GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 18,068

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."  More hazardous than the latest coronavirus variant, which, apparently, more readily evades the latest vaccines, but appears to have mutated into something that doesn't "appear to be more serious" than the earlier mutations.

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.  In the United States, the restrictions themselves were deadly. "The 'experts' and leaders who pushed these failed policies need to be held accountable so they can never perpetuate an injustice like this again."

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  The emergency powers should be rescinded.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.  The most recent flight of fantasy out of Springfield, which will do nothing about that sort of crime, is a ban on some firearms.  "The law is hard to defend on logical, practical, or constitutional grounds."  There are county sheriffs who give a low priority to enforcing it.  The potbellied dictator issues empty threats to have such sheriffs fired.  As is to be expected, people stocked up on weapons ahead of the law, which might not hold up in court, being signed.

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 2,697,840 infections, up by 47,471 from last month, and 22,610 deaths, a change of 929 from the preceding report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,969,832 infections, an increase of 763,031 over last month and 40,678 deaths, adding 272 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.  End the emergency decrees.

The most recent tally of vaccinations gives around 26 million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of January 13.  The state also appears to have ended their count of the scary variants, although the page has been updated to January 1 to show a mix of Omicron variants circulating.

At the end of the fall semester, the governor trailed by 19,204.

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 has been growing only slowly.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.

THE FARCE THAT IS LIBERATING TOLERANCE.

My old "The Burden of Sixties Ideas" alluded to a distinction between reactionary and revolutionary violence, as well as to the concept of liberating tolerance, necessary because pure tolerance gives too much voice to defenders of institutions or traditions the Anointed consider oppressive.  Once upon a time, people with intellectual integrity could address those concepts in a serious way.  "At some point these acts of brazen viciousness [scaling back the public sector, to the less aggravated] are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified, an issue that has, oddly, not been widely addressed in political philosophy since Locke."

THE ROUNDHOUSE FOREMAN DOES NOT RULE THE ROUNDHOUSE.

It is often the case that a railroad shop facility is guarded by an 0-2-2-0 Mouser, and sometimes that Mouser becomes famous.  There's a rainbow bridge at the final summit.

Dirt, who became a celebrity in 15 years as the shop cat at the Nevada Northern Railway, has died, the railroad has announced on its Facebook page.

The orange and white male cat was adopted as a stray kitten by shop crews in 2008 and became famous for his coal-dust-tinted fur, photogenic nature, and regular appearance during shop tours and other special events.

The cat was at first wary of railroaders.

Dirt was discovered in the railroad’s locomotive shop all alone as a kitten in 2008. Not wanting the little cat to starve, the shop crews started providing him with cans of tuna and soft cat food. It took time, but after a while, the cat started to trust the workers, and shortly after that, the master mechanic brought him to a vet for a checkup.

After a while, the cat realized that the warmest place in the entire shop was in the cabs of the railroad’s two steam locomotives, NNRy 4-6-0 40 and 2-8-0 93. Because of that, the cat’s fur started getting dirty so the crews nicknamed it “Dirtbag.” Later it was shortened to “Dirt.”

“The engine house and machine shop are very dirty, noisy environments. In addition to the locomotives and railroad cars being moved in and out, repair work goes on all the time. Dirt got very wise, very fast, quickly figuring out where not to be when locomotives and cars were moving, or work was being performed,” the railroad’s staff wrote.

Later, he figured out the routine of the roundhouse enough to come out and show off for tourists.  "To commemorate Dirt, the railroad plans on having two life-size bronzes cast of the cat. One will serve as his gravestone, the other will be placed in the machine shop, so Dirt can continue watching over things."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Pay attention to internal migration.  "[Democrat-run states] are also beset with crime and homelessness, and they tend to have more oppressive, authoritarian governments, a fact that became evident during covid."

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

ANOTHER UNDENIABLE TRUTH?

Perhaps it is inevitable that school lunches suck.

School lunches are still unappetizing.  Once upon a time, the Milwaukee Public Schools must have had a creative writer on the payroll, to make mystery meat on a stick sound good.  In the menu published in the Thursday Milwaukee Journal, it would be mock chicken leg with a savory gravy, and it might be accompanied by golden glow salad on crisp lettuce -- that being a concoction of orange jello with carrot shavings.

I wrote that ten years ago, concluding,

A lot has changed in fifty years. The Thursday newspaper might on occasion mention Italian pizza with sausage and cheese and a tossed salad. That's what everybody got, and if it was assembled out of government surplus ingredients, all we could do was joke about it.

Perhaps not just joke, you might have heard of s*** on a stick, right?

Let's see if the current crop of students has more success.

For a year, high school students across Milwaukee have been advocating for better meals at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

On Thursday, students took that fight to MPS’ school board meeting as the board voted on a resolution to implement a “School Lunch Justice Task Force.”

That task force is aimed at allowing students a seat at the table when it comes to decisions and implementation of changes for school meals.

Eliza Palacios is a junior at Alexander Hamilton High school and a part of Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES), a student-led organization at the forefront of the fight for better school meals.

“I have a lot of friends that don't have a lot of food at home, and they depend on the school lunches,” shared Palacios. “And sometimes they won't even eat the school lunches, so they'll just go home hungry.”

I remember the Hamilton of years ago, when it was not yet a poverty pocket, in which an awful lot of fresh apples were discarded uneaten at lunch.  Those might have been locally sourced.  Back then, the school lunches were sensitive to cultural and religious needs: fish stick Fridays.  Probably frozen.

THE FACT-CHECKING ENTERPRISE, INDIFFERENT TO TRADE-OFFS.

Just for fun, I posted some captioned train photographs to Facebook.  The first showed an active four track railroad.

Yes, I was having some fun, because there was a second, less railroad-magazine worthy captioned image I also posted.

The railroad magazine editors would prefer either some sort of arty shot, or a well-lit image of the motive power and the consist.  My motive, though, was to see how Facebook's rivet counters would react.  Sure enough, within a few minutes of my posting it, there was a "partially misleading" label on it, complete with a link to what the algorithm thinks is the proper nuance.

