THERE'S MONEY IN SCRATCHBUILDING.

Some kids are too small, and too wriggly, to sit in a grocery cart.

Father and daughter alumni Stan Valiulis and Lindsey Valiulis Fleischhauer received $100,000 for 25% equity on “Shark Tank” for their Totes Babies business. The two appeared in season 12, episode 17 for their Car Seat Carrier that attaches to shopping carts to make shopping easier for parents.

Valiulis Fleischhauer graduated in 2004 with a degree in theater and Valiulis graduated in 1984 with a music degree.

Sometimes, it helps to understand what power tools the property masters are using.

Valiulis Fleischhauer said the Totes Babies Car Seat Carrier idea came from when her son was a baby and the cart had no room to fit his carrier and the groceries. She went to her dad in 2017 who then sketched out the idea and went to Home Depot to create the prototype.

“It was a curtain, adjustable curtain rod and drop cloth,” Valiulis said. “I made it using a stapler and scissors, so I had a functioning prototype and you (Valiulis Fleischhauer) still have it. It works great.”

Valiulis Fleischhauer decided they needed to make it a real product because moms would come up to her at grocery stores asking her about it. The product was launched in August 2018.

The goal of Totes Babies is to help parents shop easier and lower their anxiety levels.

“Parents can also put the toddlers in the front part too that opens up,” Valiulis Fleischhauer said. “So like for me when I had my second son, I’d put my toddler in the front and then the Totes Babies behind it (and) still get all my groceries.”

There are other products under development.  Let's see if this enterprise does well enough that the entrepreneurs can become Shark Tank venture capitalists themselves some day.

WE WON'T MISS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY UNTIL IT'S GONE.

War and Pandemic Could Push 263 Million Into Extreme Poverty This Year.  We saw this coming, as well as a way out, two years ago.

Brick-making, furniture-crafting, and brush-clearing were occupations in the era of Pharaoh, but nobody had any idea what a "better life" might look like. The current crop of kids, for the time being deprived of their schooling and their consumer electronics, at least have some idea what a better life looks like. If their minds are not polluted with social justice posturing, they might be able to figure out how to get it back, once the contagion passes. The contagion, too, shall pass. I'm less optimistic about bad ideas in political economy.

Unfortunately, the idiots at Oxfam are at it again with all the wrong remedies.

That's according to Oxfam, which warned Tuesday in a new report that urgent international action, including canceling impoverished nations' "unpayable" debt obligations and taxing the windfall profits of corporations along with the wealth of multimillionaires, is needed to prevent rising food and fuel costs from further exacerbating global economic hardship and inequality.

Will someone tell me how much of that oligarchic wealth came from trading with Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, and the rest of the usual third world basket case countries that are facing visits from the four horsemen?

UNDERMINE THEM WITH MOCKERY.

It might be wise, dear Guardians of Approved Thought, that you not become the very purveyors of "disinformation" you wish to call attention to.

The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it turned out, didn’t extend to the blue-check media’s own role in proliferating disinformation.

Even before the event got underway, I was skeptical. The conference struck me as one more chance for America’s corporate class to collect fat honorarium checks in exchange for addressing obedient students keen to join that class. My suspicions were soon confirmed. Given the opportunity to ask questions, most of my fellow students lobbed softballs at the speakers, in worshipful tones more befitting a royal audience than a university.

On the coasts, that panel was a royal audience, including Barack Obama, David Axelrod, and Brian Stelter, with once-reputable Gulag historian Anne Applebaum representing The Atlantic.

As it happened, I got a chance to question Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer-winning historian and Atlantic staff writer, following her session with Obama consigliere David Axelrod. For nearly an hour, Applebaum had effused about how important it is to fight disinformation. So I asked her if she thinks the media acted inappropriately in immediately dismissing the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Files as Russian disinformation—a claim we now know to be completely false.

This wasn’t meant to be a gotcha. Yet Applebaum gave a stupefyingly arrogant (and borderline incoherent) answer: “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop,” she said, “is I think [it’s] totally irrelevant. I [mean], it’s not whether it’s disinformation, or I mean, I don’t think the—Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I didn’t—I don’t find it to be interesting. I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.”

Seriously? A troubled son of a successful candidate for the presidency isn't something the voters should know about before they put that nominee in office?  Sometimes, the artless words of a student are more useful than the carefully curated words of a courtier.

Applebaum’s haughtiness perfectly encapsulates why so many Americans are distrustful of the corporate outlets that claim to defend truth against “post-truth” disinformation. Figures like Applebaum don’t actually seem to care about disinformation. They just use the word as a tool to advance their own class and political interests.

Unfortunately, in the same way that affordable mass-printed Bibles permitted the faithful to bypass their robed gatekeepers, affordable person-to-person communication (including modest hobby weblogs) permit the politically interested citizen to bypass the credentialed gatekeepers, and the credentialed gatekeepers of today, much like the corrupt priesthood going into the Reformation, don't much like it.

A LENTEN SACRIFICE MUST BE OF SOMETHING GOOD.

That is, chocolate, or binge-watching, or Mozart.

For the 40 days of Lent, the church — which has about 650 members — is removing all music written by white composers from services in favor of those written by African American and non-white musicians from around the globe; it’s part of the church’s broader “anti-racist” mission, [Oak Park First United church pastor John] Edgerton said.

He disagrees with those who might say the sign promotes division.

“The work of anti-racism in this country, the work of taking white perspectives out of the center and allowing other perspectives to have space – that work must come from the majority culture, from the white culture,” said Edgerton, who is white and whose congregation is majority white.

That provokes the kind of question my fourteenth great-grandfather got himself kicked out of the Anglican Communion for asking.  "Isn't woke-virtue signaling precisely the sort of vanity one ought abstain from during Lent?"

That's better left to people with better theological chops than I.

Edgerton said he still loves Bach, Mozart and other European composers.

“You don’t fast from things that are despicable. ... You don’t fast from things that are ugly,” he said. “You fast from those things that do tug at your heart.”

Edgerton came to First United in fall 2019. Before that, he was a pastor at a church in Minnesota and at Boston’s 350-year-old Old South Church. Among other things in his bio from his Boston days, it reads: “Three of John’s ancestors were tried as witches. Two were hanged. One was acquitted.”

Edgerton said his inbox has been crammed with several hundred emails that have arrived in recent days, most of which he hasn’t read. Those he has looked at run the gamut from “vulgar” to “supportive,” he said. He won’t repeat the vulgar ones.

High-profile South Side Pastor Corey Brooks this week on Fox News described Edgerton’s Lent message as “the worst kind of moral preening” and “nothing but hot air.”

