UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

I called them on it, over thirty years ago.  Four years ago, when I posted that essay in full, this is the way things stood.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

Perhaps the academy can still be restored to a state of good repair, but it's going to take a lot of mugging by reality.

The value of the college degree, in my analysis, has reached its peak and is on the wane. There are a host of factors to blame, stretching from cost and affordability to curriculum relevance to rapidly evolving skill needs to advances in automation and technology. But playing the blame game only gets us so far.

Imagine if a company lost nearly 10 percent of its profits in two years. The situation would be catastrophic. Drastic changes would be expected. We have lost nearly 10 percent of our students, but where is our sense of urgency? What will it take for us to recognize that the status quo is not working?

That's current Temple president Jason Wingard.  Here's the mugging.

Who needs a four-year marketing degree graduate to run social media when you can instead hire someone fresh out of high school and sign them up for HootSuite’s Academy’s social media certification course? Why pay for a six-figure education when HootSuite can get you some of the same skills in just six hours and for less than $200?

We all know that a $200 certificate program does not remotely equate to a four-year education from a best-in-class institution like Temple University, but perception is everything. And the reality is that the perceived value proposition that was once a constant for institutions of higher education becomes cloudier day by day, with just six in 10 Americans recently surveyed saying college is worth the time and money.

I'm not familiar with Hoot Suite, and it's unlikely they have online modules for plumbing, welding, or air conditioner repair, but then, neither does Temple. On the other hand, it is likely that Temple (does that "best in class" refer to regional comprehensives, or all Carnegie I universities?) serves up a dose of radical gender theory and identity politics indoctrination that isn't in that six hour module.

In that ancient essay, I noted,

Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.

Yes, I've always been provocative. Here's Mr Wingard, being suitably provoked.

We also must get back to basics. We are at our best when we promote discourse and the scholarly exchange of ideas. Companies deeply need high-level critical thinking skills that will never coalesce from a $200 online certificate program. This gets back to the importance of adapting curriculum on a yearly basis and, when doing so, specifically looking at our core curriculum with a fine-tooth comb.

I suspect there's a lot in what we used to understand as the core curriculum that would develop those critical thinking skills, which are something other than the instinctive trashing of practices of long standing that sails under the "critical thinking" banner these days.

PIONEERING DON'T PAY.

Milwaukee's Third Ward will be a feature destination during the Republican National Convention, that is, assuming the public health boffins don't come up with another round of Have. No. Fun. ukases first.

That area was once a ward for electoral purposes in Milwaukee: the wards are now "aldermanic districts" and the "precincts" have become "wards," but whatever.  At one time, that was the commercial district for the distribution of produce, and nearby were the insurance and banking offices.  These days, that warehouse space has proven useful for galleries and eateries and it's definitely not low-rent any more, not with warehouses abutting the railroad tracks (yes, those featuring the Hiawatha service so dear to Cold Spring Shops) being converted to loft dwellings, and with the former Fire Department boathouse (no, there is no sliding pole from sleeping quarters to dockside) being converted for housing, along with the shoe polish factory that as late as 2013 was still determinedly in the shoe polish business.

And now one of the first establishments to demonstrate the play value in the Third Ward is leaving.

Milwaukee Ale House says they will not be renewing their lease on Water Street after the building's owners have decided to go in a different direction. The last day at the location will be Sunday, Sept. 11.

"Very few places have been around for this long," Milwaukee Ale House said. "After such a long tenure here on the water, we are losing our beautiful home, and the city is losing a staple in the restaurant and brewing scene."

The Ale House has been a regular recombobulation area on those Cold Spring Shops jaunts into Milwaukee and its outdoor tables feature a view across the river of The Milwaukee Road's crossing of the Menomonee River at its confluence with the Milwaukee River.  Gathering place of the waters, indeed.  The geography at the location makes it better for train watching than for train photography.  It seems likely that there will still be waterside tables, if not run by the Ale House, run by other eateries, along that stretch of the river.

Still, it's another chapter of Everything I Like Goes Away.

I'M FROM THE GOVERNMENT, AND I'M HERE TO HELP YOU.

Davis Junction, Illinois, used to be where Rockfordians would transfer to cross-country passenger trains operated by The Milwaukee Road, and where there used to be a beanery surrounded by railway tracks on all four sides.  That business burned, and could not be rebuilt in place, because contemporary fire codes require unobstructed street access to at least one side of commercial buildings.  I'm not saying that the loss of a tourist draw contributed to the decline of commerce in Davis Junction, but commerce has declined.

Village Trustee William Luchsinger says he spotted Davis Junction’s potential for economic development more than a decade ago, when trustees bought a huge chunk of land near IL Route 72. What they didn’t know, however, was how they’d get the funding to actually develop it.

“Ogle County was one of the hardest communities hit due to COVID, across the state,” said Luchsinger.

This prompted the village to apply for a grant that eases hardships brought on by the pandemic.

“Being such a small community, we’ve been trying, and trying, and trying to get development and growth,” said Davis Junction Village President Rick Wurm.

Without the overbearing corona tyranny in the first place, perhaps there wouldn't be as many reasons for the state to come up with money (printed by the Federal Reserve, but I digress) to undo the damage the preceding state actions caused.  But, as I noted, commerce has been in decline in Davis Junction for some time.

Luchsinger says the grant from the state’s Rebuild Illinois (RBI) Downtowns program, allows the village to break ground on an 8,000 square foot commercial building, where small business owners can finally launch their careers.

“We received a lot of inquiry from small business owners,” said Luchsinger. “However, they don’t have the funds or the means to put in the infrastructure of water, sewer and roads, or a building, and that’s exactly what this grant is going to do.”

Luchsinger says the development location is great for business, because it’s right near two major highways, where the village sees a high volume of traffic. He hopes it can also inspire other communities, about what opportunities are in store.

“It’s a great success story for the village of Davis Junction,” said Luchsinger.

We'll see. Where there are subsidies, there are often recipients who could not pass market tests in the first place. (That's a regressive transfer argument of long standing where Small Business Administration loans, or farm price supports are concerned.)  Now comes the printed money, making possible the installation of those mains and roads.  But who will be responsible for the upkeep?  For that matter, why would anyone want to establish a business in a known tax hell?

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE BOAT.

That's long been a sailing maxim I apply to failed political candidates, who cannot see in themselves the reasons voters might have rejected them.  The latest losing skipper incapable of self-reflection is soon-to-be-former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, who after a few sentences of reminiscence, gets off this.

A few years ago, I won this primary with 73 percent of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take.

No House seat, no office in this land is more important than the principles that we are all sworn to protect, and I well understood the potential political consequences of abiding by my duty.

