GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 19,204.

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."

The verdict is in.  "Sweden Wins! Country That Refused Lockdown and Kept Schools Open Has Lowest Pandemic Mortality in the World."  Not only that, the Swedes did better on excess deaths from causes other than coronavirus.  That despite Worldometers reporting more infections but fewer attributable deaths in Illinois.

The emergency decrees for the United States taken together, as well as Illinois, remain in effect, if in modified form.  The emergency is over.  The emergency powers should be rescinded.

These posts will continue until the emergency decrees end.  This is what a majority of Illinoisans voted for.  I retain the right to call attention to what they've inflicted on themselves, and it's going to be fun come January, when two years of inflation adjustments to the motor fuel tax kick in, and later in the year, when the sales tax moratorium on groceries expires.  In addition, the winter fearmongering about coronavirus, flu, and other respiratory ailments is under way again, and I'm seeing more people masking up in stores or riding alone in their automobiles.  Meanwhile, letter carriers in Chicago are being hunted for their master keys to cluster mailboxes in apartment complexes and office parks that don't have individual curbside or in-house delivery.

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 2,640,369 infections, up by 21,681 from last month, and 21,681 deaths, a change of 377 from the preceding report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,906,801 infections, an increase of 72,376 over last month and 40,406 deaths, adding 277 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.  End the emergency decrees.

As of this afternoon, the state appears to have revised their tally of vaccinations.  The most recent tally of vaccinations gives around 26 thirty million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of today, December 12.  Last month that estimate was around thirty million doses of all types.  The state also appears to have ended their count of the scary variants, although the page has been updated since last month's tally, and the discussion of the various Omicron variants circulating also includes mention of the latest reformulated corona shot.

At Veterans Day, the governor trailed by 19,284.

At Columbus Day, the governor trailed by 19,436.

As Oktoberfest season began, the governor trailed by 19,467.

At the start of the academic year, the governor trailed by 19,611.

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.

BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS, THEY'RE FAILING?

What, dear reader, is the proper value proposition for the university?  It used to be that the academy was a place where people could play with ideas, maybe one in twenty of which might work when taken from the common room or chalk board to real life.  But even in my youth, I recall the public service commercials on the three television stations we had, and the car cards on the buses exhorting people to get that good education.  Was vocationalism thus the default value proposition?

It probably came to this when higher education sold itself with the slogan, "to get a good job, get a good education" back in those Prosperous Early Sixties.  Likewise, it probably came to this when the competition for prestige included the competition for grants, whether federally funded, or by politically-motivated foundations, or by Big Pharma and the corporate interests Ms Scott invokes.

Then came the return of the Holy Inquisition, or perhaps the understandable tendency for people to stop looking when they reach a conclusion that makes them comfortable with their priors. "It's probably a little late in the game to start defending 'care and precision' in academic writing, given the past thirty years of increasingly tight priors and epistemic closure."  That was a reaction to a culture-studies type attempting to introduce yet another euphemism.  It doesn't matter that the word to be banished was "pedophile".  There's a lengthy list of these, and it's easy enough to pronounce any of them the way Mark Anthony rendered "honorable" in that funeral oration.

Here, now, in leave of Brutus and the rest, let us consider Caesar's will.  Oh, sorry, it's a new policy study from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

We make the case that public universities must serve as good stewards of taxpayer money, and those that are putting students on career paths where they’re unlikely to be able to pay their student loans ought to be held accountable. Moreover, universities should aid in solving the growing workforce crisis by steering students towards careers where there are shortages in the state. Using extensive data on college defaults and the return-on-investment from various degrees, we highlight the schools and programs that are a net positive for would-be college students, and those that are not.

That report focuses on Wisconsin, and it includes a few private colleges and universities.  Make of it what you will that cosmetology degrees are among the biggest net losers for students, with dance also being a poor financial risk; and that Lawrence University, a wanna-be high end private liberal arts college in Appleton, offers almost no majors with a positive return on investment.  It engages in the usual sort of fretting about graduates of Wisconsin seeking employment elsewhere.  That sort of mercantilist illiteracy has spawned periodic attempts to indenture students.  I repeat, because repeat I must.  "Midwestern politicians cannot get their brains around the idea that graduates of Big Ten universities competing in the global economy by relocating elsewhere on the globe attest to the strength of those universities."  Yes, that includes those performing arts degrees.  High risk but high returns for the successful.  Just like football.

The caviling over reports like Wisconsin Institute's is likely to go on until the fall of the house of Harvard.  "Markets exist to value risks, and there is likely a balance of luck and merit in a market outcome. Efficiency, on the other hand, depends on agents having the incentives to do efficient things. In the academy, nobody has spelled out what those efficient things are."

III. ADVENT.

It's still too early to be dreaming of that white Christmas.  It's not too early to be on your best behavior, as Santa's helpers are riding the rails.

That's the East Troy Railroad's re-enactment of the Schuster's Christmas Parade Train.  There are other Festive Season themed trains on the preservation railroads, and the freight carriers might still be assisting local charities.  Play nice.

THE ABSENCE OF BOURGEOIS NORMS COMES FOR WAL-MART.

We've noted, in passing, the reliance of what used to be self-service retailers on locked cabinets for some of their offerings, such as baby formula locked up with the expensive liquor at the nearby grocery, or shaving supplies at the drug store, and called attention to the way Target is reducing hours and might be moving away from self-service in response to the shoplifting.  "Self-service shopping only works as long as the shoppers respect their side of the bargain, which is to settle up."  Now it's Wal-Mart's turn.  "Rising thefts at Walmart could lead to price jumps, store closures, CEO says."

One has to have a heart of stone.  The big box retailers gave up on Chicago some time ago.

It didn't help any that Chicago's rookie mayor, Lori Lightfoot, decided that denouncing "vigilantes" was more important than, oh, securing the oases in what would become a food desert.

Two years ago, Target took some stick for pulling stores out of Chicago's south side neighborhoods.  Those were underperforming, according to business metrics, but not under attack by looters.  Today, though, the rookie mayor is not in a good place.  Here's a headline.  "Mayor Lightfoot Pleads With Walmart, Other Retailers To Not Abandon Chicago."  It continues,  "There were earlier reports that Walmart expected to rebuild all stores trashed by looters and vandals, but company officials later said they would open some stores and would not say which ones."  I don't know, if I've had to jump through all sorts of hoops and take all sorts of abuse just to open a store in a city, and then the residents trash it, well, I might be considering a more tactful way of telling the mayor what she told Our [then -- Ed.] President.

It's not any better for the Chicago area dollar stores. "The article also reports on Les Miserables manifestations at the dollar stores, which acknowledge the shrinkage and their enhanced security efforts."

Not too long ago I cracked wise about Dollar General adding a few two dollar items and setting up a store in an unexpected place.  "What intrigues, though, is that now Dollar General would like to set up shop in Milwaukee's upscalish Third Ward."  That was toward what transpired as the end of Trumpian prosperity, and perhaps Dollar General was running out of poor neighborhoods to expand in.  Or was it the early warning, Dollar General could not sustain its business model if there was a lot of shoplifting?