“The Bible is about one thing only: the word. It’s not about who is Black, white or red. … That’s why faith in Jesus Christ unites so many people, and that’s why it’s been such a blessing to so many people,” Brooks said in an email to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Seems like a lot of pride, hubris, and conceit on display.  Or that matter, logic-chopping.  If you don't fast from things that are despicable, what does that say about "whiteness" on days you're not fasting from it?

NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR EMERGENCY POWERS.

I suspect that most of the time Thom Hartmann would trot out the list of industries the national government has effectively nationalized as examples of socializing the losses, and bad policy.

In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.

In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.

In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.

Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation.

When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.

When George W. Bush was handed the White House by five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline security system was entirely in private hands.

They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.

President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock.

Those are the recent examples. The wartime examples from earlier in the twentieth century aren't any more encouraging.  It gets longer from here ...

PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY.

Illinois state government received all sorts of fiat money from the Democrat state bailout masquerading as a 2021 coronavirus relief appropriation.  It isn't really money, and it isn't potbellied dictator J. B. Pritzker's to give, but attempt to give it away he did.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker will unveil his fiscal year 2023 Illinois budget Feb. 2, including $1 billion in tax cuts for Illinoisans ahead of Nov. 8 elections to boost the state economy, a top aide said.

But not long after the votes are counted, Pritzker’s tax cuts go away.

The administration said the 1% cut to Illinois’ sales tax on food, delaying of automatic gas tax increases and property tax rebates worth up to $300 will be doled out to counter the rising cost of necessities because of inflation. The tax breaks expire in July 2023.

After a year of better-than-expected state revenues bolstered by billions in federal pandemic stimulus, Pritzker claims the tax cuts are resulting from his responsible government spending during COVID-19.

But as the governor waylays permanent tax cuts in favor of temporary policies designed to expire before surplus pandemic funds run dry, state residents are right to question how long Illinois’ improved fiscal standing will last after federal assistance is used up.

The other question is whether Pritzker’s temporary tax cuts would be followed by four more years of unbalanced budgets, growing state debt and nation-leading taxes for Illinoisans. Pritzker’s term has aggravated all those state fiscal woes.

Pritzker’s temporary cuts include blocking an annual automatic increase in the state gas tax, which he doubled in 2019 to 38 cents from 19 cents per gallon. It has been automatically boosted a fraction of a penny each year since then – currently it’s at 39.2 cents – a mechanism state lawmakers inserted to avoid voting on unpopular gas tax hikes.

Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly. State officials will take some of the money the national government printed and hand it out to Illinoisans to ... counter inflation.  It's not going to turn out well.

Besides the $1 billion in temporary tax cuts, re-election mode Pritzker is touting a budget expected to be balanced for the first time since 2001. Illinois has not fixed any of the money problems that made it the nation’s fiscal joke, but Pritzker’s rosy outlook is from billion in federal stimulus coupled with consumers generating taxes thanks to spending their pandemic relief funds.

Feel-good campaign rhetoric shouldn’t hide the fact that one year of calm cannot make up for decades of deficits or stop a rapid return to the government irresponsibility that gave Illinois the nation’s leading state and local tax burden.

The tax holiday will take away one source of the revenue Springfield politicians have been counting on to make the fiscal house look in order, at least for election season.  The Springfield Supreme Soviet have ratified a budget, complete with the tax gimmicks.

Illinois lawmakers early Saturday morning passed a $46.5 billion budget that would bring temporary tax relief and direct inflation payments to residents.

The House voted to approve the budget just before 6 a.m. Saturday, less than two days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other leaders of the Illinois House and Senate announced an agreement on the state spending plan that aims to fight nagging, near-record inflation by giving $1.8 billion back to taxpayers.

"We end this legislative session with enormous and historic victories for the people of Illinois: Gas, grocery, and property tax relief, more support for local government than ever before, a massive improvement in staffing for our nursing home residents, short and long term debt reduction, and a balanced budget for the fourth year in a row," Pritzker said Saturday.

According to lawmakers, the state’s 1% sales tax on groceries will be suspended for the entirety of the new fiscal year, which officials say will save taxpayers up to $400 million through July 1, 2023.

The state’s fuel tax, which was slated to increase in July due to inflation, will instead be frozen at $.39 a gallon through Jan. 1, 2023, with a taxpayer savings of $70 million.

Property tax rebates of up to $300 per household will also be included in the budget, along with an expansion of the earned income tax credit in the state, according to Pritzker.

Finally, families will receive direct checks from the state pending approval of the budget. Each individual will be eligible for a check of up to $50, with households also receiving $100 per child.

Where do we get these reporters who with a straight face say politicians can fight inflation by throwing money at it?  Moreover, why should I take seriously the so-called party of environmental protection when the first chance they get, they treat motor fuel taxes as a tool for fiscal stimulus?

The legislature, however, wants to make sure shoppers and motorists know who is responsible for the slightly less egregious draining of their cash.

Illinois lawmakers want to be sure you know about the “tax relief” you’re getting this election year. So, in the waning hours of session they inserted into their budget bill a requirement that private-sector retailers use signs and notations on receipts to tell consumers of how blessed they are.

Arguably, that's a legal notice requirement, similar to the labels on gas pumps that spell out what the taxes are and that the bureau of weights and measures has inspected the pump; and people who itemize all their sales taxes have a record that they didn't pay any sales tax on those potato chips.  Alternatively, though, it's the same notion as the "Open Road Tolling, Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor" that served as campaign ads until they became a laughingstock.  But the notice requirements raise the possibility of doing some mischief.

The thinking behind the sign requirement, lawmakers claim, is that sales tax cuts don’t necessarily get passed along to consumers. The signs supposedly would pressure gas stations away from keeping prices high and pocketing the sales tax reduction. That’s pretty hard to see since there will be no tax reduction, only a temporary suspension of an automatic increase.

Grocery stores also must note on receipts that the state suspended the 1% grocery tax for a year. The message on the receipts must say “From July 1, 2022 through July 1, 2023, the State of Illinois sales tax on groceries is 0%.” If printing messages on receipts isn’t feasible, then the retailer must post a sign. What good that does escapes me. You don’t get the receipt until you’ve shopped, and grocery is a brutally low-margin business, which would make it hard for stores to pocket the savings.

I wonder if the suspension of sales taxes on groceries means flatlanders who buy cheese in Wisconsin don't have to pay use tax on it.

At the same time, there are people prepared to argue that the notice requirements do not qualify as legal notices.

Josh Sharp of the Illinois Fuel and Retail Association said before Saturday's approval of the budget bills that the forced sticker notice is unconstitutional.

“This industry won’t be forced into offering free election year advertising for the Governor," Sharp said. "Ordering businesses to take part in speech that is compelled by the government under the threat of fines and criminal penalties is unwise and unconstitutional.”

Sharp said retailers would sue over the requirement.