Posts on social media suggest electric cars do not help lower climate-changing emissions because people rely on coal power to charge them. This is misleading; data shows that they still produce fewer emissions over their lifespan than gasoline-powered vehicles, even in regions where coal is burned to produce electricity for the grid.

That reminds me of a train-off petition filed by the South Shore Line in the early 1970s in which the regulator concluded that, with so few commuters using the electric cars, the additional exhaust fumes from automobiles would for the most part be offset from the reduced exhaust fumes from power plants supplying the electricity.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

College Sports, Incorporated granted players extra years of eligibility during the coronavirus shutdowns, with limited and restricted provision for additional athletic scholarships.  Thus, players on successful teams find themselves in the transfer protocols, retaining eligibility but putting their coaches in a bind.  Five Ohio State volleyball players opted to transfer, for example.  "Basically, the Buckeye seniors were caught in a roster crunch caused by the NCAA granting an extra year of eligibility to athletes affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but ending an amnesty for programs over scholarship limits after this season."  

It seems odd, unless you understand the economic way of thinking.  "'If I make a choice to keep all five on my roster, on scholarship, then I'm telling incoming freshman or players in my program, 'Hey, sorry. Not yours anymore,'' [coach Jen Oldenberg] said. 'You can do that, and I had a choice to do that, and I chose not to do that – not because I don't want these five. I want them forever.'" They can be friends for life, but eligibility runs out, and it helps to have the next player up in the program and prepared.

THERE IS SOMETHING ABSURD ABOUT A POLITY GOVERNED BY A VANGUARD.

That's an observation I made a year ago, in a meditation that concluded, "Put another way, when the relatively disengaged voters are paying more attention to politics, that's when you have a problem."  Study your history, dear reader.

MAKE HIGHER EDUCATION HIGHER AGAIN.

Maybe it's the continuing intrusion of special education, not the corona tyranny or the Diversity Weenies, that's wrecking faculty morale.  One administrator has thoughts.  "The reasons cited for the departures include burnout, low compensation, lack of remote or hybrid work options, and recent racial and political unrest—which places pressure on workplace relationships and complicates people’s sense of belonging. In addition, employees are being lured away by more competitive packages from rival colleges or organizations in other fields."  Now might not be the time to apologize for being too selective.  You won't find that in his essay, which deteriorates into a jumble of the usual buzzwords of culture studies and diversity indoctrination.  You might find some answers in working the problem.

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the future of academe. Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, captures many of them in an essay titled “The Season of Our Professorial Discontent.” He imagines a prolonged state of “Eternal Covid” in which he spends “decades delivering indifferent lectures to indifferent classes as the price of submitting little-read articles to niche journals.” If he can’t kindle the same enthusiasm in students that he brings to his teaching, Musgrave fears he will become “just a dispenser of grades.”

Indeed, the drop in student performance during the pandemic’s Zoom era has only continued after the return to in-person teaching. Faculty members often feel pressure from administrators to lower expectations for students who are struggling to meet deadlines and sometimes skipping class altogether. Earlier this year, New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr., a respected researcher and teacher, in part because students had filed a petition protesting the rigor of his organic-chemistry course. The story resonated nationally because many faculty members feel similarly trapped between disengaged students and provosts preoccupied with retention.

Eternal corona tyranny with eternal protest. Looks like a good time for academicians to think about model railroading.

THE POLITICAL AGGREGATION PROBLEM ALMOST RESULTS IN FISTICUFFS.

The past week or so has offered a salutary reproach to people who will see in the so-called two party system of the United States a stability missing from parliamentary nations, where it's bad form to bring up the Italians, the Israelis seem bent on confirming the wheeze about four congregations and six political parties being present at the minyan, and Queen Elizabeth's last official act was to ask Liz Truss to form a government only to put King Charles in the position of asking Rishi Sunak to form a government.

In the United States, in part, I submit, because the political bundles are too big, the two major parties exist to paper over differences, often under a "lesser of two evils" sort of rubric.  "That elections tend to devolve to a binary choice, and disaffected voters are often reluctant to reject a binary choice between bundles that are each horrible in their own way makes the [re-election of incumbents] more likely to be bad."  I predicted that the slim Democratic majorities taking office in 2021 in Washington would devolve into faction fighting, and the allegedly transformative legislation that came out of the 117th Congress was at the margin of one or two Democrat senators from contested states, and probably filled with earmarks and carve-outs to hold that House coalition together.

A Washington Post contributor, Perry Bacon, contends that there are "four political parties stuffed into a two-party system."  There's nothing magical about there being four coalitions, and the way in which they align themselves can change over time.  In the past two weeks, though, we might have seen that forming a government isn't as easy as past experience suggests.  I know that our civics-books view of governance is one in which the president is the head of government, but the president cannot sign any bills into law until both houses of Congress agree on what to send to the White House, and Congress can't pass anything until the House convenes, and the House can't be sworn in until they name a speaker.  Might we think of the Speaker of the House as the true head of government?

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

The Principle of Parsimony wins again.  "Russian Twitter Trolls Did Not Throw the 2016 Election to Trump."  Recall, dear reader, there were only twelve Russian spies.

Yes, [Donald Trump] did outwork all the Republican establishment hopefuls during the primary, and he did outwork Hillary Clinton, and it didn't take a Russian operative to put "basket of deplorables" and the other hectoring, condescending material into Mrs Clinton's fundraising and campaigning.

But is anyone really surprised, let alone scandalized, that foreign intelligence services do what foreign intelligence services do, which is to say, steal secrets and plant stories?  If the Soviets, er, Russians, didn't do that, that would be reason to send generals to gulag and bust colonels back to sergeants.  And there are likely more than twelve spies, er, intelligence officers, working that project.  And if Democrats were careless with their internet security, relative to Republicans, well, that's business.

Further, does anybody believe that Bernie Sanders supporters wouldn't have figured out that the Democratic National Committee was rigging things for the Dowager Empress, even without John Podesta's leaked e-mails, no matter who got them, or how they got them?  Cripes, I had the story in August 2015, before a single caucus took a vote.