Self-serve retail: caught on in a big way in the American High, now a casualty of whatever we shall call this era of diminished expectations and no standards.

THIS NEIGHBORHOOD IS ZONED FOR NO ACTIVITY AT ALL.

I've had some fun with zoning follies.  No pickup trucks in your driveway! No above-ground swimming pools in your back yard!  (How many palms do you have to grease to get an in-ground pool and the requisite fencing approved?)

Apparently, it's now possible to experience the frustration on your own computer or mobile device.

City building games have gotten ever more intricate. But if it's realism you want, you can't go wrong with Sim Nimby. The online parody of Sim City doesn't have particularly impressive graphics or great gameplay. But it does teach users what it's like to be a big city developer in the real world of intrusive government driven by overreaching neighbors.

Anyone trying to construct an apartment building, road, or rail network will get hit with a series of obstructing pop-ups screaming "Won't someone think of the property values!," "Keep our local fiefdom weird!," or "Live, laugh, love showing up to these town halls and stopping your building." Eventually the player realizes nothing is getting built and quits.

That's a simulation, but Reason's Christian Britschgi notes it's still freeware. In reality you probably have to pay to be frustrated. "As a result, new homeowners, renters, and small business owners pay inflated costs for their space."  Now, if you live in Brooklyn, as the developers do, you also get to have a ditzy representative of Congress who will keep employers from building new capacity there.

BET ON EMERGENCE.

The recent, federally mandated labor agreements between the railroads and the various unions didn't please anybody.  What politics can't do, market tests might.  "Creative destruction still works faster than politics .  Maybe a few more operating crews on the extra board and a more understanding approach to marking off?"

Yes.

To provide more predictability in road freight service, [Union Pacific] is working with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen on the pilot program that lets engineers know when they’ll work every 15 days.

Under the “11 and four” schedule, engineers know which 11 days they’ll work and which four days they’ll be off during every 15-day period, [vice president of operations Eric] Gehringer told an investor conference on Tuesday.

“It’s something we have to do through the collective bargaining agreement. We can’t just instantly put that across the system,” Gehringer says, adding that he’s excited to see what the results will be over the 60 days left in the pilot program.

But wait, as the Breathless TV Pitchman says, there's more!

UP is nearing its goal of hiring 1,400 train and engine employees this year, Gehringer says, with two-thirds of the new hires in active service and one-third in training.

But the railroad remains short of crews across its northern tier and is offering hiring bonuses of $10,000 to $25,000 to new conductors at some locations, including Cheyenne and Green River, Wyo.; Salt Lake City and Helper, Utah; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle.

“We still have those pockets where we are constrained,” Gehringer says. UP aims to hire about 500 additional conductor trainees this year.

Getting back to full strength on train crew staffing levels will improve service and help UP be more resilient when extreme weather or other events hit the railroad, UP executives say.

If the economy softens and freight demand drops, UP will use furloughs as a last resort so that it has enough crews to handle a rebound, Gehringer says. “That’s not a tool that we employ without thinking very carefully through that, because what we want to be most prepared for is when the demand shifts. We want to be able to capture that without missing a beat,” Gehringer says.

Let's tack on another Yes.  "CSX Transportation and Union Pacific have relaxed their attendance policies in response to labor concerns."  On both carriers, demerit points (did you know, dear reader, that on the railroad, "Brownie points" are not meritorious?) no longer go on the railroader's Permanent Record.  Santa's list or St. Peter's Book are another matter.

The thought of not being able to run trains for lack of people to operate them concentrates management minds, doesn't it?

ELIGIBILITY STUDIES AT AUBURN.

Faculty who hold administrative positions have some obligation to uphold the administrative line, but there are limits.

[Economist Michael] Stern’s attorneys successfully argued that Joseph Aistrup, a former dean at the College of the Liberal Arts, illegally relieved him from his job as department chair in May 2018 because he criticized the school for placing a disproportionate number of athletes in a “troubled” public administration major, according to the complaint.

“Dr. Stern’s statements about the alleged clustering of student athletes in the Public Administration major were a motivating factor in Dr. Aistrup’s decision to remove Dr. Stern as chair of the department of economics,” the jury concluded on November 15.

The professor successfully demonstrated that “Airstrup acted with malice or reckless indifference to Stern’s federally protected rights,” according to the verdict.

Usually, the eligibility studies major is something like communication studies or sport management. Public administration, particularly at the graduate level, can be a worthwhile activity. For instance, you'll likely find a city manager or the like with a Master of Public Administration from Northern Illinois almost anywhere in the State Line or Greater Chicago. Apparently not so much at Auburn.

More importantly, department heads still retain some autonomy as scholars and stewards of the curriculum.

A law professor at George Washington University and a commentator on free speech issues wrote that the jury made the right decision.

“Professor Stern went public with his view that the university was using the College of Liberal Arts’ Public Administration major to offer athletes an easy education, particularly as part of the school’s famed football program,” Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert, wrote November 18 on his blog.

Turley wrote that while it is commendable when professors have the courage to voice dissenting views, Stern’s criticism of the prestigious Auburn football program “takes an unparalleled level of chutzpah.”

“The decision is a substantial victory for free speech,” Turley wrote.

Better, too, to call attention to the student part of "student-athlete" being neglected before some star athlete sues the university for educational malpractice when his inability to read finally catches up with him.

Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty provides additional details.  I like the cut of Professor Stern's jib.

Stern became something of a thorn in Auburn’s side in 2008, when he worked with a local reporter on a story alleging that Auburn was accepting money from the Charles Koch Foundation in ways that undermined the economics department’s academic integrity. In retaliation for Stern’s internal and external activism, Auburn in 2009 suddenly moved the department of economics out of the College of Business and into the College of Liberal Arts, the lawsuit said. Around this time, Stern’s new dean allegedly opposed his tenure bid, as did the provost, contradicting the positive recommendation of his department. Stern’s tenure was granted by appeal, in 2010.

Later that year, Stern was elected chair of the economics department. He eventually developed a good rapport with his new dean, but that dean was “run off” in 2013 over a then-quiet dispute about whether to keep the public administration major open at the behest of Auburn’s athletics programs, according to the lawsuit. A new dean, Joseph Aistrup, was appointed.

There's an instructive side story. Imagine a former pro football player with some math chops conducting a clinic on "disproportionate participation".

Football player and mathematician John Urschel, who at the time was playing for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and who has no connection to Auburn, raised the issue in late 2014, however, arguing in a blog post that that the high density of Auburn players majoring in public administration only had a one in three undecillion chance of occurring randomly.

"A stunning 23 out of the 48 upperclassmen student athlete football players are enrolled in public administration," Urschel wrote. "Logically, it must be a fairly common major, right? This is where things take a turn for the worse. As of last spring, only 88 of the 11,402 upperclassmen in the whole university were majoring in public administration!"

In other words, Stern's lawsuit said, “pretty low odds" that this was random.