The measures fail to impress the editorial board at Chicago's Tribune.

Pritzker’s stewardship on debt reduction has been impressively responsible. He deserves more credit than the Republicans are offering.

But when it comes to tax relief, permanent breaks for the hardworking citizens of Illinois are in short supply. Temporary is the byword. They want to maintain the right to hold on to your money and to the state’s “extraordinary” streams of revenue in the future.

They also understand that you can't overcome inflation by throwing printed money at it.

But all of the temporary reductions remain no substitute for genuine, long-lived tax relief: a permanent reduction in the state’s hefty sales tax, for example, thus increasing Illinois businesses’ ability to be competitive. Or some property tax relief that allows homeowners to share in the state’s good fortune.

In fact, these direct, one-time checks feel like a benevolent election-year handout, as if the state were doing Illinoisans a favor, not simply returning to them some of their own money in the face of record revenue, mostly coming, let’s remember, from strapped Illinoisans. And relief checks hardly have been a positive when it comes to the rising rate of inflation.

In addition, none of the temporary measures do anything to change the motivations people have to bail out of the tax hell that Illinois has become.  Watch, if the potbellied dictator is re-elected, for another bite at the income tax amendment.

KEEPING THEM ROLLING.

The evacuation trains continue to roll in Ukraine.

Ukrainian Railways employs more than 230,000 people, and almost all its employees have stayed in the country to work, according to Oleksandr Kamyshin, the company’s CEO. While stations in the areas under Russian occupation are now closed, the trains have continued running even to cities like Kharkiv, which has been under constant Russian fire.

Since the war started 64 employees have died and 71 have been injured, he said, counting incidents at work and those at the homes of employees.

“If the track is blown up, we repair it. If we can get somewhere, we go. It may be dangerous for our staff, but then that train can save thousands of other people from danger,” said Kamyshin, in an interview at Kyiv’s central station. He and a small “mobile command centre” of seven people has spent the last month crisscrossing the country on trains, to show support for staff working in all parts of the country.

The return workings are carrying supplies to people persevering in the cities and towns.  Although most of the evacuations have taken place, the freight capabilities will be useful if the Black Sea ports remain closed.

Kamyshin said the evacuation programme is now “basically done”, and the focus of the railway leadership is now on helping to build export and customs capacity on the country’s western borders to increase rail exports, after the Russian advance has put Ukraine’s southern ports, which handle much of its export trade, out of action.

“Once the ports are unblocked the cargo will flow through them again, but we will still have this crazy neighbour. And this crazy neighbour could make problems for years. So we need to develop these western corridors, and have them as Plan B, with the option to extend them significantly at any moment.”

The trains continue to run.

THE POTTED POLITICAL ECONOMY OF OPERA CRITICISM.

Commentary's Eric Nelson tackles a serious subject in "Wagner and the Anti-Semitism of ‘the Ring’."  He opens, though, in a most unserious way.

The experience of reading [Roger Scruton's] posthumously-published Wagner’s Parsifial: The Music of Redemption has now converted my instinctive feeling into a near-certainty. For in the opening pages of this new book, Scruton recognizes that “in his mature operas” Wagner meant to reject the bourgeois, liberal “world of deals and transactions”—a world characterized, as Wagner saw it, by the perverse “‘commodification’ of human relations,” rather than the longed-for “dissolving of the self in the experience of community.” This is indeed a central ideological preoccupation of the Ring. Scruton misses only the crucial fact that, for Wagner, this pathological world of bargains was essentially “Jewish.” Wagner’s anti-Semitism was therefore inextricably bound up with his critique of bourgeois liberalism. And since this distinctive style of Jew-hatred has recently returned to prominence on the political left, getting to grips with its character is, alas, no longer an imperative for deranged Wagnerians alone.

There is no better reason to understand the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment than to cast, forever, the lunatic notion of "commodification" into the outer darkness, or at least somewhere beyond Pluto.

GREAT MOMENTS IN MEDICAL POPULISM.

Last weekend, on the way home from the train show, I dipped into one of the latest things self-styled progressives are getting worked up about.  (Can't write"the latest thing" as it is the nature of self-styled progressives to be worked up about multiple things, all the time.)

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, which has agreed to pay a $339,000 state fine stemming from the insurer's almost year-long contract dispute with Springfield Clinic, says the clinic is making unreasonable demands.

Blue Cross divisional senior vice president Krishna G. Ramachandran said the for-profit, multi-specialty clinic, in its "first very specific counter-offer," is demanding a 75% increase in reimbursement rates "even though their rates are already the highest in the Springfield market and tower 60% more than those in the Chicago market."

It gets better. Springfield wanted to be reimbursed for offering high end services, while the Blues were trying to convince Springfield to accept Medicare reimbursement rates.  The article linked above does not mention that dimension, although it came up on the radio discussion.

Don't say I didn't warn you.  "Apparently, the government wishing that hospitals and clinics accept a greater discount, or requesting hospitals and clinics to lower their usual and customary charges, is by some magic transmuted into lower outlays for taxpayers. Whether fees rise for cash patients or for participants, if any remain, in private insurance plans, is apparently for another day."

Don't say I didn't call attention to what was likely to happen.  "Yes, and what happens when that Federal Insurance Provider takes sole control of the reimbursement rate to health care providers? Does anybody seriously expect that Wal-Mart-like methods to bend down the cost curves are going to work any better because it's Washington optimizing against the marginal factor cost schedule?

But when it's an insurance company, rather than politically reliable commissars in Washington, using those Wal-Mart methods, the griping comes through loud and clear.

The aggressive stance by Chicago-based Blue Cross, the state's largest insurance company, comes as thousands of central Illinois patients deal with the ramifications of Blue Cross removing the clinic's doctors and other medical providers from the insurer's preferred-provider network last summer and fall.

Illinois' insurance department is evaluating whether Blue Cross' remaining central Illinois provider network meets adequacy standards without Springfield Clinic's more than 600 medical providers.

Department officials said the fine was based on Blue Cross failing to notify the department that the removal of the clinic was a "material change" in the network that justified the insurer filing documents proving adequacy.

The jumble that is in-network, out-of-network, covered, not covered, subject to Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement rates, taken together, makes a pretty strong case for trade-tested betterments in medicine.

In City Journal, Tom Coburn and Paul Howard summarize their case thusly. "State and federal mandates hamstring competition in the name of protecting consumers and providing charity care, but they don’t do either job particularly well."  The details are complex in places, but the political economy is straightforward.  Why should a medical cartel be different from any other cartel?  The purpose of a cartel is to generate monopoly rents for insiders and then dissipate them in ways that get spun as in the public interest but in a full analysis generate deadweight losses.

In the case of the Springfield Clinic Blues, the rent-seeking takes convoluted forms.