Is she accusing the winning candidate of having run on a lie, or accusing Wyoming voters of false consciousness?  Study her speech at length: nowhere does she note that the ongoing shutdown of fossil fuel production, the neglect of the borders, the soft on crime policies of the Jarrett regency might not have been in Wyoming voters' best interest, and that the candidate who won the primary might have done a better job responding to those problems.  Red State's Bonchie elaborates.

That wasn’t lost on the voters of Wyoming voters over the last several months. They saw a woman who didn’t care about them or their concerns. They saw a woman who couldn’t be bothered to do anything but bolster Democrat prospects during a key mid-term election in order to feed into a petty grievance.

Rather, she's implicitly giving that regency a free pass.  "No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility, where their refusal to follow the rule of law will corrupt our future."

A CITY MOUSE REDISCOVERS 4-H.

The 4-H projects have long been a summer feature at Cold Spring Shops.  To the political internet, the county fairs are often a venue for meditations on the quiet discontent of the country folk with the machinations of the coastal cosmopolitans.  Every so often, though, a populist scribe stumbles on the simpler realities. "Feel-Good Friday: 4-H Auctioneer Mentors Children on the Value of Livestock and the Value of Life." Red State contributor J. O. O'Connell expresses some surprise the program is still around.

Not being a parent, I have not heard about 4-H since I was in high school. I frankly was surprised to see it’s still around, and equally surprised that its main goal is to build leadership skills in our youth.

The benefit of these programs cannot be understated. Sadly, over the past decade, we have seen a deficit where such programs do not exist.

Find yourself a county fair to go to, dear reader, and go to it.

That's the advice to exhibitors in the swine barn at the Boone County Fair outside Belvidere, Illinois.  It's on the current exhibitors to set a good example to their younger siblings or cousins or the younger city mice who look at the show.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 19,611.

From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "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."

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control acknowledged "the pandemic is over for most people."

If anyone was still waiting for official permission from the nation's top health officials to resume life as normal, it is here. By signaling that the universal masking-and-social-distancing phase of the pandemic is now over, the CDC has conceded that the U.S.' COVID-19 prevention strategy should now revolve around protecting those who are at heightened risk.

And perhaps most importantly: Schools in areas of the country where community spread is low or medium do not need to require general mask wearing.

Put another way:  the United States is now where Sweden was at the beginning of the pandemic, or "we are all Florida 2020 now."  Potbellied dictator J. B. Pritzker,however, has not yet ended the emergency decrees.  These posts will continue until the emergency decrees end, or the governor leaves office.

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 2,551,996 infections, up by 23,830 from last month, and 19,497 deaths, a change of 327 from that report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,620,877 infections, an increase of 124,863 over last month and 39,108 deaths, adding 371 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.  Local media say little about hospital utilization.

As of this afternoon, the state counts around 29 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they've updated their tally to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations.  The state no longer counts the scary variants.  The end of July mix of infections is almost all BA.x strains of Omicron.

Let me reiterate: if the potbellied dictator and the rest of the Combine are returned to office in November, Illinoisans can expect no sympathy from me when the retail taxes go back on, and go up, and the power goes off.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 19,567.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 19,295.

At Syttende Mai, the governor trailed by 19,149.

At Patriots Day, the governor trailed by 19,243.

At St. Patrick's Day, the governor trailed by 19,580.

At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 19,533.

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.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.

STOP BEING STUPID ABOUT BEING SMART.

David Brooks appears to be confusing a symptom, in the form of one Donald Trump, with the sickness, which is a failure of the allegedly Smart People.  Consider the way he starts his argument.

Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.

The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.

It simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime.

That "core of truth" is approaching, to mix metaphors, critical mass.  The condescension comes bundled with unliveable cities, experiments against reality in the classroom and in social interaction, and in clumsy attempts at nuance that fail to persuade anyone who has shopped for peanut butter or baby formula, or filled the gas tank.  As Mike Konrad puts it, "You can only push people so far and then comes Thermidor."

A REFRESHER ON THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED.

Dear reader, you must understand this.

The "wouldn't it be nice" ratchet has been screwing over people much longer than that: the interstate highways, and urban renewal, and the Great Society, and the story is always the same: self-congratulation over good intentions never compensates for bad policy.  Go, read and understand Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.  I'll wait.

With that in mind, let us be amused by the latest from Common Dreams contributor Julia Conley.

Analysts say rents are expected to continue rising this year due to high demand resulting from homebuyers getting priced out of the market, inflation-driven higher maintenance costs for landlords, and a need or desire among some landlords to raise rents following the federal eviction moratorium that was imposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the Data for Progress poll, 65% of respondents said they believe the federal government should do more to help tenants, including 82% of Democrats and 61% of independents.

I have to wonder where I missed that part of price theory wherein rents would increase in markets that people were "getting priced out" of; or whether that's an inartful way of saying that some people have the means to bid rents up.

It's rather touching, though, to see anyone relying on the agency that caused the problem itself (printing money, banning evictions) being looked to as the agency to fix the problem.  Oh, I suppose government could fix the problem by going away, but that's too logical for Common Dreams types.

"There are clear steps that President Biden can take to provide relief," said Data for Progress. "Biden must take it upon himself to use his executive authority in order to assist those who need it the most, or we will not only have a cost-of-housing crisis in this country, but a major homelessness crisis as well."

We already have that major homelessness crisis, mostly in cities run by self-styled progressives.  If they're reading Common Dreams, they might not be terribly interested in expanding their appeal: "Politicians in places losing residents might gain from changing their approach, in order that fewer people leave. In the places gaining residents, politicians might also benefit by changing their approach, in order to expand their coalitions."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Liberal sadism is For Your Own Good, Deplorable.  "They love to boss the rest of us around and make us miserable."

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

The weekly roundup of pithy reinforcement of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

Robert Weissberg argues it was all with "the best of intentions."

Yes, some criticized the Diversity and Inclusion obsession and condemned identity politics. But, out of sight and on the sly, we contributed to the university’s intellectual decline. We made this disaster worse than what even the “woke” mob accomplished.

The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” captures this culpability. In a nutshell—and here I will speak only for myself and those I knew personally from the late 1960s onward—I am referring to lowering academic standards for black students and faculty in order to promote racial progress, a Weltanschauung in which the path to racial equality lay through education and, ultimately, the act of recruiting as many black students as possible and ensuring that they graduated.

Call attention to the affirmative action asterisk at your peril.  It's what went on in the faculty meetings, though, that did the real damage.

Much of what changed in my department of political science was obvious: more bureaucratic paperwork, additional departmental offerings on race and ethnicity, a neglecting of traditional political science subjects, and untold meetings that accomplished nothing. Less obvious was the extra time spent by faculty personally tutoring struggling minority students and recruiting affirmative-action candidates at professional meetings. It’s hard to estimate all the hours taken away from our teaching and research responsibilities as a result.