The baccalaureate in public administration might be a rare sort of program, with most of the action being in the master's degree.  What were the academic profiles of the other 65 majors?  It takes some insider knowledge to understand that the M.P.A. is the main public administration degree, often open to people holding elective or appointed office irrespective of undergraduate degree, and that this Auburn program is eligibility studies without the taint of communication or underwater basketweaving.

Stern shared some of this information with The Wall Street Journal, which published an explosive article just ahead of 2015’s football season. The article said that in 2013 about half of students majoring in public administration at Auburn played sports, including nearly all the top players on the football team. The Journal quoted emails from athletics officials internally lobbying for the major, as well. In one case, an official wrote that “If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline.” In another, an athletics official seemed to be offering money to fund the public administration program, which Stern considered an “institutional bribe.” Stern was quoted in the Journal as describing Auburn athletics as a “second university” in its power.

There has to be a public administration degree, or perhaps an economics department, for Auburn's football team to be proud of, right?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Christmas rush is upon us, and every locomotive capable of running is in use.  We never lack for material, do we?  Beware "intellectuals".  "The typical intellectual more and more fancies himself or herself as being a member of the planning board for society’s Shining Tomorrow from which will be eradicated – in the name of love, course – all want, fear, unhappiness, hate, danger, and differences among humans."  Speaking of flights of fancy: "Demonstrators drew attention to the worsening crisis of fuel poverty and called on lawmakers to pick up more of the tab for skyrocketing bills, fund home insulation, and accelerate clean energy production—all of which would be made easier by enacting a stronger tax on oil and gas corporations' windfall profits."  Speaking of that Shining Tomorrow:  "While you ponder that, here’s another question: when are Democrats going to condemn their party’s constant erosions of the Constitution and the rule of law? Their efforts to erode Federalism, abolish the electoral college, add states to tack on Democrat Senators, weaponizing the IRS, FBI and DOJ, squat on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 10th and 14th Amendments, circumvent the First Amendment via 'public/private partnership' between Big Tech and the Democrat Party, weaponize “Emergency Orders”, pack the SCOTUS?" That's why the Sunday shows are so annoying. “You can’t come out against someone who supports suspending the Constitution?”

Meanwhile, there's real life.  "The economy is still atrocious. The job market is hot but so is inflation. Interest rates are going to continue to go up. Crime is still a problem that now the media is willing to report on. There’s still a crisis at the border. There’s still a fundamental lack of leadership in the world. And the voters are concerned about all these things."  And the epistemic closure in our ruling circles is destructive.  "American liberalism has remarkably come to resemble nineteenth-century British Tory Radicalism, an aristocratic sensibility that combined strong support for centralized monarchical power with a paternalistic concern for the poor."  Make that paternalistic disdain.  "Our 'betters' in tech, media, and government have gaslighted us so often, we can never believe a word they say again."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

PASS THE POPCORN.

It doesn't matter that Bernie Sanders wrote the 2020 Democrat platform, and Dementia Joe and the rest of the gerontocracy have been attempting to implement as much of it as they can within the margin of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and now a Republican House of Representative.  A year ago, I noted, "[T]he communist on corporatist fratricide is taking precisely the form I anticipated."  Yes, in the intervening year, there is a new infrastructure porkulus, putting local governments on the hook for future repairs of the shiny new bridges or water mains the federal money went to, and an abridged "build back better" took shape as the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

But now, Dementia Joe wants to change the order of the Democrats' presidential primaries, and the communist wing doubts that it's about "equity."

President Joe Biden has directed the Democratic National Committee to reduce the danger that progressives might effectively challenge him in the 2024 presidential primaries. That’s a key goal of his instructions to the DNC last week, when Biden insisted on dislodging New Hampshire—the longtime first-in-the-nation primary state where he received just 8 percent of the vote and finished fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary. No wonder Biden wants to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina, where he was the big primary winner.

The White House and mainstream journalists have echoed each other to assert that Biden would face no serious challenge to renomination if he runs again. But his blatant intrusion into the DNC’s process for setting the primary calendar is a sign of anxiety about potential obstacles to winning renomination.

Unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries, South Carolina is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket won’t come close to winning in deep-red South Carolina in 2024. But that state—which Biden obviously sees as vital to his renomination—has a party apparatus dominated by Biden’s powerful corporatist ally, Congressman James Clyburn.

James Clyburn, who is another of the Democrats' gerontocrats, is apparently not socialist enough for the Common Dreams crowd. Thus a primary challenge is desirable.

From health care, extreme economic inequality, labor rights and racial justice to military spending, foreign policy and the climate emergency, voters in Democratic primaries need to hear crucial issues debated.

The current prevailing attitudes are retrograde. While Democratic politicians and pundits weigh in on whether Biden should run for president again, his party’s voters are presumed to be little more than spectators. But the decision on whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024 shouldn’t be his alone. A party that has been emphasizing the importance of democracy should not be so eager to short-circuit it in the presidential nominating process.

Very few congressional Democrats have been willing to publicly depart from the party line that Biden would be a fine standard-bearer. The few dissenting voices among them are usually furtive.

We have much to look forward to.

A FUTURE PLOT COMPLICATION FOR THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC.

Kurt Schlichter has been writing a series of novels about an internal split of the United States into coastal areas controlled by the communist wing of the Democrats as the People's Republic of North America, and a surviving United States of America with fewer states.  In a few of those novels, the Democrats create a People's Militia out of liberated prisoners.  "The formula is simple enough: arm some former felons, tell them they are facing a race and class enemy, condition them to think of that enemy is "deplorable" (an Americanized version of Untermenschen), then turn them loose." That works to deal with the cowed normals within the People's Republic, but it doesn't work so well in the contested territory, or the United States, where people with field or military experience have better fire discipline.

Here's the plot complication.  Vladimir Putin is apparently freeing prisoners and turning them into irregulars.  It isn't working so well.  "They’re finally realizing they’ve been duped." They're moping off, or turning themselves in to Ukrainians, and asking not to be returned in any prisoner swaps. In addition, the recruitment videos include recorded executions of deserters.

About 20 armed inmates fled from the frontline in occupied Donetsk in recent days and the Russian military was forced to launch a manhunt for members of its own team, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Thursday. Three of the “fugitives” were killed in the ensuing search, Ukrainian authorities said, wryly noting: “Beat your own, so that others are afraid, as they say.”

The hunt was reportedly still on for the other fleeing inmates.

Even the people who do their hitch, and earn their freedom, return to Mother Russia with whatever bad memories combat brings, and their criminal skills intact.

THE SUCCESSION STILL MATTERS.

Not the British Monarchy, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.  In that post, the worst case scenario was a protracted losing streak going into Bears Week.  Reality, now that the two wins over the Bears are in hand, is not that gloomy.

Although the Packers entered their long-awaited bye week at 5-8 following a 28-19 victory over Chicago, they are still alive in the NFC playoff chase.

While the Minnesota Vikings can clinch the NFC North title by beating or tying the Detroit Lions, the Packers would finish 9-8 if they can win out, beginning with their “Monday Night Football” post-bye matchup at home against the fading Los Angeles Rams (currently 3-9).