"Central Illinois is not Chicago," he wrote. "We have strong relationships with more than a dozen commercial insurance companies that recognize the value and quality of care that Springfield Clinic provides to our patients. BCBS is the only insurer that jeopardizes access to that care by significantly undervaluing our market to increase its own profits. Thankfully, there are laws in place to protect employers and patients from the very type of 'ghost networks' that have recently been exposed, and we applaud the Department of Insurance for working to uphold the law."

Springfield Clinic has declined to provide data supporting its statement that Blue Cross is jeopardizing access to care from clinic providers.

Illinois State Medical Society President Dr. Regan Thomas said in a statement that the state fine "is a critical first step for ensuring patients get the access to medical care they deserve.

"The practice of 'ghost networks' must end. Insurance company provider directories often list doctors who are unavailable, not taking new patients, are located far away or who don't work at the listed medical facility, or are no longer a part of the network."

State Rep. Sue Scherer, D-Decatur, who said many of her constituents have lost access to their regular doctors because of the contract dispute, on March 23 introduced House Bill 5729, which Gov. JB Pritzker said would "make our system operate more transparently and give people and regulators more tools to hold health care insurers accountable."

I'm skeptical, though, that a new patch managed by Chicago politicians in Springfield, is going to do people caught in this tussle between a private sector monopsonist and a public sector monopsonist much good.  That's too adult a problem when there are opportunities to spew populist froth.  "The insurance company, which operates as a non-profit mutual reserve corporation and has stockpiled billions of dollars in profits while paying lavish bonuses to executives, argued that if it paid higher reimbursement rates to a few hundred doctors in Springfield, it would be forced to pass those costs on to customers and businesses in the area through higher premiums."

RECOGNITION.

The Milwaukee Brewers invited the brother of Waukesha Christmas Parade victim Jackson Sparks to throw out the first ceremonial pitch at Opening Day on Thursday.

The families whose lives were disrupted that day carry on.  I understand the Dancing Grannies are also performing again.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Biden owns our economic nightmare. Despite the fact that he’s no leader, he’s currently our leader.

This week's reinforcement of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes covers a wide range of topics.

IF LOGIC DOESN'T WORK, UNDERMINE THEM WITH MOCKERY.

There's an interesting faction fight shaping up in the sexual underground. "T was force-teamed with LBG. T has nothing to do with sexual orientation but by making it 'LGBT' many people have assumed it is LIKE sexual orientation and innate." In practice, a lot of kids that might have figured out they favored L or G are now being handed over to the conversion clinics, at the end of which they are even more messed up. "We cannot defend confusing/ sterilizing/ maiming kids who would have outgrown TG if simply supported emotionally."  Anybody else miss eating disorders?

That's the logic.  Perhaps, though, the right way to deal with crazy people loudly asserting your obligation to honor their right to be crazy is to mock them.

The Babylon Bee has got to be envious of how the left is mocked for the atrocities it perpetuates on children in public schools. Allie hit the left on critical race theory, grooming children, its insatiable appetite for extensive government programs, and its casual disregard for the innocence of children.

In the same way that basketball teams dependent on the press fear being pressed, advocates who rely on jargon fear having their jargon turned back on them. "Allie Beth Stuckey has taken her cues from Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi and posted a thread today on 'groomer fragility.'"

Like the critical studies jargon, her thread lacks nuance, and it picks up the scolding tone of much of the so-called antiracist pedagogy.  She does, however, land a few haymakers.  "We must also reimagine a society in which the nuclear family, fathers especially, are the biggest influence not just in their child’s life, but in society. We must recognize the role Toxic Matriarchy has played in upholding systemic grooming."  When the best you can get by way of pushback, though, is equivocation over whether "racist" or "groomer" have similar force as epithets, you're doing pretty well.

The right did not ask for this fight. Rather, we are finally engaging in a war of self-defense that has actually been raging for decades. And that’s what truly drives the left insane — they hate it when we fight back.

So no, we aren’t going to stop using the term groomer because it is not only highly effective in exposing their depravity, but it is accurate. Grooming does not just apply to the physical abuse of children, and teaching kindergarteners about sex and gender theory is grooming them into a particular ideology. And yes, though some are loath to hear it, it can lead to physical abuse as well.

In short, Republicans have learned to fight back, and that genie isn’t going back in the bottle, no matter how much it hurts the sensibilities of some, including the surrender caucus on the right.

Make them play by their own rules.

I CAN GO ALONG WITH THIS.

Brightline Says It Wants To Increase Train Speeds To 150 MPH.

Brightline’s new train service to Tampa could run at higher speeds than previously announced, a company executive said this month.

The new higher speed could make Brightline a true high-speed train service by some definitions. Brightline previously had planned a top speed of 125 miles per hour.

“We’re looking at opportunities of getting up to 150 miles per hour on the straightaways of I-4,” said Christine Kefauver, Brightline’s senior vice president of corporate development.

The company plans on building its own secured corridor between Orlando and Tampa, as it is now doing between Cocoa and Orlando.

Good. If people who actually run trains want to extend the Cold Spring Shops "Free Rein to 110 125" campaign to even faster speeds, I'll endorse their efforts.

BEFORE "CONVOY" THERE WAS "GREAT BIG ROLLIN' RAILROAD."

Union Pacific honor the passing of Bill Fries, who you better know as C. W. McCall (or perhaps as "Rubber Duck") in "Convoy."

I remember a cold winter day early in 1970 when I was asked to write an advertising campaign proposal to Union Pacific. I started thinking about what might get UP's attention. I noted that 1969 was the 100th anniversary of the Golden Spike. Wow ... what history! What a great big American railroad story! I thought a song just might be in order. So, I scribbled a few words on a scratch-pad that went like this ... "we're a great big railroad that everybody knows" ... I thought about that ... then, I added the word "rolling" and dropped the "g." Two verses and a chorus later, plus some hand-clapping, foot-stomping music to go with it, I walked into a UP conference room and sang it for the first time ...

He worked with Chip Davis, who also went on to musical fame with Mannheim Steamroller.

Here's the song.

Bill Fries, best known as CW McCall for his songs "Old Home Filler-Up & Keep On Truckin' Cafe" and "Convoy", passed away at age 93. His first song was an advertising jingle he wrote in 1970 for Union Pacific called "Great Big Rollin' Railroad." Read more: https://t.co/wRPJfKqxl9 pic.twitter.com/kinQhevt5e

— Union Pacific (@UnionPacific) April 6, 2022

No extra charge for those retro hair styles, or the first-generation diesel power.

May all the lights be green, C. W.  R. I. P.

DON'T POKE THOSE MAMA BEARS.

School board elections, which used to be boring, genteel events that might not have even been contested, have gotten more exciting.