Almost nobody challenged the underlying logic of this make-the-numbers pathway. Everyone just knew that this was the route to equality and justice.

Nor was there any need for bureaucratic heavy-handedness or incentives. Everything was voluntary, and since I taught American politics, a favorite among black students and an obvious place to attract more minority faculty, I was at the forefront of the campaign. That our efforts might be injurious to racial progress or create cures worse than the disease was unthinkable. Even today, it’s difficult to accept that our good intentions helped undermine the university’s commitment to intellectual excellence.

That's incomplete. The administrative usurpations were with the sanction of the faculty, as faculty who were so sure of that shining path to equality and justice, were willing to have deanlets and deanlings handle all that paperwork.  "Unfortunately, the faculty has surrendered too much authority to administrators, including to trustees, often being complicit in the usurpation because it appears to be in the service of some Greater Goal, and that Greater Goal looks like a finger in the eyes of normal Americans."

The loss of the good of the intellect was a long time in coming, and now the bill is coming due.

In a few decades, what began as improvised, temporary measures to move the needle on racial progress hardened into the official academic culture. Trigger warnings and micro-aggressions existed long before they were officially codified. From freshmen to senior faculty, blacks on campus enjoyed intellectual diplomatic immunity.

Today, with scarcely any rejoinder, anything can be effortlessly explained by “white privilege.” Even to suggest that such arguments are unscientific invites accusations of racism. It is as if our past good intentions created people who now lack defenses against vigorous intellectual counter-arguments; if challenged, they respond with vitriol, threats of cancellation, or worse.

It's more accurate to note that treating idiocy as a form of intellect created a faith tradition, where, once, there was a semblance of engagement with ideas.

Academic life now resembles a monastery of One Truth and Only One Truth, and this Truth is sacred, an enterprise that innocuously began when the well-meaning efforts of well-intentioned professors like me decided to promote racial justice by lowering standards and avoiding anything that “might cause trouble.” Could matters have been different? Perhaps, but who had the courage to oppose affirmative action—the unchallenged dictum of the era—let alone to fail those special-admission inner-city kids trying to move up the economic ladder?

The enterprise might be, as Professor Weissberg suggests, beyond redemption.  On the other hand, a recent John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane roundup of readings "in the self-destruction of American academia" might find the first stirrings of recovery: "[T]ake your country back, found institutions again."  There's a lot of irredeemable rot to be catalogued, all the same.  "When you are in the right, and the opposition is wrong, evil, racist, and so forth, and the world faces crisis after imagined crisis, we have no time for dissenting views and procedural niceties." Until Popular Opinion shifts, but you knew that.

A PERMANENT HOME FOR THE SPEED TROPHY.

Years ago, a magazine called Electric Traction suggested the interurban railways could offer a better value proposition by running the cars faster, and held an annual fastest schedule contest, complete with a travelling trophy.  The first company to win the trophy was the Galveston-Houston Electric, in 1925 and 1926: after that Chicago area interurbans, the South Shore Line and North Shore Line, took turns posting the fastest schedules, until the North Shore Line won permanent possession of the trophy in 1933 after winning the contest three straight years.

That permanent possession rule was laid out by the magazine's editors, although continuing the contest into the Depression was going to be moot.  A number of the interurbans that submitted schedules in the 1920s had quit business by then, and Electric Traction (not to be confused with the ferroequinologist Electric Traction Quarterly) also left business.

The trophy, apparently, remained in North Shore's offices until abandonment.

The trophy itself passed into possession of the last president of the line, Harold G. Mason. His son David Mason has now donated it to [Illinois Railway Museum].

We are very grateful to Mr. Mason for this very generous donation. IRM was obviously the most appropriate choice for this unique artifact, firstly because we are the premier North Shore museum with the only comprehensive collection of preserved North Shore equipment.

Randall Hicks notes, "First of all, it's amazing that this trophy is still in existence, and in perfect condition, and secondly, that it has finally found a permanent home where it will be preserved and eventually displayed."

Good.  There are numerous North Shore and South Shore cars and motors at the museum, as well as a few cars from also-ran interurban companies such as Chicago Aurora and Elgin, The Milwaukee Electric, Indiana Railroad, Michigan Railways, and Illinois Terminal on the museum grounds, and in service.

I'm not sure if any stock from Galveston-Houston Electric made it into preservation.

THERE IS NO CALCULATOR LARGE ENOUGH.

A recent EconLib article argues, "No, a Planned Economy Can’t Actually Work."  That could be a Friday short take, as well as a repetition of the obvious for Cold Spring Shops.

Seriously, business firms are collections of transactions that can be organized more cheaply by command-and-control than by open-market transactions (imagine the drawer of wire selling the drawn wire to another contractor who straightens it and then seeks yet another contractor who cuts it.) But those open market transactions provide sufficient information for the entrepreneur to be able to guess how much brass to purchase for drawing into wire in order to convert into cards of finished pins to sell to various users thereof.

That canard about General Motors being bigger than North Korea is a favorite hobbyhorse of socialists and anti-globalization freakazoids. What distinguishes General Motors from North Korea is that General Motors has price signals to respond to that are absent to the North Korean version of Gosplan. The claim that because a corporation is a large planned economy, a planned economy ought to be practical, is a howling non sequitur. The largest corporation subsumes transactions that are a tiny subset of the transactions of a small open economy.

That's my long-winded way of making the argument a Jacobin writer (!) made against the folly of treating a large corporation as a planned economy. "Aside from the fact that the scale of organizing a total society in a nonmarket way is of a different order of magnitude than addressing a single, even vast, corporation, internal corporate calculations under capitalism have an advantage that centralized socialist planning would not have: they have external market prices and market-driven standards by which to measure themselves."  Never mind, you can wish for a supercomputer big enough to hold all that information and calculate all those prices.

Unfortunately, because the set of economic contingencies might best be understood as the power set of a countable set, no such computer is feasible.

CAN WE THINK AND CHEW GUM AT THE SAME TIME?

Adam Ellwanger suggests that in a multi-tasking world, monomania is still a thing, trending on social media.

There is no better evidence of the managed nature of what passes as “democratic deliberation” than the recent development of “Current Thingism.” Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you know the phenomenon well. There are many crises unfolding in contemporary America, and the “Current Thing” is whichever one our elites insist should be the focus of our attention at the present moment.