Those "fading Rams" are now 4-9 after a replacement quarterback took advantage of some Las Vegas errors for a last minute win on Thursday, and they'll be coming to Titletown rested.

The succession, though, still matters.

With Rodgers’ injuries, the team’s long-shot playoff chances and Love’s strong showing in 10 fourth-quarter snaps against Philadelphia two weeks ago, it would make sense to take a look at Love and other youngsters during the final month.

Even Rodgers himself acknowledged the possibility of not playing once the team is eliminated from playoff contention, although in 2018, after the firing of Mike McCarthy with four games left to play, Rodgers still started all four games before suffering a concussion in the season finale against Detroit.

“Look, I’d love to finish the season out. But I understand this is a business,” Rodgers said. “There’s a lot of us older guys who play a decent amount and they might want to see some younger guys play.

“Hopefully, we don’t have to have that conversation. But if that conversation comes up, I’ll approach that with an open mind and without any bitterness or resentment,” he said.

Best case scenario, the new quarterback continues to develop, the young receivers gain experience, and the transition to another quality quarterback occurs.  First, though, let's see what the remaining four games bring.

(A historical note: in the 1940s, the pro football season was already over by now.  With this eighteen week schedule, there's football almost to when pitchers and catchers report.)

AS TIME GOES BY.

Christopher Flannery provides a back story or three to Casablanca.

The film premiered on Thanksgiving Day 1942, just two weeks after the city of Casablanca in the real world had surrendered to American forces. The premiere was sold out and, after opening titles, the first thing the 1,500 people in the theater would see on the big screen was “a revolving globe,” which, as the script describes, “turns briefly into a contour map of Europe, then into a flat map. Superimposed over the map are scenes of refugees fleeing from all sections of Europe by foot, wagon, auto, and boat, and all converging upon one point on the tip of Africa—Casablanca.”

Where the refugees without papers or pull wait and wait and wait.

In the film, if you pay attention, it’s the first week of December, 1941. America is far away and seemingly asleep. But here in the Vichy-controlled African port city of Casablanca, the grim reality of Nazi tyranny casts its shadow over everything. The emotional turning point of the film is a scene in Rick’s Café, where Nazi officers begin singing the German patriotic song Die Wacht am Rhine, [c.q.] whereupon the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid, orders with Rick’s approval the house band to strike up La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.

The most stirring part of the scene is played by LeBeau, the young French girl we know as Yvonne, who stands up to join in the song. We have seen her, having been spurned by Rick, coming into the bar on the arm of a German officer, an act of treachery during those times that was common and would be severely punished after the war. But now we see her showing her true colors, standing up for her country and its cause. This is where her true loyalty lies. Tears are streaming down her face as she cries, “Vive la France!” and “Vive la démocratie!”

And she wasn’t the only one with tears streaming down her face. One of the American born actors, who played the doorman Abdul at Rick’s Café, noticed many of his fellow actors shedding real tears during that scene, and recalled, “I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees.”

Almost all of the 75 actors and actresses cast in Casablanca were immigrants, refugees from more than 30 different countries, most of them in war-torn Europe. Of the 14 actors given screen credit, only three were born in the United States. The living experience of Nazi tyranny, and the living experience of the fight for freedom were overwhelmingly present on the studio set in Burbank, California. Their own living experience of Nazi tyranny and of the fight for freedom that was still going on and was still uncertain, made those scenes overwhelming in their effects on the souls of those refugees. They are singing and weeping with souls full of defiance for tyranny and resolution on behalf of the cause of freedom.

The French, apparently, regard Mme. LeBeau's performance in Casablanca right up there with Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People as a symbol of French resistance to tyranny.

IT WAS NOT GIVEN TO ME TO FINISH THE TASK.

For years, I have contemplated the dubious writing skills of university seniors, and wished for the railroad custom of time-slipping the English department, meaning I get extra pay for doing the work somebody else should have done.  I don't care if you're all into semiotics or loopy French philosophy, or potted political economy.  It does no good to expose new matriculants to recondite concepts they're not capable of understanding, let alone explaining.

Time slip or not, I still have sufficient F.U. money to spout off.  It's up to others, such as Houston's Adam Ellwanger, to continue the task.

I am one of the few tenured English professors at my university who still teach freshman writing courses. This is a task that many faculty avoid: the writing is often very poor, making for demanding teaching and grading. For these reasons, the freshman sequence is often taught by lecturers, graduate students, and untenured faculty. This trend holds across the nation.

That works about as well as boot camp without senior noncoms.

I work at a large, urban university in Texas, where a high proportion of our students are from minority groups. As the freshman course begins each semester, I ask the students for the total number of polished, revised, typed pages of writing they produced during their entire senior year of high school. In the years prior to the pandemic, the answers typically ranged from 10 to 20 pages across all their courses over 9 months of schooling. Students admitted after the beginning of COVID-19 have reported even less: generally between 4 and 12 pages.

Anything less than 40 pages of formal, revised, graded writing over the course of the senior year will probably ensure that a student struggles with the workload of the freshman year of college. In practice, college freshmen are being asked to produce four times as much writing as most did during their last year of high school…in one-third of the time.

It should come as no surprise that for many students this is an impossible task. Consider also that instructors’ expectations regarding the quality of writing is significantly higher in post-secondary institutions.

It's on the institutions of higher education to make the high schools liable for their delivery of Distressed Material.  Perhaps that is too much to ask, even at Christmas, when you'd better hope Santa's list of who is Naughty or Nice is accurate and legible.  Professor Ellwanger sees the problem.

Teachers could put lower expectations on students, but that ensures that students with average and better-than-average skills learn nothing new. The most under-prepared students get a shot at getting a passing grade, but they also learn very little. Ultimately, removing any rigor from the course simply incentivizes mediocrity.

There are really only two ways to address these issues: either rehabilitate high school curricula to ensure college readiness or make college admission much harder to achieve. For a variety of reasons, neither of these solutions is practicable at this moment. The catastrophic consequences of our pandemic-era policies continue to compound.

The students, though, might have figured out that wearing down the standards by refusing to go along might work.

“The vast majority of students (87%) say they have felt at least one of their college classes was too challenging and should have been made easier by the professor,” the survey found.

However, 71 percent of students spend fewer than 10 hours per week on studying, and a total of 87 percent of students spend fewer than 15 hours per week hitting the books.

The survey organization found that about one-third of students who think they work hard fail to put in more than five hours a week into schoolwork. “But of the 64% who say they put in a lot of effort, one-third also say they spend less than 5 hours a week studying and on homework,” the group reported.

The rot has been a long time in coming. It is reversible, but that's not how contemporary administrators roll.

“Students first need to adjust their expectations about the nature and purpose of education,” [National Review contributor Stanley] Kurtz said, responding to the minimal effort put in by students, despite many thinking they are working hard.

“In a proper college classroom, students come to understand that there aren’t enough hours in a day or years in a lifetime to drink in or grapple with the choices offered by the greatest pieces of literary, philosophical, or religious thought,” he said.

“Professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way should be rewarded with promotions, prizes, and praise,” Kurtz said. “Colleges should compete to hire them. Administrators who discourage, punish, or dismiss professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way—like the professor of organic chemistry fired by NYU—should themselves be dismissed and replaced.”

Unfortunately, Student Affairs types are too prone to find "disparate impacts" in any application of standards, and that diminishes the diversity, inhibits the inclusion, and erodes the equity.  Never mind that diversity, inclusion, and equity of that form is a long-term suicide mission for a no-longer-higher education.

Kurtz also expressed some concern for how this trend could hinder the future workforce. “Obviously, students coddled with reduced expectations for work in college will fail in the workforce, or corrupt it, or both,” Kurtz said. “That said, the solution requires more than demands for increased work and discipline—although that is certainly part of the picture.”

To appropriate another academic worship-word, that course is not sustainable.

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

I still don't care who gets the credit.

What did I tell you in 2005? "Huh? I'll never lack for work explaining the backward-bending labor supply curve.  The Left and the Right have been trading shots for years over whether it's unions or economic growth that contributed to rising wages, and whether the shorter workweek antedated the Fair Labor Standards Act."  Did I change my mind in 2011?  "That's long been a pet cause at Cold Spring Shops, although it's something more likely to emerge out of a multitude of small decisions long before any new Fair Labor Standards Act codifies it."

Bet on emergence.

Turns out, less really is more.

That’s the consensus among a group of companies that participated in a six-month experiment to downsize the work week from 40 hours over five days to 32 hours over four, with no reduction in pay.

In the end, the vast majority — company and worker, both — said they were hooked on the concept, with nearly everyone saying it was unlikely they’ll ever go back to normal.

Bear in mind, dear reader, that "normal" used to mean on the clock, all the time, whether that was for pay or for performance.

A LEGACY, BUT NO "UNSINKABLE" IN THE MARKETING MATERIALS.

Book a transatlantic passage, get promotional materials from transatlantic carriers.  "Today, Cunard White Star Service® is a lasting legacy of our historical connection to the White Star Line and honors the golden era of these elegant and luxurious vessels." Which luxurious vessels, though?  "When the construction of the Queen Mary stopped in 1931, only one year after work began, the British Government loaned Cunard the funds to finish constructing Queen Mary and build a sister ship (Queen Elizabeth). Cunard White Star came together when a new company was formed in May 1934 with Cunard owning a 62% share. In 1947, Cunard bought the remaining 38% share from White Star’s creditors."

The combined company sought Royal Assent to name ships after consorts who became Dowager Queen and Queen Mother to come up with a new naming convention.  White Star's liners had names ending in -ic, such as Britannic, whilst Cunard's liners had names ending in -ia, such as Britannia.

The choice of White Star Academy as a name for the training program for the staff is on point, as White Star tended to emphasize the lavish onboard experience, to the extent that is possible at sea, while Cunard emphasized the speed of crossing, holding the Blue Riband until after the War.

YEAH, HERE'S HOW YOU GET THAT YOUNGER DEMOGRAPHIC.

Apparently, the poobahs of public radio recognized that they had a senescence problem.

Power Line's Steven Hayward found out how they fixed it.

every liberal news show pic.twitter.com/APQiQG8ysp

— Tyler Fischer (@TyTheFisch) July 3, 2022

Even got the look right. Enjoy.

ARE WE STILL HIGGLING OVER THE SAME THINGS?

Fifteen years ago, I wrote,

There's more action in Congress on an immigration bill, perhaps with more border enforcement, and perhaps without any amnesty. A Time reporter visits Illinois and files a case for amnesty. He sensibly observes that the perceived unfairness of granting immediate amnesty to people who haven't been waiting a long time for legal entry might, just might, be evidence of flaws in the legal procedure.

Oh, there were flaws in the legal procedure then, and there still are.  Ask any director of graduate studies about the joys involved in student visas, or any academic personnel officer about the joys of securing work permits or permanent residency for new faculty.  The flaws, though, are interconnected, whether we're dealing with restrictive border enforcement then, or whatever passes for border enforcement now.

The two procedures cannot be tweaked in isolation. The more onerous the legal admission procedures are, the larger is the pool of potential illegal migrants, and under some circumstances that pool will be more skewed toward people with desirable skills.

That post continued, by developing the technical details of the argument, and if you want more technical details, I've got more.  There's a lengthy Cato Institute policy analysis looking at the effects of changing temporary worker status for Mexican nationals on border apprehensions in the United States, which concludes

This analysis shows that guest worker visas can provide an important avenue for reducing border apprehensions by driving would‐be illegal border crossers into legal temporary visas. The periods during which Bracero and H‑2 visas were issued in higher numbers provide critical lessons for the administration and Congress to understand how best to use guest worker visas to further reduce apprehensions—both for Mexicans and non-Mexicans—at a low cost to taxpayers. Perhaps the most crucial insight is that discretion matters. Top officials must tell lower officials that an important goal of these programs is to reduce illegal immigration, as INS officials did in the 1950s and again in the 1980s.

Much of the current foot traffic at the southern border, the authors argue, is a consequence of labor shortages in some United States labor markets.

Politics, alas, gets in the way of the logic.

On the surface, this is a win for both parties.  The Democrats will have 2 million new voters in the form of DREAMers and new asylum-seekers, who are likely to be future Democrats voters.  The Republicans will have border security, the removal of migrants, and the continuation of COVID-19-based restrictions.

The Democrats are claiming that the lame-duck session is the last opportunity to pass immigration legislation.  They could also claim that 3 out of the 5 points of the deal are in favor of the GOP; hence, the GOP should sign on.

I grow weary of that "importing Democrat voters" talk.  Democrats give the impression, much of the time, that they don't like their country, and it should be straightforward for Republicans to flip some of those DREAMers, who might have earned citizenship in the military or helped establish a family business, thus making such a proposal even more favorable to Republicans.  If you're a polemicist, you engage in polemics.

The WaPo laments that President Donald Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller, and "right-wing media propagandists" such as Tucker Carlson "amplify that toxic message to enrage the base" — i.e., it scares GOP lawmakers from compromising on their principles and giving Democrats easy victories.

Yes, it is ironic that propagandists such as the WaPo have the audacity to attack others as propagandists, but the sanctimonious rarely have any self-awareness.

The WaPo was unknowingly highlighting the importance of the MAGA movement. Trump, Miller, and Carlson are the few standing not only against the Democrats, but also against establishment Republicans, who readily capitulate before the Democrats.

I don't know, a president who defeated an even less appealing opponent, and an amen corner that hasn't fared so well in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections might want to rethink its message.

Amusingly, deep in that essay comes -- recognition of the flaws in the legal procedure.

The presence of illegal aliens is a burden on the taxpayers and the facilities and infrastructure meant for citizens. If illegal migrants work for less than minimum wage and without benefits, once again, the citizen could see a drop in wage or be rendered unemployed. If the illegal migrants are of the criminal variety, once again the victims of these crimes will be citizens. Usually, it is the working class who suffers from this.