Voters in Wisconsin and three other states head to the polls Tuesday in what are some of the nation’s earliest school board elections this year. In a harbinger of what voters across the country will see in coming months, many of the traditionally nonpartisan school board races have become increasingly polarized.

Outsiders who have traditionally stayed out of local races are now trying to influence school board contests across the country, using tactics more typical of elections with higher stakes.

To a naïve view, the local government school ought to be the canonical manifestation of Governance by Wise Experts: people knowledgeable in the ways kids develop would design suitable curricula, and the kids would learn, and voters could rest assured that their kids were developing their social and cultural capital.  "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 might not be what parents are seeing, particularly through the telescreens their kids have been chained to for much of the past two years.

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?

Might state operation of schools be even more dangerous to intellectual development than state operation of churches or mosques? "If we're talking about the common schools, perhaps it's time to contemplate a wall of separation between school and state."  Particularly if it appears that the teachers and their supporting staff have been breaking the social contract by ... not fostering that intellectual development.

DEGRADING THE VALUE PROPOSITION.

The Custodians of High Culture are ripe for the madhouse.

In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an Enlightenment paeon to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female correctional officer in her husband’s prison. This change from a male to a female disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera, a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.

In a New York City where the arty set will go for Julius Caesar wearing an orange comb-over and an ill-fitting business suit, that might be par for the course.  Messing with the staging of operas (the Ring des Nibelungen most notoriously) is standard, and the groundlings must be catered to, purists be damned.  "That prompts Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen to ask, 'What or how much are we willing to sacrifice to continue to promote some of mankind’s greatest creative achievements, namely classical music?'"

It's not enough, though, to change the sexuality of the love interest or the setting of the political crime.  People bought tickets (probably at New York prices) with the expectation of seeing and hearing Beethoven.  That's not what they saw or heard.

In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S. The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.” The white prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really “wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None of these lines is related to the original libretto.

There's a concert coming up at the university this weekend that draws a lot of the faculty. I wonder if there will be an opportunity to pose, say, to a drama or composition professor, a hypothetical in which a student substitutes woke maxims into the libretto of Fidelio, the question of whether such work would qualify as inspired parody or failed for its obvious plagiarism.

The article includes other recent maladaptations of late Classical or early Romantic works to suit contemporary sensibilities.  Go there, these are not for the faint of heart or the respecter of excellence.  It is not those who are familiar with the originals who suffer, though.

Such revisions imply that we should not try to stretch beyond the boundaries of our petty, circumscribed lives into a radically different aesthetic milieu. Many current revisions are animated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeing in past works of art only oppression and illegitimate privilege. Such deconstructive readings provide an excuse for ignorance and a pretext for prejudice. Even without that deconstructive agenda, however, rewriters and revisionists destroy the precious link between present and past that is the primary means of transmitting civilization and of keeping our minds open to beauty.

Put another way, when you have deconstructed all cultures in the name of multiculturalism, all are nyekulturny.

CONTEMPLATING THE VALUE PROPOSITION.

Women's basketball has probably reached the limits of its appeal to the woke.  Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter Rick Telander considers possible appeals to a broader audience.

The women’s game is a comparative startup, puttering along in a secondary fashion. But with the right tweaking, I feel certain it could grow into a monster to rival the men’s billion-dollar March Madness (trademark, of course) money pit.

I'm leery of any references to money pits, maybe ten years of breathless "Could this be?" leave me cold.

Although Mr Telander makes the obligatory nods to path-dependence on equity, he continues with the outlines of a value proposition.

A lot of people say the women’s game is slow, old-fashioned, not gymnastic and high-flying. All that may be true, but it’s only in comparison to the men’s game.

The first thing I would do to push the women’s game into the stratosphere is get away from comparisons to what men do. Women’s tennis thrives because of what women can do on the court, not what they can’t do.

Use that as impetus. Nobody avoids women’s tennis because the females can’t serve 140 mph. They love it for what it is — great competition.

Maybe getting rid of those baggy shorts has something to do with it.  Sorry, I was supposed to be endorsing a value proposition.  Perhaps following a few players emerge and thrive qualifies as such.

Use these women as posters to make your game famous and cool. It can be done.

And here’s another huge advantage to the women’s game: The stars return year after year. The men, if they’re any good, are one-and-done. Remember Zion Williamson at Duke? Barely.

Right now, the WNBA won’t take any U.S. players until they’re 22 and have completed their college eligibility.

Might be, although the perennial participants in the men's finalists seem to have an occasional fallow year (Kentucky this year, Duke a few years ago, there have to be others) and then there's a new crop of one-and-dones and you see some subset of the dozen or so usual suspects establishing their lottery pick qualifications in early April.

Better, though, to think about expanding the fan base than to keep doing the same thing. 

A LATTER-DAY CHAMPION OF STEAM.

Kalmbach Publishing report the death of current Trains editor Jim Wrinn.

Jim Wrinn, who aspired since his youth to be the editor of Trains magazine and served in the role for more than 17 years, died at home on March 30, 2022, after a valiant 14-month battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 61.

Wrinn’s longevity in the editor’s role was second only to that of the legendary David P. Morgan, who led the magazine for more than 33 years and died in 1990 at age 62. Morgan’s editorship and writings deeply influenced Wrinn, who began reading Trains in 1967 at age 6.

Those years saw the transition of railroading into wholesale freight transportation, with fewer idiosyncratic carriers, fewer small-town industries for local train watchers, and continuing travails involving public support of Amtrak, Canada's VIA Rail, and the metropolitan Commuter Rail authorities.  But among the developments that often made Trains read more like Railway Age, there were the steam locomotives.

Wrinn also showed a flair for the big moment, capitalizing on important news developments and effectively using a variety of media platforms. Case in point: the revival of Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 “Big Boy” No. 4014. Over the course of three years, Wrinn oversaw blanket coverage that included online reporting and numerous articles in Trains; two Big Boy special issues; live video updates from the field; and updates from the 4014’s coming-out party at Ogden, Utah, in May 2019.

And the on-point observation that railroads connect people.  (Is there any other business that can claim the same level of popular enthusiasm decoupled from daily use?)

In addition, he championed preservation railroads.

Wrinn’s passing is being keenly felt across railroading, especially among the many writers, photographers, and professional railroaders with whom he collaborated. Theirs was a special kinship, born equally of a love of railroading and storytelling.

This summer, find yourself a preservation railroad and go to it.  R. I. P.

TRANSGRESSION FOR TRANSGRESSIVITY'S SAKE WILL NOT END WELL.

Jonathan Rauch, who shares the same cultural space as Andrew Sullivan, provides that argument.

I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.

A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false.

Vanguards have a self-destructive quality about them, and the most, shall we say, colorful, of the alphabet people perform to type.