Taken together, I evaluate the situation as intelligence services doing what intelligence services do, voters doing what voters do, and Mr Trump outworked Mrs Clinton.  Never attribute to malice what can be more easily ascribed to overconfidence.

Reason's Robby Soave offers a supporting argument.

This observation is well-supported by a few key findings. Just 1 percent of Twitter users absorbed about 70 percent of the so-called Russian disinformation, meaning that a tiny fraction of overall users encountered actual Russian trolls. These users were overwhelmingly partisan Republicans; there is no reason to think that masses of gullible swing voters who might have voted for Hillary Clinton were hoodwinked by Russia and opted for Trump instead.

Again, dear reader, you saw it here first.

Doesn't make it right: doesn't excuse the GRU, or whatever they call it these days, that CIA does it better; doesn't even make a case for moral equivalence. [Attempting to influence elections is] what intelligence services do. At the margin, it's probably not easily-influenced voters that carry the day.

I know I repeat myself: Stalin would have purged those twelve spies for their ineffectiveness. Robby Soave, again: "[T]he amount of time, money, and effort Russia spent on influencing social media users was a drop in the bucket compared with the work being done by the Trump and Clinton campaigns themselves, as well as the attention being paid to the candidates by U.S. media outlets."  If anything, the confirmations from these recent studies suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity among the pundit class.  "The news probably came as a surprise to many readers; unfortunately, mainstream and liberal consumers of political news have been conditioned to believe that misinformation—often of foreign and Russian origin—is the source of countless modern maladies. But time and time again, data tell a different story."

THE VAPIDITY OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

Scientific American recently published an editorial by a Duke anthropologist who is only the most recent academic to suggest there's a racialized gladiator economy in football.  That essay has come in for the mockery it deserves, including from former professional football coach Tony Dungy, who, alone amongst NBC's panel of football pundits, correctly picked the Detroit Lions to win in Green Bay and keep the Packers out of the playoffs.  "As a black man and former NFL player I can say this article is absolutely ridiculous."

It's against my better judgement, but let me take the essay seriously, starting with the author's credentials.  "Tracie Canada is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her research uses sport to theorize race, kinship, care, gender and the performing body, and she is currently working on a book project about the experiences of Black college football players. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia."  That's a misuse of the term "theorize".  It's possible to have theories about the evolution of race, or kinship ties, or sex roles, or performance, and to look for confirming evidence in sports, using rules of inference that are part of your discipline's discourse practice.  Theory first, then evidence.

XENOPHOBIA IN WOODLAWN?

Chicago's rookie mayor Lori Lightfoot would like money from Springfield or Washington or a magic helicopter to provide shelter for the illegal immigrants being sent by governors, Republican and Democrat alike, to sanctuary cities run by Democrats.

Declaring yourself a sanctuary city costs nothing, as long as you have a national government that is protecting its borders. Let the national government change its policies, and all of a sudden, accusing state governors who are bearing the brunt of the illegal crossings as "racist" doesn't do anything for the material or moral condition of the people who request transportation to Chicago.

It gets more interesting.  Decades of flight of productive people of all callings, colors, and creeds from Illinois, including Chicago, mean there are idle public buildings including schools that might serve as temporary shelter until the new arrivals connect with their local sponsors.

HOT TIME, SUMMER IN THE CITY.

Heat, plus humidity, plus crowding, might lead to the distemper The Lovin' Spoonful alluded to in their song.  "All around, people looking half-dead / Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head."  That is, unless you're Julia Conley at Common Dreams, where despite the heat, it will not be alright at night, because hotter temperatures lead to less impulse control, or something.

Researchers in the U.S. have linked the climate crisis and the extreme weather patterns it causes to the country's epidemic of gun violence in a first-of-its-kind analysis, showing that thousands of shootings in the U.S. in recent years were attributable to higher-than-average temperatures.

As Environment Journal reported Tuesday, experts at Boston University School of Public Health and University of Washington School of Social Work analyzed 116,000 shootings in 100 of the country's most populous cities between 2015 and 2020 and found that 7,973 took place during periods of unseasonable heat, concluding that about 7% of shootings could be attributed to extreme heat.

The research, which was originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open in December, found that the Northeast and Midwest saw the greatest increases in gun violence on days that were unseasonably hot, but the trend was observed across the country.

Predictably, women and minorities are hardest hit.

"It could be that heat causes stress, which makes people more likely to use aggression," said Dr. Jonathan Jay, a co-author of the study and faculty member of Boston University's Center for Climate and Health. "Or it could be that people are more likely to get out on warmer days and have more interactions, which creates more opportunities for conflict and violence. Most likely, it's a combination of both."

While it is the first analysis of the correlation between the climate crisis and gun violence in the U.S., the study offers the latest evidence of a dynamic that has been previously reported: violent incidents, including domestic and gender-based violence, increase during and after extreme weather events driven by the climate emergency.

As The Washington Post reported Tuesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022 identified a link between extreme weather and domestic violence, while The Lancet published an analysis of more than 40 studies showing "an increase in one or several [gender-based violence] forms during or after extreme events, often related to economic instability, food insecurity, mental stress, disrupted infrastructure, increased exposure to men, tradition, and exacerbated gender inequality."

It's difficult to capture the effect of deconstructing mediating institutions on changing behavior, although that's not something I'm going to rule out based on what those studies are reporting.  It's easier, if you write for Common Dreams, to assert that people lack agency when it's convenient.

Researchers at Boston University and Washington University said their new study makes the case both for lawmakers to pass gun control and climate action measures and for local investment in heat mitigation strategies, such as increasing tree cover in "urban heat islands."

When introducing the Saving Hazardous and Declining Environments (SHADE) Act in 2021, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) noted that many formerly redlined urban neighborhoods are on average 4.68°F hotter than non-redlined areas, "due to reduced tree cover and increased asphalt or concrete surfaces."

"We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk, such as abandoned buildings, liquor stores, lack of green space, and more intense urban heat islands," Jay said in a statement in December.

Heat mitigation strategies could be a crucial part of an effort that is "part racial justice, part climate change mitigation, and part gun violence prevention," he added.