For a while, the Current Thing was #MeToo. From 2016 until 2018, the Current Thing was Russian collusion. After that scheme unraveled, we moved through a series of Current Things, each of which was said to compound the grave threat Trump supposedly posed to Our Democracy: in March 2020, it was Covid-19; for a few months that summer, it was systemic racism; then, it was the Delta variant; finally, for a stretch of early 2021, it was the January 6th “insurrection.” And when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine became the Current Thing. You knew it was the new Current Thing because all the smart people suddenly changed how they spelled and pronounced “Kiev.”

So, you know what the Current Thing is. What, then, is “Current Thingism”? Current Thingism is the default mindset of a certain segment of the American population: typically, the professional, liberal, educated, urban caste of society. Current Thingism is an enduring assumption that whatever the Current Thing happens to be, it should, in fact, be the Current Thing—the issue among issues.

I don't know: for my entire adult life, there has been a proliferation of non-crisis "crises," presumably because that generates ratings, or more recently, clicks and links; and it has always been possible to identify the communist sympathizers on the radio, public radio particularly, by the way they pronounce "Nicaragua." Kiew? Nicht neues im Osten.

The dynamics, though, might be those of reinforcing the Narratives of Our Intellectual Betters.

What we refer to as “the issues” have always reflected the preferences of an educated, urban elite, who exercise sole power in deciding what problems count as valid public concerns. Current Thingism is an advanced manifestation of this phenomenon, because it insists upon a monomaniacal focus on a particular issue. Counterintuitively, though, when a particular issue takes on the status of the Current Thing, it doesn’t intensify the debate on that topic. On the contrary: when a problem becomes the issue among issues, mainstream media and the liberal establishment enforce an artificial consensus on every question even peripherally relevant to that concern. Thus, whereas the defining of “the issues” was meant to narrow the focus of which topics need to be debated by the public, Current Thingism serves to narrow that focus to a single issue and to push it beyond the realm of debate entirely.

Consider the pandemic. When Covid-19 was the Current Thing, deliberation was actively suppressed. To doubt the efficacy of masks was considered stupidity. To question the necessity of lockdowns was deemed selfish. To press for the reopening of the schools was framed as a desire to kill teachers. To note the 99 percent survival rate was to be a callous, heartless person who wants to kill grandma. Reluctance to take a largely untested vaccine was to be “anti-science,” which is, of course, to be a moron. Despite the fact that there were a number of scientific debates regarding the virus, the public was simply commanded to “Follow the Science.” In other words, a consensus was invented where none existed. This is the very purpose of Current Thingism. It is rhetorical intimidation meant to disable public deliberation so that a false “consensus” can be imposed without resistance.

That might be, and that's the way the consensus used to emerge on the Sunday shows.  These days, though, judging by the fretting by People Who Used to Have Authority about people who bypass the gatekeepers and get their information from whatever sources make them comfortable with their priors, that rhetorical intimidation doesn't seem to be working so well.

Nor should it be.  "Hive mind" might work as a metaphor for people who share a consensus, but humans are free agents.

IF THIS BE INSURRECTIONARY, MAKE THE MOST OF IT!

Cold Spring Shops is a safe space for problematic people, and from time to time, there might be flag hoists at headquarters that might give Establishment types the vapors.  Yes, seriously.  "In the document, the FBI cites symbols, images, phrases, events, and individuals that agents should look out for when identifying alleged domestic terrorists."  That's a Project Veritas release from a source claiming to be an FBI whistleblower, be governed accordingly.

That noted, Our Political Masters have issued previous profiles of potentially dangerous militia or domestic terrorist types, and Revolutionary era imagery, including pine trees and coiled snakes, has been on such lists.  That might not be the best way to win friends or influence people.

More seriously, the FBI handout shows how our elites view (and loathe) the common man in this country. Simply being patriotic and believing in the Second Amendment gets you labeled a domestic terrorist. If that’s the definition, then I’m proud to be a Militia Violent Extremist.

Yes, or as Patrick Henry put it, "if this be treason, make the most of it."  Or was that Cyndi Lauper, singing "Libs, they just want to be owned?"

MARJORY COLLINS VISITS PENN STATION.

Say what you will about the logic of either the New Deal or government subsidies for photographers who documented Depression and War, the photographic team was pretty good.

Marjory Collins was, for a time, a formidable presence among a group of pioneers who changed the trajectory of American photography. She was already an established documentary photographer when, in 1942, she was invited to join a team assembled by the Office of War Information to record everyday life on the home front.

The group was organized by Roy Stryker, an economist and noted photographer who had earlier formed the team that made legendary Depression-era pictures for the Farm Services Administration. Collins shared her government credentials with such illustrious colleagues as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Jack Delano, and Gordon Parks. That she belonged in such company says something about the depth of her work.

Her New York Pennsylvania Station portfolio, notes Kevin Keefe, offers "refreshing alternative to endless photographs of towering limestone arches, GG1 locomotives, and Broadway Limited tailsigns."

Enjoy.  The Classic Trains weblog posts tend to be outside the paywall.

TAKE THE POINTS.

Governance is about compromise, and sometimes that means getting what you can, even if good enough isn't perfect.  Deal with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders's gripes about the latest boondoggle accordingly.  "Republicans did what the media always says they do: pounced. Sanders, for his part, didn’t care, because, he pointed out, the statement is accurate."  That article continues, "Don’t assume this means that Sanders won’t support the bill. He’s never met a spending bill he didn’t like, so don’t take his moment of honesty as a glimmer of hope the bill won’t pass." Well, no, raising taxes on corporations is more important to the senator than whether the boondoggle will have any effect on inflation or the size of the current deficit.  (How silly has it become when borrowing less money for a boondoggle now gets hailed as deficit reduction?)

Here's how the Bernie Sanders fan club presents it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday supported final passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act but said it "goes nowhere near far enough in addressing the problems facing struggling working families."

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, offered amendments that would have removed oil and gas handouts from the reconciliation bill; added dental, hearing, and vision coverage to Medicare; established a Civilian Conservation Corps; strengthened the measure's drug price provisions; revived the expanded child tax credit; and hiked the corporate tax rate.

Enough logs were rolled, though, for the senator to assent to the final bill.

Sanders said in a statement after voting yes on the final package that "it is a step forward" and he "was happy to support it."

"At a time when we face the existential crisis of climate change, the most significant part of this bill is an unprecedented $300 billion investment in clean energy and energy efficiency, including a $7 billion solar rooftop proposal that I introduced," said Sanders. "This bill could help increase U.S. solar energy by 500% and more than double wind energy by 2035. That is no small thing."

"This bill also begins the work of making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes by imposing a 15% minimum tax on corporations," the senator continued. "It also gives the IRS the resources they need to pursue the estimated $1 trillion in taxes not paid by the wealthiest people in this country, and will help ordinary, working people get their returns faster."