In the end, every country has laws that have to be followed, and immigration laws are not at all different.

The only way to enter or temporarily work in the U.S. is to apply for a visa and undergo a thorough background check and an interview. If the applicant clears all of these phases, he can enter or temporarily work in the U.S. The duration of stay and work also depends upon the visa permits.

The only path to citizenship is by naturalization, by marriage, through your parents, or through the military. Each route has its own set of specific requirements that must be followed.

I have to wonder how many lawful residents and citizens willingly participate in the underground economy that first paragraph suggests.  I also wonder whether the difficulties, whether as a legal or illegal immigrant, in achieving that status are so trivial as to make people go through all that trouble at the border simply to go on welfare.  The third paragraph, though, is the key to my argument, and the Cato analysis appears to bear it out: more expeditious vetting and receipt of work permits reduces the illegal or hope-for-the best entry.  I suspect more expeditious vetting would be welcomed by those graduate studies directors and personnel managers.

THE PELTZMAN EFFECT, AT ONE REMOVE.

Automobiles go faster because they have brakes.  "Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences, particularly where a safety appliance changes the incentives to live more dangerously."

What happens, though, when the person using the safety appliance is not the person living more dangerously?  "Motorists Punish Helmet-Wearing Cyclists With Close Passes, Confirms Data Recrunch."  A University of Bath psychologist called Ian Walker apparently made himself a human subject, and took notes.

Half the time he wore a bicycle helmet and half the time he didn’t. The results showed motorists tended to pass him more closely when he rode wearing a helmet. Such “punishment passes” can also lead to collisions, collisions which can result in injury and death – and not to those guilty of the dangerous overtakes.

Walker suggested that drivers believe cyclists who wear helmets are more serious, experienced and predictable than those who ride without, and motorists, therefore, overtake them with less care. Drivers may also wrongly assume that cycle helmets – usually made from expanded-polystyrene – are forms of armor that will protect cyclists in any impact from motor vehicles. Cycle helmets are not designed for such collisions (they do not even protect against concussions.)

Jake Olivier and Scott Walter of the University of New South Wales took Walker’s original data and recrunched it, claiming in 2013 that “bicycle helmet wearing is not associated with close motor vehicle passing.”

The things people will do for Minimal Publishable Units.  I suspect the now somewhat old article got another mention on infrastructure Twitter was for the opportunity to deplorable-shame those "punishment passers" (if they even exist).  It's worth reminding people that the point of doing research is to get some sort of handle both on the truth and on the margin of error.  "Whether or not bicycle helmets offer whole-population safety benefits is a surprisingly fractious debate among academics – there is no settled science on the matter."

SHUT UP AND SING.

The Annoying Left, perhaps because it's a coalition of the unemployable, always manages to have prepared posters and rhyming chants, and, generally, all the good songs.  That phenomenon even gets people who should know better noting the return of the old chestnuts such as We Shall Overcome or We Shall Not Be Moved as harbingers of Something Gone Wrong.  Yes, something might have gone wrong, but look for Government Overreach or Expert Failure, and get to work.

Who knew, though, that when I asked, "Are there any good wokie songs these days, or is their repertoire limited to chanting and REEEEE-ing?" that I hadn't stumbled on an E-T-T-S moment, elaborated on by a Soy Trotsky called Paul Engler.  "Music is making a comeback in movement spaces, as organizers rediscover how song culture strengthens the capacity to create social change."  Well, yes, the repertoire has worn thin, but is it really necessary to publish a post only slightly shorter than an article on Soviet inventions of things that reads like culture studies?

Once we began incorporating singing into our work, we discovered that there was a great appetite among activists for reviving song culture. But it did take some work to create an environment where people feel comfortable embracing music-making.

One key step was conditioning people to be creators—not passive consumers—of song.

We live in a consumer-capitalist society that trains us to be purchasers and observers, rather than active participants, with regard to the production of art, music and other forms of culture. This is a departure from the norms of almost all ancient cultures, which relied on people to produce their own music and art. The shift has negative effects on social movements, and on democratic society as a whole.

Keep reading, there's probably a "commodification" or two in there.  But is that even necessary?  I mean, if you believe that borrowing the rhyming abilities of rappers to improvise something better than "hey-hey, ho-ho, [something that bugs us] has gotta go" or "What do we want? [Something foolish!] When do we want it? NOW!" or the unironic mob yelling "Show me what democracy looks like!  THIS is what democracy looks like!"  by all means go for it.

When we speak, and even more when we sing, our bodies emit vibrations. By singing we can express and channel the emotions of the moment more profoundly and lastingly than we can through speech alone. By producing the same sounds and vibrations at the same time, groups of people literally can get on the same wavelength with one another, creating a profound collective experience.

People who have studied the way that music works in religious communities have observed that activities such as chanting magnify a group's power by concentrating its voice into one chord and one breath.

So, too, might trashing a liquor store create a profound collective experience.  Protest, the opiate of the Annoying Left.

II. ADVENT.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train winter food drive resumes operation, after two years of social distancing, with one train each for the United States and Canada.

Three years of corona tyranny, and, Stateside, two years of promiscuous money printing, have left the food pantries in a precarious place, with fewer donations, and more clients, including, in many cases, clients who used to be contributors.

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

What it's about ... the train called at a crossing hard by the high school and one of the elementary schools, at lunchtime, and the kindergarteners walking to trackside behind had a successful food drive, if the hampers their teachers were carrying was any indication. The local food bank left with a fully-loaded pickup truck. The preschoolers got their fresh air, and more than a few of them brought canned goods.

If you have the means, and the train is not coming to jog your memory, consider contributing generously to your local food banks this Festive Season.

THE EXTRA BOARD ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

The Cold Spring Shops locution, "marking off" that signals a pause in posting, comes from a practice in railroading whereby a railroader, upon reaching his home terminal, takes himself out of the rotation of crews to tend to errands, or perhaps to mark back up in the hopes of landing a more favorable assignment upon rising again to the top of the rotation.  That latter practice used to be called "playing the board," and it could engender ill will among the people who discovered that their ascension of a spot or two got them on the Dead Freight or dogcatching the train that broke down, or (until Amtrak created its own pool of crews) having to run the late-running window train.  The practice had been codified so far that even yard crews, who have a better chance of being home on a regular basis, might have this sort of contractual protection.

An extra Engineer who is granted permission to xxxx off or to be out of place will retain his position on the extra board if he reports back for duty before his turn is called. Failing to report for duty before he is called for a yard assignment or for a run out of the terminal, his turn will be removed from the board and he will remain off for a minimum of twelve (12) hours and then be marked up last out upon reporting.

Not bad: something comes up, railroader marks off, takes care of whatever has come up, marks back up, no harm, no foul.  That, predictably, does not sit well with bean counters who wonder whether the extra board is too large, if people can take some personal time without disrupting the rotation of crews.  If train crews get paid only by the trip, the size of the extra board might not look like a big deal, but when each person on the payroll is eligible for fringe benefits irrespective of trips taken, there's an incentive to reduce the number of people drawing fringe benefits, which means turning over the extra board more quickly.  That's the same incentive that the unionized automobile makers face to rely more on overtime, rather than expand their work forces.