I can't help but wonder, though, whether Common Dreams writers turn agency on or off as it suits them. Consider a recent lament from Thom Hartmann. "When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?"  Nowhere in his column, or in Julia Conley's, though, do we see mention of poor white guys behaving badly in the summer.  It's easier for him to slag on those voters for having reactionary attitudes.  "My bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their nearly-all-white politicians."  Perhaps, as long as people who argue with, but vote for Democrats, continue to look for external causes for the behavior of people protected as racial and gender minorities, whilst scolding people not-so-protected, Republican voters will avoid voting for Democrats.  "What do you think happens when you encourage dysfunction for some people and mau-mau others? How many experiments against reality can you run?"  No matter how uncomfortable the heat, or the cold might be.

THE END OF JAPAN'S INTERURBAN ERA.

Once upon a time, electric interurban railroads offered cheap, frequent service linking hamlets, small towns, cities, and stopping at rural crossroads to pick up passengers or parcels, including milk cans and nursery stock.  A number of those companies also offered city streetcar service in communities that these days are lucky to have a ride-share provider or two.  Hicks Car Works devotes a section to such companies just in Illinois.  City cars in Dixon or Belvidere or Peoria?  Yes.

So, too, are there interurban railroads in Japan, for now.

Like many small railway lines across Japan's countryside, the 60-year-old trains that ply this route are a loss-maker, but [Katsunori] Takemoto has found a way to keep the business afloat.

With a combination of savvy marketing partnerships with pop stars and branded souvenirs, the president of the Choshi Electric Railway navigated the firm into the black in 2021, while helping promote the local region.

"I feel strongly that this is the mission of all local trains. We want to serve as advertising vehicles for communities," Takemoto told AFP.

The same sorts of internal migration and infrastructure spending that appeared in the United States a century ago, when the interurban network began to decline, manifested themselves more recently in Japan.

The rural lines are legacies of Japan's economic boom through the 1970s but failed to adapt to rural depopulation, as younger people left for cities and some villages emptied altogether.

Infrastructure like city halls and hospitals is increasingly built along main roads, with visitors expected to drive rather than take trains.

Did you think those Japanese companies built those Toyotas and the like solely for export? Or that town plans would forever be a central business district on an electric line?  On the other hand, as we noted a few years ago, the Japanese interurbans are able to invest in real estate and deal in services unrelated to their railroad business, which is contrary to several national policies in the United States.

For now though, lines like Takemoto's are turning to alternatives to stay afloat.

His Choshi Electric Railway makes 80 percent of its revenue from non-train operations, including baking and selling its popular soy sauce-soaked crackers.

The company has sold everything from corn puffs to slices of railway track, and Takemoto aggressively promotes the line on television, joking about his cash-strapped firm with well-rehearsed self-deprecating puns.

Choshi Electric have even run haunted trains, in the fashion of our preservation railways. They're not yet ready to quit.  Meanwhile, it's possible our transportation policy poobahs will rediscover the interurbans.

IS THE MIDDLE CLASS VANISHING UPWARD?

You can weigh the evidence, dear reader, and draw your own conclusions.  Or you can read between the lines in a recent lament, "People Are Sharing Things That Rich People Have 'Ruined' For Everyone Else."

Color me skeptical, when the first entry in that list is ""Thrift shopping. I used to thrift a lot, but it's been ruined. I used to be able to go thrifting and come back with three new work shirts and a pair of pants for around $15 (and they were good clothes, too, some with the tags still on them). Now, good luck finding my size at all. Plus, the clothes that are left are all shit, and they want $10 for a shirt now."  That observation might be evidence for that growing immiserisation anticipated by Marxists of all stripes and seized upon by whatever political party doesn't currently hold the presidency.  That is, the thrift shops are being shopped more intensively by that larger cohort of poorer people, particularly if the prices stay at those historical levels.  The new stuff, including that name-label stuff that was never worn?  Perhaps it's gone to upscale resale shops of the sort dealing in furnishings in Wisconsin's Lake District.

Read on:  "Formerly cool towns around the country. Think: places like Denver, Austin, Asheville, and more."  Pray that people fleeing the (salt-or-fresh-water) coastal tax hells do not bring the sort of coastal politics that rendered their former neighborhoods uninhabitable.  If the income and wealth is being hoarded by fewer people, which is how that inequality narrative usually goes, where are these migrants getting their money?

Now comes the kicker.  "Coastal property. My grandfather bought a house on Cape Cod when he retired from being an airline mechanic in the late '60s. He wasn't poor, but he sure as hell wasn't rich. Today, a normal middle-class person wouldn't be able to do that. Even if you inherit a house free and clear, the property taxes will eat you alive if you aren't made of money."  That, by itself, refutes any notion of ever-concentrated wealth.  Let's review the doomsday paragraph in Das Kapital.  "Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself, The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production."  So that might be, but if there are fewer people getting richer, that beachfront property might even get cheaper.  Under a dynamic of growing immiserisation and fewer rich people, all a Bill Gates has to do is outbid an Elon Musk for that beach house, but if Bill Gates is bidding against more rich people, those additional rich people bid up the prices for the beach houses of the very rich as well as for the beach houses that used to belong to the near-rich.

Let's finish with an obvious one.  "Lobster. At one point, this shellfish was considered to be the 'cockroach of the sea.'"  There's probably a research paper on fisheries management to be written, but, again, the simplest explanation might be that there's more disposable income to spend on lobster, or on coastal holidays to lobster country.

THERE SHE IS, MISS AMERICA.

Years ago, Labor Day weekend came to an end with Jerry Lewis's telethon to raise money for muscular dystrophy research, and the weekend after that came the Miss America pageant from Atlantic City, whose live shows gave Jerry Lewis his start.  That pageant signalled the beginning of off-season rates at a resort town that started to lose its appeal shortly after it lent its street names to Monopoly.

Fifty years ago, the women of the fevered brow began to protest the pageant under the general rubric of "objectification of women."  I can respect the sentiment, to the extent that Beauty Contest World might preclude the intellectual or the athletic in its criteria for talent or appearance, although I can't help but think that one of those undeniable truths might have been behind some of the support for that protest.