That all sounds good, although there is no incidence analysis behind the senator's desired fair share of taxes borne by businesses, and the happy talk today will surely not materialize as some new birth of renewable energy.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL.

Perhaps the notion of deconstructing "merit" because it crowds out "diversity" has died a death of obscurity.  Campus Reform flagged an Inside Higher Ed article by posting a clickbaitish headline.  "Merit system is unjust because it rewards productive individuals, professors argue."  Well, I guess it worked, if with a lag, I came across it because one of the sites I go to flagged it late last week, although that article was posted at the beginning of the academic year in 2021.  The key takeaway might be that, although it is easy enough to gripe about supposed injustices in the promotion and compensation measures in use in the academy, proposing concrete improvements is hard.

That's a shame, as the Inside Higher Ed contributors allege the current measures leave money on the table. "We applaud the compilation of cutting-edge social science research, sometimes based unapologetically on critical race theory, on how bias and stereotypes disadvantage the health and welfare of millions of Americans and ultimately lay open the possibility of the U.S. being unable to maintain the innovation necessary to remain a world leader."

I would be delighted to sew a causal argument, let alone an attempt to quantify that effect.  None forthcoming.

At the summit, we were hopeful when speakers called for making the invisible visible as a precondition to that change. We were hopeful when we heard about the great social science research studies underway.

That hope quickly dissipated, however, when it became clear that even many of the leaders in the field find it difficult to name the actual systems and structures that necessarily must change. People seem to agree that the system supports and protects the status quo, but very few appear able to point to the specific parts of the system that do so. How can we fix what we don’t name? The problem is much bigger than increasing the representation of women and people of color in STEM.

To be sure, achieving a more equitable representation of our population is an important goal, but it is for naught if the system doesn’t also change. After all, we don’t want to send our talented marginalized and minoritized researchers to work without identifying and removing the underlying barriers to lasting change.

They then ask, "But what exactly is it that we are trying to change?"

That question has never had a satisfactory answer.  Fifteen years ago, I found an amusing quote from one of those weblogs run by anonymous neurotic humanities cat ladies, offering the excuse that answering the "what exactly" question was too much work, because overcoming those (unspecified) barriers was work enough already.  Or something.  That weblog has since closed down.

Long before that, advocates of affirmative action in colleges of law came to terms with the high failure rate of students admitted under, shall we say, affirmative action standards by suggesting even more such students be admitted.  There, dear reader, was the beginning of the argument that the standards themselves were the problem.

It’s taken decades for us to get to a place where most people agree that the academy is not the objective, level playing field we all hoped it would be. Now it is time to not just say the system is inequitable but also to start putting our finger on the particular pieces that require a reset. We call on all academics, funding agencies, professional organizations and leaders to consider the following structures as a jumping-off place for change. It feels too big to try and change a system, but if we can name parts of the system, then we can put ourselves on an inspirational path forward that finally leads to real change.

I'll be churlish and suggest that an academy ought have standards of objectivity that aren't level for sloppy thinkers. Sometimes the best way to disguise sloppy thinking is with wordnoise.  Here it comes.

On the first day of the summit, a speaker discussed the construction of the meaning of merit. Admitting that the normative definitions of success and merit are in and of themselves barriers to achieving the goals of justice, diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary but not sufficient to create change. Most of the academy functions by using a narrow definition of merit limited to a neoliberal view of the university: that merit is indicated by obtaining funding dollars or by producing lots of peer-reviewed journals or juried exhibits in prestigious outlets that garner a high number of citations or visits. Some institutions also include attracting many doctoral students or obtaining high numbers of student credit hours in their definitions of success.

That hegemonic, numbers-crunching conceptualization of merit in the American academy today stifles innovation and constitutes one of the main techniques of maintaining the status quo and reproducing the social order that undermines efforts toward DEI. We are not the first to point this out, of course, but thinking about merit as embedded in the system helps us focus on change strategies.

In the academy, we have been using the same metrics to assess merit in annual performance and promotion reviews for eons, despite the fact that our work lives and expectations have changed significantly over the last half a century. For example, the advent of the internet has meant that, at a minimum, many new outlets for and forms of scholarship should be part of the reward structure.

Is that final sentence a lament for the demise of the neurotic humanities cat lady weblogs, or might it be contributors to Inside Higher Ed attempting to work the compensation committee the way Earl Weaver would work the umpire?  (Read on, one institution has created a tenure track in which doing diversity, inclusion, and equity "work" fulfills the requirement, perhaps to the exclusion of the grants and publications.)

In the past thirty years, the proliferation of affirmative action efforts in the academy have gone right along with the decline in the esteem of the enterprise.  These two things might not be correlated.  And yet I can't help but think that the Ayn Randian competition in misery that inspired the title of the post isn't really where all this "normative definitions of merit" talk is leading.

Put another way, in a universe where there is no cosmic justice, there will be people who might have better chances, no matter how hard we work at ensuring everyone a fair go, and in a world where humans are free to associate or not, there will be insiders and outsiders.  Privilege-checking strikes me as the least effective way to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as it's just a big guilt trip, including for people who might be subject to multiple oppressions only to learn they are less oppressed than others.

On the other hand, maybe such a "privilege level" chart might become part of the promotion or pay raise application.  So far, though, I have seen no such proposals at Inside Higher Ed.  Maybe the anonymous humanities cat ladies are thinking such things, but they're not posting much.

MAKE NO SMALL PLANS.

The mayor of Green Bay, Wisconsin, would like to make his city an Amtrak hub.

Mayor Eric Genrich told Local 5 News he’s building a coalition to push national rail officials to consider Green Bay a hub for a national passenger rail system.

“We checked in with Amtrak fairly recently,” Genrich said Thursday night. “The next step in the process is convincing the Federal Railroad Administration that this corridor is worthy of being part of their national corridor plan.”

Once upon a time, Green Bay was the northern end of a corridor service linking Chicago, Milwaukee, and Green Bay along three routes on both sides of Lake Winnebago.  The Chicago and North Western operated something like that hub, with a number of trains terminating in Green Bay, while the services for Ashland or the Upper Peninsula cut cars northbound (timetable west)and added cars southbound.  The Milwaukee Road was also in on the action, with an overnight Copper Country Limited and a day Chippewa, which, for a while was a Hiawatha.  Some of the timetables were set up with the longer distance trains in Green Bay at the same time to swap cars: the turn of dining, lounge, and additional coaches on the Flambeau 400 being railway ballet of the highest order.

Alas, both the trains and the tracks vanished, with The Milwaukee Road severed somewhere north of Hilbert Junction, the Fox Cities side of the North Western severed south of West Bend, and the Lake Shore Division cut north of Sheboygan.