UNDEFENDABLE IN NEW ORLEANS.

Years ago, Loyola of New Orleans economist Walter Block published Defending the Undefendable: The Pimp, Prostitute, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue's Gallery of American Society.  That Goodreads page provides the expected range of reactions to the deliberately provocative title.  The book might be an example of being outrageous to make a point.  There is evidently a sequel.

Professor Block is still teaching at Loyola, and the call-out crowd has come for his version of outrageousness.

Loyola University New Orleans has spent the last two and a half years subjecting professor Walter Block to investigations and sanctions for his protected speech. The university has targeted Block for everything from his teaching of particular economic theories to his classroom discussion of Gandhi and Hitler. Yet all of the speech in question is squarely protected by Loyola’s strong promises of free speech and academic freedom.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is on the Cold Spring Shops "nice" list for charitable giving, is giving the Diversity Weenies grief for their undefendable, or is it indefensible, assaults on academic inquiry, which have been going on for a while.

Block’s trouble began in June 2020 when students created and circulated a change.org petition calling for his termination. The students accused Block of holding “racist and sexist” beliefs, exemplified, they claimed, by some of Block’s alleged statements on slavery, the gender wage gap, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A group of students sent a letter to then-university president Tania Tetlow calling for action against Block, citing a New York Times article that quoted Block as saying slavery was “not so bad.” (The accusations ignored that Block received a settlement in a defamation suit against the Times in which he claimed the paper had taken his words out of context.) Tetlow acknowledged the students’ concerns, but admirably stood by the university’s promises of academic freedom in explaining the decision not to punish Block.

However, the administration would not have Block’s back for very long. In April 2021, Loyola determined various comments Block made in his Intermediate Microeconomics course — including his use of the word “Oriental,” his teaching of the “marital asymmetry hypothesis” as an explanation for the gender wage gap, and his reference to slave owners in a discussion about authoritarianism — had created a hostile learning environment. The university required Block to complete diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

And Block continued to face sanctions and investigations throughout 2021. In July he was sanctioned for discussing wages and productivity in his Principles of Microeconomics class after he used a hypothetical premise in which he and two students — one of whom was a student of color — picked cotton at different speeds to explain that employers pay the highest wage to the most productive workers. A student also complained about another of Block’s illustrations of worker productivity, asserting that he invoked stereotypes about Asians and Harvard graduates not being good at basketball to explain why the New York Knicks did not accurately estimate the ability of Taiwanese-American player Jeremy Lin. Loyola forced Block to apologize to the student and imposed a mandatory review of his syllabus before each semester.

I bet that "out of context" reference involving slavery is a reference to Time on the Cross, a much-misunderstood, particularly in passing use, economic history of slavery, and I suppose we should be grateful that the professor, who is in his ninth decade, is not being offered the Socrates choice of ostracism or a cup of hemlock.

Next, in October, Vice Provost Uriel Quesada emailed Block to inform him of a complaint concerning comments and readings from his Law and Economics course. The allegations included Block’s use of the terms “Oriental” and “atta girl,” although Block used them in the context of explaining he had “just turned 80, and my language skills are sort of embedded in me based on past experience, so if I say something that is problematic, just let me know, and I will apologize for it and we will go on and I’ll try not to.”

That's apparently no longer good enough, although the Foundation staff are still on the case.  Those latter-day inquisitors at the Loyola that is not a basketball school have to be disciplined, or perhaps persuaded to step out of line and pursue their hobbies, if they have any.

THEORY, WITHOUT TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS.

Put in Normal English, the difficulty of calling a line of inquiry that is devoid of testable implications theory is this.

Filtered through an economics lens, it's loosely this. Authors have private information. Readers have private information. Authors of letters to family or friends of long standing have private information that includes the reader's likely response to the author's choice of words. Authors can push readers' buttons, or not, accordingly. Authors of letters to a newspaper, let alone of essays or books, cannot be sure what readers' buttons will be pushed, or in what way. That, alone, makes the construction of any formal system of understanding texts sufficiently rigorous and replicable to be referred to as a theory, let alone as Theory, difficult. Ad hoc is more like it.

It's not possible to conceal the absence of a formal system with wordnoise.

This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus.

George Harbison is being too kind when he describes that as a statement of fact. "Note that this is a statement of fact, rather than a reference to a topic that is to be discussed in class. In fact, it is the basis of the class, and it reveals its true agenda: indoctrinating students in cultural Marxism." It's more like a testament of faith. It's not Marxism.

If you're still "conceptualizing" theories you're still a long way from "taxonomizing" anything. You can conceive of unicorns and dragons, but without any actual unicorns or dragons, any assignment of unicorns to the mammals or dragons to the reptiles can never be validated against evidence.

It only gets more amusing from there.

And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced.

It's not enough to conceptualize potential taxonomies, now they're searching for genealogies and epistemologies, and "constellate" sounds even weirder than the obligatory "interrogate".  Don't say I didn't give you a guide to uncovering the rot.

Here's how Ms Shaw puts it:  "But let’s make it our job as a society to encourage each other to find replicable and falsifiable evidence to support our views, and to logically argue our positions."  Note: logically argue.  Dressing it up in word-noise and pretending to be a sophisticate?  No.

And the doddering ficus keeps wanting taxpayers to pick up the bad debts victim studies majors racked up learning this stuff. Sad!  And depressingly too common.  "Fifty years ago, history departments did history and English departments did English; today, both disciplines muddle their missions by indulging in half-baked progressive politics."  Yes, and their graduates fail the market tests, and at best, the students are picking up a potted version of political economy.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Our freedom is not yet restored.  "Remember when we were initially told the medical community needed two weeks to flatten the curve and get a handle on overcrowded hospitals? Then that turned into indefinite lockdowns and mandates. Before we knew it, we were living in an authoritarian country, not living as free Americans."  An authoritarian country with a new sort of monopoly capitalist, to boot.  "[O]ne of the character tokens [Parker Brothers] made sure to retain was the top hat, representing the top-hatted banker – a recognisable cipher for greed and indifference in Depression-era America. Perhaps the ‘crypto slob’ – a mop-headed millennial burnishing his climate-change credentials – ought to be this century’s equivalent."  It could all have been avoided.  "From the very beginning of the pandemic, in fact, there were legions of pedigreed epidemiologists and other scientists—many of whom later signed the Great Barrington Declaration—who correctly held that viruses cannot be extinguished via draconian quarantines and other clumsy one-size-fits-all public health interventions; and that when it came to coronaviruses in particular, it was doubtful whether even vaccines—which had never been successful with coronaviruses—could defeat the latter’s natural propensity to mutate and spread."

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

THERE ARE MARKET TESTS FOR CITY GOVERNMENTS.

A recent Strong Towns post opens by acknowledging that reality.

At Strong Towns, we’ve never been opposed to taxation or to governments that charge fees for services like water, sewer, or electricity. To function over the long term, local governments must have revenues that exceed their expenses (in accounting terms, this is called “profit”). Local government is the way we collaborate in a place but, just because the role of local government is to serve the community, that does not remove the constraint of needing to have profit. They must run a surplus.