The same sort of intersectional victimization thinking that sought to end the Miss America competitions hailed the end of Jerry Lewis's telethons, with or without Mr Lewis.

What people with [muscular dystrophy] need is help with their symptoms and with mobility. Their quality of life can be improved, their symptoms can be reduced. They also need “accessible public transportation and housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that a democratic society should ensure for all its citizens.”

There still is a Miss America pageant, although it's no longer on Labor Day, nor nationally televised, nor held in Atlantic City, not even at a Trump property, if there still is one.  My Chicago Boyz colleague called attention to the outcome of the most recent pageant.

First, the nice nuclear news–the newly-crowned Miss America, Grace Stanke, is an aspiring nuclear engineer and a promoter of nuclear power.

She is a nuclear engineering major at the University of Wisconsin, worked as a co-op at a nuclear fuels vendor (Exelon), and does promotional work for the American Nuclear Society.  Here’s a piece she wrote on breaking down misconceptions about nuclear power.

She is also a classical violinist and water skier, and won the talent competition on that instrument.  She has what might be an unusual cause to promote.  "My social impact initiative, 'Clean Energy, Cleaner Future,' promotes America’s transition to zero-carbon energy with an emphasis on nuclear power, because I believe it is the best path forward as our major power source."

Good.  Years ago, when I did some work with the Department of Energy that involved reducing acid rain and greenhouse gases, nuclear energy was still an option.  I'm not sure, after ten of the last fourteen years under the rubric of hope and change, whether that's still possible.  "The real rewards will go to the people who develop backstop technologies, possibly using renewable energy sources, including breeder reactors. Reversion to the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a second-best choice."

GLOBAL WARMING IN THE GILDED AGE.

It's fitting and proper for a church service at Epiphany or Three Kings to include Adeste Fideles or We Three Kings in the order of worship.  The external decorations are down and packed away, as are the vintage trains, come Three Kings; and the seasonal music rotations change to some other holiday.

Is that right, though, for some of the tunes that accompany the Festive Season to go away?  Let's start with Over the River and Through the Wood.  Yes, there is a contemporary version invoking a sleigh ride to the grandparents for Christmas, but the original setting, in antebellum New England at the close of the Little Ice Age, is about celebrating Thanksgiving, which was primarily a New England event at the opening of winter.  I have heard that Jingle Bells (first released as One Horse Sleigh in 1857) is a sort of sequel to Over The River, and a few of those verses might be racy by the standards of a century-plus ago.  Consider:

Now the ground is white
Go it while you're young
Take the girls tonight
And sing this sleighing song
Just get a bobtailed bay
Two forty as his speed
Hitch him to an open sleigh
And crack, you'll take the lead

The later lyrics of Leroy Anderson's Sleigh Ride also suggest any time during the winter.  Yes, there are current versions that refer to a "Christmas party" rather than that birthday party at Farmer Gray's; and that coffee and pumpkin pie suggests something closer to Thanksgiving, whilst the allusion to Currier and Ives suggests any time during a northern winter, and snuggling up together like birds of a feather pushes that courtship envelope, doesn't it? Likewise, doesn't Winter Wonderland make sense any time there is snow on the ground, particularly in that stretch between New Year's and Valentine's Day, when people see if the connections they made during the Festive Season have any staying power?  Goodness, we've had several weeks of pop tarts lamenting their unrequited love, were all of them on Santa's naughty list?

It goes without saying, dear reader, that Let It Snow, in its understated way, and Baby, It's Cold Outside, less subtly, also reinforce that theme of pair bonding.  Consider any of those five songs, Jingle Bells, Sleigh Ride, Winter Wonderland, Let It Snow, or Baby, It's Cold Outside as part of the winter rotation, perhaps up to Valentine's Day or Groundhog Day, or as part of your Karneval rotation.

For Karneval, which begins on 11 November in the Rheinland, commences along our Gulf Coast at Three Kings, and this year will run to mid-February.  In more northern climes, conspiring-by-the-fire is still in order.  Let it snow, indeed.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

When Queen Elizabeth, the retired Pope, Pelé, or Barbara Walters departed this life, were they spared even further insanities to come, or will they miss the beginning of a return to sanity?  The early returns are not encouraging if we're hoping for a return to sanity.

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes resumes.  We'll concentrate on follies in education and the vulgar culture and resume a more general menu next week.

WERE CAIRENES MORE CHARITABLE THAN CHICAGOANS?

During the Festive Season, a non-profit organization opened its message with "We were warned that soldiers were coming to kill us, and we had to leave our homes in haste."  Ukrainians fleeing Russians?  Central Americans fleeing drug gangs?  No.  That message invoked the Flight into Egypt, and it appeared to be from an organization seeking to reclaim of the Social Gospel.

Those people fleeing into the United States?  No room at the inn, and the money is running out.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is asking Illinois state legislators for $54 million to help fund emergency services to asylum-seeking individuals and migrants.

Lightfoot made the request in a letter to state legislators from Chicago, obtained by the Tribune. She noted that Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration sent a letter to the city saying the state is “out of funds and will no longer be able to support city migrant services efforts as of February 1, 2023.”

“The city is grateful to the state of Illinois for its partnership and collaboration on this mission to date, but we are simply unable to provide migrant services at today’s levels after February 1, 2023 if the state withdraws its financial support,” Lightfoot wrote in the letter, dated Thursday.

Declaring yourself a sanctuary city costs nothing, as long as you have a national government that is protecting its borders.  Let the national government change its policies, and all of a sudden, accusing state governors who are bearing the brunt of the illegal crossings as "racist" doesn't do anything for the material or moral condition of the people who request transportation to Chicago.

YE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR, SHALL YOURSELF FIND BLESSING.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Trains resumed their circuits across North America.  "CP Holiday Train Raises More Than C$1.3MM."

“We are overjoyed with the support we received from people across the CP network who came together to celebrate the season while braving the elements in support of their community and those in need,” said CP President and CEO Keith Creel. “We are reminded how important the CP Holiday Train program is for communities and we were thrilled to be back in support of the critical work that local food banks do across Canada and the U.S.”