And so we pushed back. An opening shot was the publication of Bruce Bawer’s landmark book A Place at the Table in 1993, with its attack on what he called “group-oriented pride” and the famous aphorism, “The only time I ever feel ashamed of being gay is on Gay Pride Day.” That year, I launched what would be a twenty-year stream of output with a New Republic piece arguing that gay Americans should stop thinking of ourselves as oppressed. Andrew Sullivan took up the cause of marriage, embracing its fundamentally conservative nature, and he published his influential book Virtually Normal (1995), arguing that nothing about homosexuality is inconsistent with mainstream values.

That position, with minor variations, might be held by Mr Rauch or Andrew Sullivan or tennis player Martina Navratilova or crossers Deirdre McCloskey and Caitlyn Jenner. The last listed of these has been slagged on of late by the vanguard for daring to appear on Fox opinion shows.  The noisy vanguardists, by deconstructing the mediating institutions of civil society, are turning every day into pride parade day, and antagonizing some Militant Normals along the way.

In most respects, trans people can be reasonably accommodated with modest adjustments to everyday life. Hardly any jobs and public spaces are gendered today, and we can live with preferred pronouns and arrange safe places to pee.

A few domains that are sex-specific, such as women’s sports and prisons, require differential treatment based on biological sex. Issues involving medical transitions for children are just plain difficult and require more and better research. But those issues are narrow in scope, and the political system, the medical profession, and civil society are more than capable of working through them, if allowed to do so in a minimally politicized way.

That means the vanguardists have to back off.

Insisting that it’s always hateful to draw distinctions based on biological sex in sports, prisons, and medical training strikes most of the public as nutty, unfair, and dangerous. The backlash that is forming will harm trans people, gay and lesbian people (who are already caught in the undertow), and everyone who hopes for candor and compromise. Radicalism makes the only path forward—social negotiation tailored to diverse situations—unattainable.

The first step out of the radicalization trap is what’s already happening: decoupling trans civil rights from radical gender ideology by recognizing that they are not at all the same. You can support the former and reject the latter.

The undertow Mr Rauch references is an extended argument by Andrew Sullivan, which, at root, suggests that adding all those letters to a single aggregate of human interaction is a category error that benefits nobody.

A DORK DRIVING A SNAZZY CAR IS STILL A DORK.

Does the argument generalize to gym memberships?

For those who live far away from gyms or public health centers, social media brings the workout to the user. Information on healthy eating is also available through online platforms and can be influenced by supportive social groups.

However, the effectiveness of social media hinges on users and the content they watch. According to the study, social media is an effective support tool when encouragement is given along with information and proper material aids.

That’s where fitness influencers lose credibility.

Looking at the Instagram tag for “fitness,” there are millions of posts of extremely fit people, paired with captions like “keep your eye on the prize,” and telling their followers not to give up before they see the results they want.

Posting selfies of their ultra-fit bodies, then telling followers not to give up until they, too, are ultra-fit, creates a disconnect between what is being said and what users should do. Instead of being encouraging, it’s a comparison between the user and the influencer.

Fitness influencers are not health professionals. If you’re looking to get fit, it’s best to seek advice from a health professional, not an influencer trying to sell a workout program.

The article sails under the heading of "gym culture's toxicity."  The narcissists we have always had among us.  Whether they attempt to draw attention to themselves by their sports cars or their musculature or their professions of faith is irrelevant.  It's the absence of bourgeois norms, including the shunning of loud and obnoxious people, that enables the status displays that draw the tag of "toxic."

ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER TOURNAMENT, ANOTHER PRIVILEGE CHECK.

Last year, it was the participants in the women's basketball tournament grumping about, inter alia, the contents of the swag bag.  Apparently, there's swag equity, and the weight rooms are available for more hours, and the managers of the cartel now use "March Madness" to refer to both tournaments, even though there's not much in the way of madness from the quarterfinal games on.  But there's always something to get worked up about:  UCLA players say WNIT run highlights gender inequality in college basketball.

When UCLA junior guard Charisma Osborne scored 31 points during a win at Oregon State that vaulted the Bruins into the WNIT Final Four, it locked in another costly, grueling day of travel.

After 13 hours of travel to get to Brookings, S.D., funded by UCLA, she wasn’t going to let the moment pass without pointing out the inequity of the WNIT that gets far less financial support than the men's NIT.

"Just talking with the team, I think it's important to just bring awareness,” she said before the Bruins played South Dakota State. “So that people in the future can have better opportunities than what we have right now.”

Osborne tweeted after that game, “This needs way more attention! It took us 3 different flights resulting in 13 hours of travel to get to Oregon. There’s no reason the WNIT shouldn’t be receiving the same benefits as the men! Why does the @NCAA own the Men’s NIT but not the @WomensNIT ? Women deserve better!”

That's a Complex Gripe. Part of it is that the girls have to sell cookies door-to-door, no sorry, those are the Girl Scouts, the director of basketball operations has to wheedle funds out of the athletic department or the boosters to get the team to the games.

Unlike the men’s NIT, which is run by the NCAA, women’s teams have to hope their respective athletic departments will take on the cost to keep their seasons — and, for seniors and graduate students, their careers — going.

The women’s tournament is operated by Triple Crown Sports, a for-profit company that created the tournament in 1994. The NCAA fronts the cost for men’s NIT teams to charter across the country and pay the schools to participate; the women do not enjoy the same financial support.

The other part is that this tournament takes place at the participating teams' arenas.

It becomes challenging for schools to find flights, especially charters, since they are paying essentially on a game-by-game basis. UCLA coach Cori Close said after the Bruins' win at Oregon State that UCLA put in a bid to host South Dakota State, but the Jackrabbits ended up with the home game. Teams have to bid on each game, meaning they have to absorb the cost of hosting or quickly coordinating team travel.

That led to UCLA traveling to Corvallis, Ore.; Laramie, Wyo.; and Brookings, none of them with easy commercial flights from Los Angeles.

“It’s an opportunity to grow our mental toughness,” Close said. “.... But when you talk about a difference in experiences, wanting to have the best student-athlete experience and the most competitive equity we can, it doesn’t quite line up.”

All that woke wealth in Hollywood, and nobody could come up with the money, or the loan, of an executive jet to get the kids to Brookings?

UCLA had to take five different commercial flights to reach Sioux Falls and then make a one-hour drive to get to Brookings, S.D., for its semifinal game on Thursday. The Bruins got to Brookings at 1:30 a.m. the day before their game.

What was I saying a year ago about that value proposition?

Maybe, just maybe, the people managing women's basketball, whether at the team, conference, association, or professional level, ought come up with a better value proposition than "look how unfair this all is." That pitch has probably won over all the professional feminists and alphabet people that are there to be won over. It's unlikely to entice any new eyeballs onto the screen or into the stands.