Ignore that constraint, and bad things happen. Places fall apart. Calls for help are unanswered. People suffer.

What follows, though, is a scary manifestation of the extent to which local governments go to maintain the grand fiction that somebody else is paying for the services.

If we are going to build a mile of new road, extend a pipe to a new subdivision, or annex property into the city, what are the real financial implications of that transaction? And not just the money we get, but what is the cost of the liability we take on?

Cities don’t answer these questions, and standard accounting practices don’t prompt them to, and so local leaders routinely find themselves over-committed and under-resourced, especially a couple of decades after they’ve experienced a growth spurt and those liabilities—all those miles of road, street, sidewalk, and pipe—are now in need of maintenance. When this happens, cities frequently turn to the assessment process.

Illegally assessing for routine maintenance is the most common way that residents experience a lack of transparent local accounting. A property owner will pay taxes and fees for decades, believing that they are paying, in part, for the maintenance of the community’s essential infrastructure. They have the impression that, when the street in front of their home needs repairs, the city will fix it. This is a reasonable expectation because this is how things are supposed to happen.

Here I was, treating that Monopoly hazard as business as usual. "I wonder if there's a way to sell more widespread road tolling as a way to provide property tax relief, since in much of the country that old Monopoly hazard, being assessed for street repairs, is still part of the town budget."

It's annoying enough to draw that Chance card.

It's got to be more annoying to get it in real life, for street repairs, or, as is now the case, for upgrading the streetlights.  Now put yourself in the position of a property owner getting hit with an improper assessment.

A direct assessment is a charge the municipality levies on a specific property as part of a project. To be legal, the project must increase the value of the property by at least as much as the amount being assessed. If you’d like to know more, I wrote an article earlier this year about a judge’s decision declaring that St. Paul’s direct assessment program is illegal. That article explains a lot of the nuances of direct assessments that I won’t repeat here.

Somewhere, Bastiat is nodding in understanding.

Some property owners even report having prior assessments on the same property they are still paying off. If a group of these property owners got together and hired the same attorney, they would kill this project.

Of course, then their road will fall apart, and that’s the underlying problem. Even though tax rates are relatively high, the properties don’t generate revenue to pay for the maintenance of their own road, let along all the collector and arterials roads the city has obsessively built over the years (including my favorite stroad to nowhere, which I think it approaching 15 years in place without any development).

And this is where the city is stuck. They have an insolvent development model, and their residents expect more services than they are willing to pay for—more than their tax base can support. Instead of reckoning with that fact, instead of changing their approach, they convince themselves that they can do something illegal (direct assess for maintenance), because that is more responsible than letting their roads fall apart.

If you buy a home, you should know that you will have to eventually pay an assessment for road maintenance, or so city officials tell themselves. They tell themselves this because they know it; they know that they are screwed without illegal assessments. They know it because they live it day in and day out, but their residents don’t.

The alternative to assessing the residents for street repairs is hoping that there will be another transportation porkulus and that your Member of Congress has enough juice to put your broken road into the list of projects.  "All that the periodic porkulus bills do is prolong the fiction that somehow we can rob from Peoria to fix Pittsburgh, while we rob Pittsburgh to fix Peoria."

And yet, local congestion tolls or parking rates that reflect the opportunity cost of that street space are somehow Not to be Raised in Polite Society.

PONTIFEX MAXIMUS? NARKOM?

Before Thanksgiving, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed asked his readers for suggestions to a person granted plenipotentiary powers to rule over higher education.  That plenipotentiary had the hypothetical title of "Grand Poobah for a Day."  That rank arose out of youthful recollections of Howard Cunningham's lodge, beating out "Head Honcho" (which no doubt somebody would problematize) or "Big Kahuna" (cultural appropriation, you know.)

The suggestions, themselves, are instructive, although, since it is not possible for even the Most Exalted Grand Poobah to implement them all at once, there is still reason to think of institutions of higher education as in competition with each other, and subject to some sort of market test.

Today, though, we focus on the choice of a proper honorific for that plenipotentiary.

The pop culture reference to a Grand Poobah appeared during the American High, as the elected leader of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes., at least a decade before Happy Days. The Bedrock Lodge figured in several Flintstones episodes, although the only one I recall was one devoted to the efforts of Wilma and Betty to be able to attend Lodge meetings.  That episode even featured a cross-dressing Wilma in full Water Buffalo rig, crashing the meeting.  Hanna and Barbera were out in front of women's liberation, while Gloria Steinem was still waiting tables at a Playboy club.

PASS THE POPCORN.

The gerontocracy that is the Democrat House leadership passes the torch.  The communist on corporatist fratricide continues.  "Congressman Hakeem Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but that affiliation for the heir apparent to the current House Speaker should not be taken at face value."  There's enough gridlock now that the United States will not turn into Venezuela all at once, or in the next two years.  It's not that there aren't people who would welcome such a transition.

When Nancy Pelosi announced two weeks ago that she will no longer lead House Democrats, she said: “The hour has come for a new generation to lead.” But in what direction?

Pelosi quickly endorsed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to replace her as leader. NBC News offered the common media frame: “Pelosi made history as the first female speaker of the House, while Jeffries, the current Democratic Caucus chairman, would become the first Black leader of a congressional caucus and highest-ranking Black lawmaker on Capitol Hill.”

You can count on much of the mass media to shower the 52-year-old Jeffries with accolades, largely supplied by fellow Democrats. But, overall, a closer look reveals a problematic record.

Early on, before becoming a New York state legislator, Jeffries worked for years as a corporate lawyer. In Congress—while he has taken a few progressive positions like cosponsoring Medicare for All and voting to cut 10 percent of the military budget—his emphasis has been in sync with the party establishment.

That party establishment is still soft on crime and beholden to technocratic overreach. But that's not becoming Venezuela fast enough if you write for Common Dreams.

“I’m a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now,” Jeffries told The Atlantic in August 2021. But during the same interview, Jeffries added: “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” (Ironically, Jeffries was echoing the “fierce urgency of now” phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., who was a democratic socialist.)

Jeffries likes to jab leftward. In 2016, he called Bernie Sanders a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign-policy experience.” A 2018 profile in The Economist—titled “High Hopes for Hakeem Jeffries” – concluded that he “is nearly as moderate as a safe-seat Democrat gets.” The article pointed out: "Though he supports the principle of universal healthcare coverage, he speaks of ‘the importance of market forces and getting things done in a responsible fashion.’ Quoting Ronald Reagan approvingly, he suggests this means promoting a flourishing private sector outside the ‘legitimate functions’ of government."

That's unfair to Crazy Bernie, who, recall, did honeymoon in Soviet Moscow.  To hear a Democrat conceding "legitimate functions" suggests there's still room to make the case for enumerated and limited powers.  Last time I checked, though, the so-called Progressive Caucus was not yet a majority among House Donks; and the more those kids cut up, the fewer safe seats there will be.