In addition, further back in transportation history, the Chicago and North Western once ran passenger trains toward Wausau and the Twin Cities.  Much of that trackage is also gone.

Replacing that which has been destroyed will be more expensive than rebuilding that which has been downgraded.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Oktoberfest season is upon us, and a Schnitzelbank that sends up assorted mountebanks and poseurs is surely in order.  The list of expert failures is a long one, after all.

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

A CASE FOR DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE ACADEMY?

Or, more pungently, what business do professors of English have dabbling in political economy?

We might think, in our professorial way, that the rejection of the high—the disparagement of great artists, serious thinkers, and wonderful writers—is without a doubt the worst thing that our colleges and universities have done. But if we want to measure the decline of the liberal arts in the public imagination, we might want to focus on the stigmatization of the ordinary instead of the high.

What I mean is this: Along with the political denigration of what had always been regarded as the peaks of humane learning and the literary and philosophic achievements of the West, there were other attacks and erosions. These stemmed from the view that it is not merely the highest expressions of our culture that need to be toppled but this culture’s more ordinary manifestations—its “bourgeois values,” the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens, their everyday questions and concerns, their pride in their country, and the ethics promoted by conventional Western religious understandings. Regularly, it was not that these views would be “examined” and certainly not that they would be “understood.” More often the agenda was that they would be overthrown.

Eventually, dear reader, you will miss them.

The problem is not that political correctness stops racist speech or ethnic slurs but that, under its sway, the most ordinary things—ordinary questions, ordinary views—are disdained, ridiculed, and often condemned. That people shouldn’t be judged on the basis of race has surely become or is becoming a commonplace, ordinary, standard view. Except on many college campuses, where race-based affirmative action and preferencing is often the rule and where “anti-racist” curricula and procedures are in force—where the solidification of group identities and the ever-present view of American society as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed are what pass for an understanding of our principles and our history.

The greater loss, John Agresto argues, is the conventions and discipline of scholarly inquiry.

Although they live and grow on the basis of freedom of thought and investigation, higher education and the liberal arts in particular do not and should not have to rally to the defense of students who want to use racial slurs or hurl scurrilous comments. Neither students nor faculty have any right to slander, ridicule, or shout down others and claim they are covered by “free speech.”

But, while epithets, obscenity, and even common vulgarity may well be out of bounds, the free exchange of ideas and the right to ask any serious question—and follow where the argument leads—may not be abridged. Liberal education exists to help us understand, as best we can, the truth about the universe and ourselves within it. But if we believe that protecting “diversity” means preventing students and faculty from asking serious questions—or even ordinary questions—about certain human issues for fear that offense might be taken by some or by many, or if we think our view of social justice demands that we treat our universities as seminaries inculcating the new religion of cultural awareness or view our colleges as the new re-education camps for ethically crippled students, then again we see how the spirit of enforcing “correct” beliefs and the spirit of liberal education have become opposite.

That is, bourgeois conventions ought enable members of the scholarly community to marginalize the cancel mob and the troll alike.  The contemporary academy, on the other hand, will be judged for the monuments it has destroyed.

The last 30 years have seen the vandalizing of ever so much of higher education. The supposed reformers have entered the storehouse of centuries of accumulated knowledge, torn down its walls, thrown out its books, and toppled its monuments. For all their brave talk of justice, they have carried out what has to be seen as one of the most intellectually criminal act of the ages, the modern equivalent of burning the libraries of antiquity. Today, acts that were unthinkable, unimaginable, just years ago now seem so very ordinary.

Mr Agresto concludes with a challenge.  "Is any of this reversible? In part, I think so. But this requires us to have a clearer idea of where we intend to go."

It is reversible.  Cold Spring Shops's favorite retired college administrator, Peter Wood, argues, though, that deconstructing the academy simply because it is a nest of deconstructivist nihilists will not turn out well.

Abandoning academia due to the prominence of left-wing orthodoxy within it and the totalitarian means by which it is enforced abandons American institutions beyond college to those who hate America. Left-wing hegemony already prevails in popular culture, the news media, and governmental bureaucracy. The left-wing orthodoxy increasingly found in these domains, however, is fed by academia. Abandoning the factories of ideas to anti-Americanism means those ideas will find still more homes elsewhere in American culture, and they will do so to the detriment of America’s standing and values.

It's on higher education to get the job right, and, unfortunately "transgressive hermeneutics" and a misunderstanding of "critical thinking" will not do the job.

America needs non-academic skills to thrive, but such skills are not all we need. We also must have a citizenry capable of seeing through lies and deception; understanding the principles of self-government and the pursuit of justice; and distinguishing between comfort and actual freedom. Acquiring technical skills is important but will not by itself empower citizens to argue for the natural rights of America’s founding documents against the ideas of socialism. The fruits of a successful small business can be taken away by the votes of indoctrinated masses.

Academia is as critical of a national resource as hard infrastructure. Doctors who are versed in the theories of racial “equity” that now abound in medical schools will be ill-equipped to treat patients who suffer from actual ailments, as opposed to figments of the social justice imagination. Economists who live in the cloud of climate change illusions will wander in ignorance when they eventually staff the Federal Reserve. Journalists who are trained to seek out stories of identity group inequity will have faint ability to recognize any of the other injustices and harms that deserve to be brought to public attention. Consider the readiness of our press to downplay the current recession or its eagerness to present monkeypox as a general threat rather than a disease spread almost exclusively among gay men. Such distortions are the fruit of college classrooms that immerse students in the need to conform to progressive narratives rather than pursue the truth, wherever that may lead. Such students graduate into positions where they will ultimately shape public policy, and those policies shape America’s future. Left-wing politicians and mobs do not come from nothing. They come from the classroom.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the higher education sector will experience a bout of disruptive creative destruction, or collapse of its own hubris, or if, perhaps, people in charge of the regional comprehensives and mid-majors where most of the higher education takes place will brace themselves to their duties.

CARS HAVE LONG BEEN POLITICIZED.

Likely, dear reader, long before Ken Galbraith whined about "mauve and cerise, air conditioned sedans" as a way of contrasting private affluence with public squalor; or George Carlin worked the Volvo diesel sedan with a bumper sticker into a send-up of poseurs, there were people reading Important Things into drivers' choices of cars.