Which, dear reader, is why that game was in Brookings.  South Dakota State, which have over the past few years been the class of the mid-major teams, won that game, then hosted and won the title game a few days later.  You might argue that there isn't much else going on in Brookings, particularly in the dead of winter, but you might also argue that there are a lot of potential butts in greater Los Angeles to get into seats.  The women's programs, however, are still underachieving at selling their entertainment. That starts with the absence of madness.

Starting with the women’s Final Four, the seedings present — three #1 and one #2 — showcased the paucity of competition in women’s collegiate basketball compared to the men’s side. There are far fewer top-flight programs, with the same schools repeatedly returning to the tournament’s final stages. Connecticut has been in the Final Four every year since 2008. South Carolina, three of the past five tournaments. Stanford, same. Louisville, two of the past five. While fun for the dominant few, when you can skip a tournament’s first four rounds and still be confident who will be left playing, it doesn’t make for must-see TV.

The entertainment value might be different, or not, but the butts simply aren't in the seats.

Can we look at attendance? The men’s final game drew 69,243. The women’s? 18,304. And before anyone screams “unfair comparison” because the men’s game was at the Superdome in New Orleans and the women’s was at the Target Center in Minneapolis, the Superdome was sold out. The Target Center was not.

You can’t have it both ways. You cannot simultaneously erase women from sports and proclaim them as equals. You also cannot force people to like and watch any sport. That has been tried in this country since the 1970s with soccer, and while it has gained a toehold over the past fifty years, no one puts MLS on the same level as the NFL, MLB, NBA, or NHL. People prefer watching men’s college basketball over women’s and men’s professional basketball over women’s. Period. After this year’s NCAA championship games, it’s easy to understand why.

Arguments based on preference are weak arguments. There might be a value proposition that expands the appeal of the women's game. But holding the finals of the national tournament in the same arena at the same time is likely to be a fool's errand. Those capacity crowds at the men's game include a lot of aftermarket sales of tickets by fans of the losing two teams.  They won't be hanging around for games that might not even involve their university, which, unless we're talking about Baylor or Connecticut, is more often than not the case.

NYEKULTURNY.

The reason we study and understand the best that has been written and thought is to be able to react to a headline such as Ukraine accuses Russia of massacre, city strewn with bodies with "That is a disgrace to the land of Pushkin, Mussorgsky, Mendeleyev and Lobachevsky."  And an educated Russian ought to grasp the deep criticism implicit in such a remark.

Unfortunately, reality is more like my cranky observation of a few years ago.  "Dismantling their cultural capital, and depriving the students they're supposedly preparing to Rule The World of the opportunity to play with ideas without getting hurt. That, too, is likely to end badly."  Few young people in the West have the cultural capital to be able to level that charge in the first place, and who knows whether there are sufficiently many Russians who understand the level to which the government supposedly acting on their behalf has fallen.

DOES NOBODY THINK THESE THINGS THROUGH?

Research suggests plastic bag bans may be backfiring in a way that makes complete sense once you think about it.  "The issue that comes up is that grocery bags are viewed as single-use items, but they often get a (brief) second lease on life as liners for small trash cans. Without the shopping bags available, people look for alternatives — which the researchers suggest means they buy small plastic garbage bags."

The standard size plastic bags grocers and the like use have less carrying capacity than the traditional peck paper bag.  The plastic bags are the right size for liners of in-room trash cans, and the paper peck bag fits the traditional kitchen size trash can, although putting one inside a plastic tall kitchen bag reduces leakage.  The paper bags are also good for holding used newspapers until recycling day.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN UNICORNS?

I view many efforts at energy conservation as enforced deprivation.  To Stan Cox, that's probably a good thing.

To achieve mutually assured protection against both global broiling and global war, humanity will have to purge oil, natural gas, and coal from our lives as quickly as possible, a future reality the Ukraine disaster seems to be making less probable by the day.

Meaning what? Fighting wars with lasers and nuclear weapons? Or fighting and harvesting like the days of the Thirty Years' War?  That's what the Davos set has in store for us.

Three days before [U.N. Secretary General António] Guterres’s remarks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a 10-point conservation plan to address the oil-supply issue, a welcome antidote to the ever more insistent “drill, baby, drill” policies of U.S. officials. In it, the IEA, an institution no one could mistake for a band of climate activists, recommended reduced speed limits; increased work-from-home arrangements; extra incentives for biking, walking, or taking public transportation; car-free Sundays in cities; ever more carpooling; more rail and less air travel (including deep cuts in business air travel); and other energy-saving policies.

Better yet, most of its proposed measures could be put in place with immediate effect. If that were done, the IEA’s experts estimate that “the advanced economies alone can cut oil demand by 2.7 million barrels a day within the next four months.” That would exceed Russia’s pre-embargo oil exports, helping keep global supply and demand in balance amid the Ukraine war. But even that wouldn’t be enough, given what’s already happening on this planet. For the affluent world to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases rapidly and deeply enough to save us from a climate disaster, government policies would have to go far beyond the measures on that IEA list.

Sadly, decades of procrastination have so narrowed our range of options for heading off climate catastrophe that humanity now faces the necessity of a far steeper mandatory phase-out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Indeed, the current disruption of world oil and gas markets makes this the optimal time to start driving fossil-fuel use down to zero on an expedited schedule, while ensuring universal, equitable access to affordable (and, as time passes, increasingly renewable) energy.

Here they go again with their end of the world talk.  The way to avoid the end of the world the doomsday environmentalists fear is to restore the sustainable life of the primitives.  No, really.

Significant increases in renewable-energy capacity are needed to see us through a decline in fossil-fuel use, but such renewables can’t be relied upon to bring about that decline in time. There’s no reason to believe that such increases in green electric capacity will work fast enough through market forces to drive fossil fuels out of electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction. History and scientific research showthat, when such transitions are left to the market, new energy sources mostly go toward increasing the total supply of energy, not displacing older sources of it.

The climate crisis has already reached a point where fossil fuels must be driven out of the energy supply far more quickly than full-scale new energy systems can be developed. The rate of phase-out now required is astonishing. The United Nations Environment Program has estimated that global greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 8% annually, starting immediately, if the heating of the planet is to be held to reasonably tolerable (though still too harsh) levels. In fact, to achieve global equity, affluent nations like the United States would need to phase out their fossil fuels even faster, at perhaps a 10% yearly rate.

As far as I can see, there will be no way to reach that precipitous rate of reduction without pushing fossil fuels out of the economy speedily and directly by law. Only then could renewable energy development, electrification, efficiency, and, crucially, deep reductions in the wasteful production of military armaments play their crucial roles in helping us compensate for the shrinking of fossil-fuel supplies.