The Clinchfield's Santa Train continued its eighty year tradition, rating a mention from Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds himself.

The Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio (CC&O) Railway launched the “world’s longest Christmas parade” in November of 1943. With World War II raging, Kentucky coal miners and their counterparts in Virginia and Tennessee worked long, hard hours to power the war machine, and yet, many families experienced deep material need. Enter Santa on a passenger rail, specially designed to share the spirit of Christmas across the coalfields.

Now in its 80th year, the tradition lives on as the CSX Santa Train brings the joy and wonder of Christmas to every child along its 110-mile route from Eastern Kentucky, through Southwest Virginia, and arriving finally in Kingsport, Tennessee.

Coal country railroading makes for spectacular train watching through hardscrabble territory.  "For some children, what they can gather by the train tracks will be the summation of their Christmas trinkets."

Preservation railroads often operate Christmas trains, although many of those are a way to entertain children of all ages.  California's Sierra Northern Railroad, however, operates in the Clinchfield or Canadian Pacific tradition.

The employees began preparing the rolling stock: a baggage car fitted with a generator, another one used as a collection point for the unwrapped gifts the children would bring so that Santa — in this case various online civic organizations and fire departments — could make sure everyone had something for Christmas. The crowning touch would be a former Santa Fe Railway Division Manager’s business car complete with an open-air observation deck, borrowed from the equipment company.

The Christmas train concept aligns well with the latest messaging from midnight Masses.  In Chicago, the message reminded congregants that the point of going to church is to be there for the neighbor who has hit a rough patch, in order that those neighbors will be there when it's your turn to hit a rough patch.  That sounds a little like some people's concept of paying taxes, but there's a difference between emergent cooperation and coerced cooperation.

Once again, the message focused on the shepherds as outsiders.  Let me be skeptical, in three ways.  First, consider the common etymologies of capital, cattle, and chattel.  That livestock was wealth, and Luke refers to shepherds watching their flocks: note, not Caesar's nor Herod's nor Pharaoh's.  Second, the shepherd-sheep metaphor echoes throughout both testaments, and not in the best way.  The sheep go astray without the shepherds; and the people go astray without divine intervention.  Institutionally, that metaphor means more authority for the shepherds, contrary to the notion of shepherds as outsiders, as well as more authority for the holy men, although following that line of thinking might get people questioning the structure of their church.  Third, are there any references in either testament to a sheep-dog?  In the same way that Divine Inspiration might accompany a vision of a famine with the concept of a futures contract, mightn't Divine Inspiration provide the vision of a wolf domesticated to guard the fold?

Theological quibbles aside, the Holiday Trains facilitating acts of mercy are a welcome corrective to the continuing reign of technocratic failures.  As long as there are people in trouble, may they roll.

THE PERILS OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

There might be more ferroequinologically significant rolling stock extant than there are resources to conserve them, as we have learned watching local preservation railways having to choose among projects.  But when the first successful mainline electric locomotive in the United States is still extant, if endangered, an all-hands effort to conserve it might be in order.

The units are NYC Class S-1 (2-D-2 configuration) No. 100, built in 1904, and Class T-3a (B-B+B-B configuration) No. 278, built in 1926. Built by a consortium of American Locomotive Co. of Schenectady, N.Y., and General Electric Co., they are among the last of their kind.

No. 100, built as No. 6000, is especially historic, with the museum calling it “the world’s first mainline electric locomotive.” It was the prototype of a 47-unit fleet that made possible NYC’s 600-volt DC third-rail electrification, including the opening of the 1913 Grand Central Terminal complex. That project was prompted by passage of laws that mandated electrification after smoky conditions from steam locomotives caused a Jan. 8, 1902, collision in NYC’s Park Avenue Tunnel. Fifteen people died and many were injured in what became New York City’s worst train accident.

The other electric, No. 278, is the sole survivor of a 36-unit fleet in a second generation of locomotives used on NYC commuter and freight lines around New York City.

There are production model S motors in preservation but not operable outside St. Louis, and at the Illinois Railway Museum.  The design lives on in several series of tinplate electric trains by Lionel and other manufacturers, and one occasionally appears in Cold Spring Shops Festive Season videos.  The sole T-3 motor survived thanks to a decision by Penn Central or Conrail to replace an even older Pennsylvania Railroad DD-1 motor on the wire train working the East River tunnels.  A third-rail motor could use Long Island's third rail, and the overhead wire de-energized for work.  That DD-1 therefore made it into preservation at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

The preservationists that first acquired the two New York Central motors, however, had trouble raising money to keep a railroad museum going, and the site where they were stored had other possible uses.

The future is looking increasingly grim for a pair of rare New York Central electrics stranded at an old power plant near Albany, N.Y.

Earlier this year, it looked as if the owner of the electric motors, the Danbury Railway Museum, was going to be able to move them in a matter of weeks. But since then the costs have increased dramatically and the president of the group said if they’re not moved in a month, they could be lost for good.

The Danbury Railway Museum acquired S-1 6000, built by Alco/GE in 1904, and T-3a 278, built in 1926, back in 2013, but had been unable to move them until this year when a developer told them they needed to move. The land the electrics are sitting on is supposed to be turned into a wind turbine tower factory. Earlier this year, Danbury was able to raise some funds for the move that at the time was expected to cost upwards of $160,000. The museum had even secured R.J. Corman to break the electrics apart and move them out in pieces because the route they need to travel is soft and may not be able to handle the weight.

But then work on the site came to a halt, in part because of a lawsuit from local residents trying to fight the construction of the windmill farm and because the contractor needed additional permits. Work resumed on the property on November 15 and when it did, the contractor told the museum that the time to move the electrics had come. But now, the cost of such a move has increased dramatically. In hopes of getting more time to raise money, the museum asked if the electrics could be moved to another spot on the property temporarily. But the contractor said that was not feasible.

The previous preservation effort also involved some diesel locomotives and coaching stock, which were scrapped at that location.

The two motors have been moved to more solid ground for future trucking to Danbury.  The museum estimates the cost of disassembly and movement at around $200,000.  Consider a contribution to that effort.

MARKING OFF.

We won't be dreaming of a white Christmas at Cold Spring Shops this year.

