate basketball game suggests that Ohio University dressed seven players for a weekend visit to Northern Illinois, and two of them fouled out.

The minutes played column credits Ohio with two hundred minutes played.  Reality was different.

After NIU stretched their lead to as large as 16 at 72-56 with 7:34 remaining, the Bobcats went on a 11-2 run to make it a seven-point game with 4:15 to play. Playing with only five available players, an injury to Hooks at the 3:31 mark forced Ohio to play with only four on the court for the remainder of the contest. The Huskies utilized the player advantage to secure the 80-70 win.

There's apparently no provision for a disqualified player re-entering the game, or it might be so onerous that it's better to play short-handed.  The game broadcaster recalled a high school game that ended five against three.  All the short-handed side can do is play the box without one or the triangle without two and hope the team on the power play doesn't run up the score.