"Increasing the total supply of energy" translates into "higher living standards for more people."  The "global equity" Mr Cox suggests is a widespread reversion to nineteenth century living standards worldwide.  "Or for people, worldwide, to go cold turkey on fossil fuels, and return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when knighthood was in flower and life, even for the titled nobility, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?"  You go first, Stanley.  Get on your unicorn and take your dirigiste impulses with you.

Like today’s disruption of global oil markets, a future phase-out of fossil fuels would indeed push energy costs up. In both cases, the best remedy would be to keep energy affordable through price controls and rationing to ensure sufficient, equitable energy access for all. Price controls and rationing were used this way with much success during World War II. Indeed, if such rationing had been employed during the energy crisis of the 1970s, it could have prevented the endless gas-station queues and the resulting misery for which that decade is now mostly remembered. Back then, gas rationing drew bipartisan support.

Plans drawn up on blackboards by technocrats always look better than messy implementation of them does in practice. How quickly we forget "fifteen days to slow the spread."  As an exercise: what is the effect of keeping the price lower while stretching out the available supply through strict rationing on the development of replacement technologies?

THE LAYOUT TOURS RESUME.

The 2020 March Meet was one of the last public events of any scale before the politicians panicked.  (Most of the panic dealt with big Saturday parties in anticipation of St. Patrick's Day that would come mid-week.  Those parties were not mass casualty events, but I digress.)

The Gloucester Branch was available for public viewing as part of that swap meet.

The swap meet might have taken place the first week in April, but the weather was March-like all the same.  The advice people in my demographic were getting when the panic started was to avoid going out in public.  Fine, there's no end of projects to work on, and complying with those ukases was not burdensome.  All the same, focused protection for older people and greater freedom of movement for younger people should have been the way to cope with Wuhan coronavirus.

The railroad was available for public viewing again over the weekend.  No scavenger hunt this year, only some information about the projects in progress.

There's a technical post on the installation of onboard power in these diesels.  The other cab unit is still in the paint shop.  The B unit carries batteries for two cab units, and the control switches and recharging ports are on the end of the B unit.

Visitors saw a few areas with landscaping, and structures mocked up.

A few of the trains that ran between conversations (the point of the layout tours is as much to share ideas and engage in bull sessions as it is to have trains running) feature in the video.

The scenery in the deep cut we saw a year ago makes a cameo appearance in the video.  The Andreyev 4-14-4 did not run.

It sounds like there will be another swap meet next spring.  If all goes well, there will be another layout tour with more work to show off.

FAIR WINDS.

With the end of the college basketball season come the coaching changes.

Sue Semrau, the longest-tenured head coach in the ACC and Florida State’s all-time winningest coach, announced Monday that she is retiring as head women’s basketball coach at Florida State University. The Associated Press, WBCA and ESPNW National Coach of the Year in 2015, Semrau guided the Seminoles to 16 NCAA Tournaments, Elite Eight appearances in 2010, 2015 and 2017, and was voted ACC Coach of the Year four times over her 24 seasons.

It's hard to perform consistently well for that long in a sport with a serious Pareto distribution of talent.  "Twenty seasons on one job, where even in the non-revenue sports headquarters' impatience often manifests itself.  Northern Illinois are on their fifth head coach since Sue Semrau and Jane Albright headed to Madison to develop Badgerball." That was several years ago and Northern Illinois continue to muddle in middling mid-major mediocrity, as the conference generally does, a few runs to the round of sixteen notwithstanding.  Florida State were not in a good place at the end of the 1997 season. 

Well done, Coach Sue.

UKRAINE, BEFORE THE VANDALS WRECKED THE PLACE.

I wonder where the hand-on-heart gesture that accompanies Shche nye vmerla Ukraina originated.

International comments running generally in support of Ukraine. Find yourself a reputable charity and pitch in.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Did I nail it, or did I nail it?  "'For God’s sake' — and the sake of human civilization — 'this man cannot remain in power.'"  It's simple, moutzas.  "Can America stand another three years of the Bidens?"  Joe Biden is no Vladimir Putin.  "The president is too diplomatically clumsy, too parochial in his political interests, too nickel-and-dime in his priorities, and too beholden to the left-wing elements in his party to do what needs doing, especially when it comes to energy policy."  "Willing to make" presumes agency on part of the ficus, doesn't it?  "Biden is willing to make an obvious phony of himself, embracing a policy he knows is punitive, divisive, unworkable, and virtually certain not to pass—and he's willing to do so simply to get attention."  By his, and his party's, fruits, shall ye know them.  "The only good thing about the Biden presidency so far, and I mean the only good thing, is that it has highlighted the utter corruption and destructiveness of the Democratic Party itself. More and more people are noticing this, and perhaps that will matter."

Yes, there were a few other things going on this week, although I'm not done piling on.  This will be a longish post.  A few entries might expand on familiar Cold Spring Shops themes.

THE TECH OLIGARCHY ALSO COMES FOR ITS LEFT.

Chris Hedges is not happy that he might have been cancelled.  "The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube."  Apparently it's his affiliation with RT, which is to say, tovarish, "Russia Today."

His procedural point is spot on.

I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a vocal critic of US imperialism and militarism and, of the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.

Are we a more informed and better society because of this wholesale censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative. And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power and obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information, as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political and social divides.

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.

Although I am not Chris Hedges, nor do I share his worldview (he's a regular foil here at Cold Spring Shops), when Our Credentialed Overlords come for Chris Hedges, they could come for me, or for Pajamas Media.  Are they paying attention? There's a great deal of schadenfreude at a Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green post calling attention to the You Tube censorship.  That's misplaced, even if Pajamas Media run their own subscription service and presumably own their servers.

The Cold Spring Shops You Tube channel, which limits itself to ferroequinology and other fun stuff, shuns the kind of controversy that might run afoul of the Guardians of Proper Thought.  All the same, dear reader, all the videos are backed up and kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls's porch, just in case something goes wrong.

ANOTHER PARETO DISTRIBUTION EMERGES.

Earlier this week, we saw four tournament perennials qualify for the finals in the men's basketball tournament.  "It might not be possible to fill in a perfect bracket, and yet, a fan has a better chance of having a shot at the big prize if the entry has traditional strong programs, even if not high seeds, in the Final Four."

Them that has get, only more so, in the women's tournament.  "With all the upsets that occurred during the women’s NCAA Tournament this year — a record number of double-digit seeds won — three No. 1 seeds and No. 2 seed UConn remain."

The three one seeds are several-times-champion Stanford and South Carolina, as well as tournament regular Louisville.  Connecticut ousted the other one seed, North Carolina State, last seen in the finals during the Kay Yow era.

Would it be churlish of me to raise the possibility that all the talk of "equity" that's pushed on (self-selected?) fans of the women's game ends in the recruitment of highly talented players?