Of late, though, the nation's sissy classes have positively been wetting themselves over "toxic car culture."  Common Dreams contributor Stan Cox, in escalating the wetting, gets off what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone."  The photograph and some of the autobiographical observations in the columns will confirm what many already suspect of Common Dreams types.  As does the sneering.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don't think that I'm just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled "petro-masculinity," those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the "Trump caravan" that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the "Trump Trains" of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Portland? Wouldn't real fascists have done a better job cleaning out the place?  That Sage article?  More empirically empty wordnoise, long on motivating the argument and short on evidence supporting it.  Everything else follows from this.  "This article undertakes a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels."  Put another way, the author has a collection of grievances that she categorizes using all manner of recondite wordnoise, including the obligatory "interrogate," without ever introducing any evidence or raising, let alone attempting to rebut, contrary explanations.  There are, not surprisingly, footnote references to Rolling Stone, public radio, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

THE BUNDLES ARE TOO DARNED BIG.

A Bulwark contributor named Jonathan V. Last explains why his Bulwark colleagues carry so much water for the Democrats.  He starts with an observation from Wise Expert Tom Nichols.

I have written, in bits and pieces, about what I think—at least for me—constitutes a conservative temperament, including ideas about human nature, the role of government, civic virtue, and the balance between freedom and responsibility.

The fact remains, however, that many of us are now in a coalition with an array of groups to our left. Among our former comrades on the right, this makes us apostates, defectors, heretics.

Still, we cannot make a permanent home with our temporary liberal roommates: We don’t like the panties on the curtain rod, and they don’t like the notes we leave on the pillow. And yet, here we are, because none of the issues that would normally matter between right and left matter as much as the future of democracy. A conservative who cares about the future of the constitutional order must face the reality that the Republican Party has become a menace to the Constitution and our system of government.

It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at that, what with all the procedural reforms the thin national Democrat majority would like to make, which will bite them in the ass the next time the balance of power shifts in Washington. And it will: there has been wishful thinking about permanent presidential majorities for Republicans and Democrats just in this century, and somehow the pronoun protocols and access to abortion don't strike me as offsetting the expensive fuel and nonexistent baby formula in a major way.

To Mr Nichols, though, the weakness internationally, the softness on crime, the stagflation are worth it.

The practical effect here is that I will root for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them. The institutional Republican Party must be weakened enough so that it can’t carry out the larger project of undermining our elections and curtailing our rights as citizens.

Put another way, it does no good to support small Republican wins on policy if the cumulative effect is to strengthen the party so that it is larger and more cohesive when it makes another run at destroying the Constitution. Politics is an ugly business; strategy requires some painful decisions. I believe we are in an existential political crisis, and I intend to act accordingly.

We might be, but people who are displeased with the continuing corona tyranny, and developments in the public schools, might have other ideas about the nature of that existential crisis. Mr Last notes, "Similarly, a political system is stable only so long as people believe that it is stable. Instability happens the moment someone comes along and demonstrates that the system can be overturned."  To Mr Last, that's Donald Trump.

What if a significant portion of America was becoming disillusioned with liberalism and open to authoritarianism in recent years. But what if this portion of America did not believe that such a transformation was possible. They believed they were in a Constitutional bouncy house, too. Though unlike Tom and myself, they saw it as limiting, not freeing.

And since they were in the grip of this delusion that there was no alternative to the liberal order, they made their accommodations with it and their politics was defined by it.

But then Trump showed them what was possible.

Donald Trump was the symptom. He called attention to what a lot of people, who don't hold Ivy credentials or write for The Atlantic, were sensing. It isn't helping that the people the Bulwark types, and Conservative Establishment intellectuals are enabling say things like we have to put up with higher fuel prices in the name of that rules-based international order.  That order has not served the back row kids well of late.

The federal bundles are too big, and Conservative, Inc. conserving the Coastal Establishment is only setting the stage for a bigger collapse of that order to come.  Perhaps devolving more to the states and the localities will restore some stability.

FOOD FIGHT!

It's not unknown for businesses to use their signs to have a little fun with each other.  The managers have to be careful what they start, though.

A McDonald's in Marshfield, Missouri started the battle simply asking, "Hey DQ! Do you wanna have a sign war?"

The nearby Dairy Queen accepted the challenge, writing in response, "We would but we're 2 busy making ice cream."

The McDonald's responded, "That's cute our ice cream makes it self."

So far, the back and forth between the chains is pretty mundane, but this is when it gets ... frosty.

"You mean it actually works," the Dairy Queen responded, adding, "Shocker."

A few other businesses got in on the fun, including a bank along the street: "Ice cream machine broken? We have a loan for that."

Proprietors have to be careful about what they post.  Presumably the operator of an ice cream parlor would have to go through proper channels to get the money.  Some years ago, a local (and now closed) gyros joint posted a series of rhyming couplets on their sign, but when that included a riff on "winner winner chicken dinner" they quickly had to change that as people started ordering chicken dinners and asking what they had won.

FIRST RECOGNIZE THE PROBLEM.

Vice contributor Aaron Gordon tells the truth.  "Amtrak has a bold vision for the future: slower trains than the days before color television."

The examples, and the method of analysis in the article will be familiar to Cold Spring Shops readers.

It's worth having the word be spread, all the same.  "Yes, our trains here in the Northeast are looking mighty fine these days, so long as you compare them to the ones our grandparents rode. Mighty fine indeed. Unfortunately, the rest of the country doesn‘t hold up so well. One day, our children may ride on trains almost, but not quite, as fast as their great-grandparents did."

A little free rein to 125 will go a long way.

EXAGGERATION SELLS.

Last week's meditation on yet another flight of fantasy around the Kennedy assassination got me wondering whether the kind of freelance professional that featured in Day of the Jackal or occasionally get put forward as yet another gunman More Substantial Than Oswald really exists.

Sorry, no.  "Why, it’s like Hollywood is… exaggerating the truth."  Naturlich: there has to be the hunky, mysterious leading man, and the love interest somewhere on the spectrum between desperate housewife and useful idiot to keep the groundlings occupied.  In practice, developing the skills might involve a hitch in the military, perhaps screening for the special forces, although people who are really good at that might be cleared as intelligence officers.  That class of individuals differs from the loyal employees of a criminal organization, whether street gang or importing business.

Lots of people kill for money, but they wear other hats as well. They may work as burglars, drug mules, or bodyguards in private security firms. And while national intelligence services occasionally task operatives with targeted assassinations, it’s unlikely that any of them keep “assassins” in their employ who do nothing but kill. Of course, we only know about the murderers we catch. No one can rule out the possibility that a well-paid gun-for-hire is loafing around the Italian countryside right now waiting for his agent to call.

Apparently, the murder-for-hire market is worthy of academic study.

A recent effort to understand the market for contract killing by economist Samuel Cameron of the University of Bradford in Britain concluded that it makes little sense from any conventional economic point of view. “The majority of paid killings take place for very small sums, much lower than the economic value of life and lower too than what one would expect as compensation for efforts and risks of the hiree,” Cameron writes.