The September Old Farmers Almanac forecast for chilly conditions might be accurate in part, as there is talk of blowing and drifting snow, and venturing away from town at your own risk.  On the other hand, the early forecast for just after Christmas promises a thaw.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree and a look at progress on the model railroad.  This year, with a lot of heavy construction under way, I decided to show off both the traditional display and the models as works in progress.  Enjoy.

The Christmas display is nowhere near as fancy as Frank Sinatra's or Charlie Bowdish's, although the modelling techniques are the same whether you're doing a permanent seasonal display, or a to-scale model railroad.

[Carnegie Science Center curator Nikki] Wilhelm picks up a red covered bridge from a shelf and turns it upside down. “I’ll show you something cool that Charlie Bowdish built. You see this bridge? Well, it was made from a Milk-Bone box,” she said, pointing to the label from the dog bone company inside the bridge.

“You really just have to let your imagination run wild because you wouldn’t believe the things you can use to make something: the row houses that we have from the Liverpool streets in Manchester, the intricate detail work on the porches — that’s just made from angel hair pasta,” she explained. “The trees are made from dried wild, hydrangea flowers.”

Yes, and at Cold Spring Shops, Starbucks coffee stirrers get repurposed as Soviet buildings. Stay tuned.

The popularity of model railroading has stood the test of time in part because hobbyists each bring a different skill set to the craft, which in turn helps develop others: Artisans love building the model scenery; history buffs enjoy researching and recreating places long gone; engineering types enjoy designing the tracks; and techies love the technological advances in electronics, wiring and the ability to run your train from an app on your smart phone.

Indeed.  Those might be century-old Lionel electrics controlled by a transformer (there's still a tap-changer transformer that works) but the scale trains are radio controlled.

It's all for good health, too.

When Bowdish was asked, in one of his final interviews before passing in 1988, why he continued the exacting, painstaking work year after year, he said: “Everyone regardless of their status in life, reaches out towards life’s ultimate achievement — happiness … privileges, money and possessions are useless unless they make a man happy. To those who have been bored and sickened by the monotony of work in offices, sales, fields and factories, where the only evidence of a day’s work is a headache, nothing to exhibit to friends, nothing to view with pride as an example of skill or handiwork — to those people I say ‘You should have a hobby.’”

Indeed so, and some of the time away from social media will be time working on the railroad.

Thank you for looking in.  If all goes well, posting will resume on or near Three Kings.

IT'S CALLED THE BENEFIT PRINCIPLE, AND MARKET TESTS ARE USEFUL.

A contributor to the house organ for business as usual in higher education inadvertently steps on his own argument.  Higher Ed Is a Public Good. Let’s Fund It Like One.  Seriously?

Bad economics. A public good has two properties, nonexclusive use and nonrivalrous consumption. [Former Northern Illinois president John] Peters's own arguments will contradict both of those properties. A more accurate argument might be that there are unpriced spillover benefits, or non-pecuniary externalities, to a university degree. That's for another day: are the marginal social benefits of a state-aided university worth the costs, or has Robert Fulghum (details or compare prices) correctly identified the sole source of a positive benefit-cost ratio?

That's not where James N. H. Spencer goes wrong, in fact he goes even further astray.

If we are serious in arguing that higher education is a public good, then we should finance it like one; we should take some lessons from my own field, infrastructure planning.

Financing an equitable higher education can be done: The U.S. has near-universal water supplies, transportation, and electricity for even its poorest residents. What would happen if we applied the same principles to the public goods that universities provide?

Public infrastructure is rarely funded fully by upfront subsidies in the way that advocates for “free college” suggest. Instead, infrastructure projects rely on floating debt that is tied to long-term user fees through the life of the infrastructure. Think of your water bill, which over 30 years helps pay down the debt associated with building your local water system. According to the National Association of Counties, government investments in transportation infrastructure, for example, total substantially less than half of the actual costs, with bond-market investors covering the bulk of the upfront costs. Over time, individual users collectively pay back that debt through costs like gas taxes, transit fares, or tolls. Whatever the repayment mechanism, end users never take on that personal debt the way we now expect college students to do.

So many things wrong there. I can only envision the caterwauling from the "water is a fundamental right" crowd in higher education, for whom the very notion of water as a commodity causes anguish.  I mean, didn't Milwaukee's sewer socialists install water meters and sell the dried activated sewage sludge as fertilizer?  There's no reason a water utility can't be a private company; indeed, doesn't the popularity of bottled spring water of various types suggest the public water works deals in hot and cold running crud?  There's no reason an electric utility can't be a private company, and it's only environmental extremists that impede the upgrading and repair of the transmission lines, and New Deal brains trusters that preclude power companies owning electric railways.

VEHICULAR CARNAGE IN THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD.

We've called attention to the dangerous public infrastructure in the far northwestern parts of Milwaukee for some time.

Another year has passed, and conditions have gotten no better.  Reporter Ben Jordan struggles with his terminology.  "Two streets on Milwaukee’s north side claim more lives than any other road in Milwaukee County."  He can't figure out whether Capitol Drive or Fond du Lac Avenue are streets are roads: they're not necessarily stroads, which suggests a heavily retail environment with lots of commercial traffic.  That might be accurate where they cross, in the Capitol Court neighborhood, although years ago there were stretches of Capitol that had pretensions of being a residential avenue, or perhaps a boulevard.  I really should finish a post that's been on my mind for almost two years about how Milwaukee traffic engineers, sixty years ago, recognized that they had a stroad problem but didn't come up with a good workaround.

IN PRAISE OF GRIDLOCK?

I'm a big fan of separation of powers, in part because I'm not persuaded elections, no matter what rules determine the winners, are useful for revelation of preferences, particularly among large policy bundles being voted on by large electorates.

In the most recent Wisconsin gubernatorial election, losing Republican candidate Tim Michels said something about his party never losing an election again, should he get a veto-proof majority in both chambers of the state legislature.  That might have been spin about how his party's manifesto would deliver so much good stuff that only fools would vote for Democrats in Wisconsin, although since he aligned himself too closely with Donald Trump's allegations of election fraud in the state, there might have been people who saw his claim as a Kinsley gaffe promising a future loss of voting rights.