In what may be the most comprehensive effort to understand the business of murder-for-hire and its practitioners, a 2014 British investigation scoured 39 years of evidence about hired killers. The authors found hitmen range in age from 15 to 63, with the average being 38-years old. A gun is their weapon of choice. And the most common setting is a suburban streetscape with the target walking a dog or shopping. It also remains a gender-specific occupation. The authors found only one case of a female assassin-for-hire.

The British report proposes four distinct types of contract killers: novices, dilettantes, journeymen and masters. Novices are young, first-time killers often steeped in violent street culture. Dilettantes are generally older and come to the grim business out of dire financial need. Journeymen are local enforcers often well-known to police. Only the final category of master—someone who travels from hit to hit and leaves no local trace—matches the standard Hollywood image of the cool professional killer. It was also the only group for which the authors could find no solid evidence.

That's not the same thing as "no prospect of evidence."

“From discussions with our network of informants, it was clear that ‘Masters’ do, indeed, exist,” they write, arguing they often come from military or paramilitary backgrounds. “However, this is impossible to verify with any certainty. These ‘Masters,’ by virtue of evading justice, exist in the shadows—almost like ghosts—and it has therefore been impossible to build up any concrete picture of them.”

The popular image of the ghost-like assassin may thus be real after all. If it is, however, we’re still reliant on Hollywood for the details.

Yes, although it's not always clear where the boundary between the free agent and the intelligence officer lies.  Consider the early 1960s of the Jackal and the Kennedy speculations.  There were attempts by disaffected French veterans to kill Charles deGaulle, motivated by pique over his change of heart regarding Algeria.  I'll let students of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon hash that out, and if they wish to engage the argument that Algeria was French longer than Texas was a State, they can dicker over the significance of part of the eastern border of Texas reflecting a late-seventeenth-century accord between Spain and France to deconflict missionary efforts to the natives.  There were anti-Castro Cubans who might have felt betrayed by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs.  In addition, there was a nasty civil war involving Congolese independence from Belgium that might have been another brushfire in the Cold War.  (The fine points of that conflict did not register on a grade schooler in Milwaukee.)  Lots of opportunities for intelligence officers, soldiers of fortune, and local gang members to participate in any of those events.

The Jackal's resume, however, suggests a man from an upper middle class milieu who tired of the office-and-commuter-train grind and created a career as one of those "Masters," with Katanga experience and a reputation that attracted the attention of a Zionist in New York who commissioned a hit on German rocket scientists in Egypt.  I think Frederick Forsyth got that right in a subsequent novel, The Odessa File, it was the Mossad (a state intelligence service) with the motive and the capability to take down that rocket project, and snag Adolf Eichmann at the same time.  Perhaps this Jackal knew enough of the clandestine arms business to choose a code name to cast suspicion on yet another participant in the clandestine hit business.

The success of Day of the Jackal is in creating the who-didn't-do-it, as everyone knows Charles deGaulle died of natural causes, and thus the fine points of the manhunt and the tradecraft are less important than the resolution (and the role of the desperate housewife.)  I suspect, though, that a state actor would have more success using false credentials than one of these "Masters."  An intelligence service can create a legend and forge papers without the annoying presence of a passport application in a file that could be cross-checked against death records, which is what led to the Jackal using other identities.  Those additional identities involved stolen passports, and wouldn't it be simple enough for someone to notice that the newest stamp on such passports was a London entry stamp: no British exit stamp, no French entry stamp.  That was the 1960s, there was a lot more passport stamping in those days.  Presumably with the bar codes and other electronic stuff these days, there are ways to twig to a passport in wrong hands despite there being less stamping going on.  That might also make the work of the intelligence service forgers harder.

WHY NOT HOLD THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION IN MILWAUKEE?

Epoch Times contributor Roger Simon is not happy with Nashville's city fathers suggesting the Republicans take their nominating convention elsewhere, either because Republican politics aren't those of Nashville's urban politicians, or because the security theater would get in the way of the casual tourists who go there for country music and other social phenomena: whose politics might not be those of Nashville's urban politicians either.

Milwaukee is very much in the lead. . . . I have reason to believe that Nashville’s behavior may well not have been “forthright and professional,” but this’s still a huge mistake.

One of the major reasons for national political conventions is publicity for the party and its candidate by making people want to attend in person or to watch on television. Indeed, this is likely the most important reason.

No city in the United States is more prepared for this than Nashville, other than Las Vegas. Indeed, downtown Nashville has been nicknamed NashVegas for a reason. People from all over the world want to come here for the music and excitement.

And, boy, do they! Hotels are springing up faster than weeds in most people’s backyards, but these weeds are high-rises with swanky cocktail lounges on the roof and a couple of restaurants off the lobbies featuring James Beard prize chefs. Also, most of the attractions, like my favorites the Johnny Cash Museum and the Country Music Hall of Fame, are within walking distance, as are the natural convention venues the Bridgestone Arena and the Music City Center. The place is just fun. I felt that way when I moved here four years ago and still do.

As for Milwaukee, from what I understand, visitors, and perhaps the press, will have to stay an unappealing hour from the venue, making it extraordinarily inconvenient for most anyone but the VIPs. I have no comment on Milwaukee’s actual fun quotient, since I have never been there.

Are any of the arenas in Nashville as rich with symbolism as Fiserv Forum?

That was in anticipation of the Democrats bringing their show to Milwaukee: that was overtaken by an excess of fauciism.  Some of what accompanied that post is now overtaken by events; some remains valid.

The arena is now in place, naming rights sold, and it's been short-listed as a future site for professional basketball's All-Star game, but that will be 2025 or later, by which time the Trump presidency will belong to the ages.  The point of building the arena was to be in compliance with pro basketball's requirements for total seating and a few other amenities.  It became part of the city's package of amenities to host the Democrats' nominating convention, which will take place in mid-July, fortunately before German Fest launches the Oktoberfest season.

Because there aren't enough hotel rooms in the Milwaukee area, a number of delegations are planning to engage space in the Greater Chicago area, and brave road congestion to get to and from the proceedings.  Let the record show that the Milwaukee-area expressways have been under construction for much longer than the interval from ground-breaking to first center jump with the widening of Interstate 94 still in progress, showing the Party of Infrastructure exactly what government failure looks like.  None of which will stop the highway lobby from making the case that a third lane on Interstate 43 from Silver Spring Road north to the Grafton area or to Saukville will be just the fix for the congestion there.

Republican conventions tend to have fewer delegates required to nominate a candidate, meaning more participants might be able to stay in Waukesha or near the airport, and that's not an hour commute unless things have gone really wrong.  In addition, the Hiawatha service is faster than driving from a Chicago or northern Illinois hotel to Milwaukee.