IV. ADVENT

Sixty years ago, we learned that North Shore Line passengers were making their last Christmas Home rides on that conveyance.

The interurban experience is still available at a few preservation railways, although the Santa trains are wrapping up their season this weekend.  Christmas is about redemption for a fallen world, and there are always symbols of what we've lost, aren't there?

THE WONDERFUL LIFE WE SQUANDERED.

It's Christmas, which means the culture studies types will be about their usual displays of cranky erudition.  That includes the movies.  The past two years we've examined the fun side of White Christmas.

This year, we'll feature It's a Wonderful Life, which a different class of culture studies types has gone after.  Ten years ago Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen wondered if the movie didn't anticipate a Suburban Experiment that would go wrong.

George [Bailey played by James Stewart] represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so as to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

George’s great dreams are thwarted by innumerable circumstances of fate and accident and he remains in Bedford Falls. Most of the film portrays a re-telling of various episodes of George’s life for the benefit of a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers)—who is sent down to earth to attempt to save George during his greatest test.

While George’s grandiose designs are thwarted, he does not cease to be ambitious, and does not abandon the dream of transforming America, even if his field of dreams is narrowed.

I think that's a variation on the Tragic Vision, you bloom where you're planted.

HOCUS POCUS DOMINOCUS.

We've suggested previously that bit of doggerel originated as mockery of church ritual reduced to going through the motions.  It should come as no surprise, dear reader, that the ritual language of cultural institutions captured by the wokerati takes on a ritualistic form.  "Mastering the vocabulary is a way of signaling entry into a select world of the knowing and the just. The system is closed—there’s an internal logic that can be accepted or rejected but isn’t open to argument or question."

So mote it be with Harvard's announcement of its newest president, current liberal arts dean Claudine Gay, which Francis "Manhattan Contrarian" Menton (via Power Line) read so you don't have to.

Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world. . . . As her many admirers know, Claudine consults widely; she listens attentively; she thinks rigorously and imaginatively; she invites collaboration and resists complacency; and she acts with conviction and purpose. . . . Claudine’s own scholarship and teaching have focused on aspects of democracy—political participation, voting behavior, public opinion, and the interplay of race, ethnicity, and politics in America.

Yup, all the predictable incantations.  What is it about so-called progressive intellectuals and their use of  "profoundly"?  The rest of it might be lifted from the prospectus of any startup: sustaining, enhancing, expanding, strengthening.  Qui tollis peccata Monday morning. 🔔🔔🔔

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The point of commissioning a house with a train room under the garage is to have a train room that extends under the garage.

Look closely: curve templates, turnout templates, and a yardstick to establish tangent lines as the spline takes shape.  The last thing I want at what will be a critical junction on the layout, with some industries back by the paint booth, the Eastern Route Main Line diving into staging, and the Gloucester Branch on its way to Manchester-by-the-Sea and beyond is to have some kinky track or tight turns as a consequence of wishful thinking.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

These will be the final Friday short Takes for this year.

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

THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

Somewhere in all the vote-buying Washington politicians engage in, there are plans, and perhaps printed money, for an expansion of Amtrak's regional corridors, including service from Chicago to Rockford and perhaps Dubuque, and the extension of Hiawatha service to Madison, along with some sort of continuation to the Twin Cities, perhaps including connecting regional service approximating the former Victory and Viking onward to the Cities by way of Eau Claire and across the St. Croix at Hudson.

SEE THE RENT-SEEKING INHERENT IN THE ENVIRONMENTALISM.

Naomi Klein did.

"Civil society should announce a boycott + instead hold a true people's summit," Klein wrote. "One gathering per continent to limit flying. Links to the official summit by video."

"There can be lobbying sessions built into the COP28 program with governments who will obviously go to the UAE," she continued. "But why should civil society expend the carbon, money, and time to join them just to declare it a failure all over again? Let's try something new."

Klein's call for a new oppositional approach to the annual United Nations climate summit came in the wake of a gathering at which civil society was harassed, surveilled, and sidelined by Egypt's authoritarian government as lobbyists from Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants responsible for record-high greenhouse gas emissions swarmed the summit, fighting off efforts to include a fossil fuel phase-out in the summit's final text.

The libertarian-populist component of civil society likely agrees that there's something off about these globalist poobahs jetting off to some gathering of the well-connected, particularly to a climate summit in a desert country that would be uninhabitable but for air conditioning.  That component would likely also see those efforts to phase out fossil fuels without development of nuclear electricity and pumped storage and a few other things as deprivation with a helping of conservation.

"It remains imperative to get off coal, oil, and gas as rapidly as possible. Every tonne of CO2 that remains in the ground means less harm to lives and livelihoods," [Guardian environment editor Damian] Carrington added. "Can the U.N. climate talks deliver this at speed? It does not look that way. It is too easy for the fossil fuel states to hold the consensus-based negotiations to ransom, threatening to blow up the whole thing if their black gold is so much as mentioned by name. There were more fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop27 than delegates from the Pacific islands, which their industry is pushing below the waves."

That's the nature of rent seeking.  There aren't, alas, enough hotels and taxiways at those Pacific islands, idyllic though they might be for a climate summit, for the globalist poobahs to park their planes.

ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATORS DEVOID OF VALUES.

Last March, we called attention to faculty objections to proposed mission and vision statements at the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts.  Generally there's a values statement as well: the mission statement is a sentence that states an objective; the vision statement a paragraph or two, outlining the actions being taken to achieve that objective; and the values are a few Desirable Things that further structure the vision being pursued.  It's an opportunity for lots of posturing and peacocking.

In common with the corporate counterparts of these things (strategic planning being, like total quality management or disruption or management by objectives) just the latest way to give the impression of being au courant while wasting time on faddish things, rather than, oh, teaching students, it's a word salad ticking all the proper boxes whilst signifying total surrender of the curriculum to the critical theory types.

What the strategic planning types came up with at Massachusetts-Boston was a load of nonsense in the spring, and if the administration had hoped to impose it during the summer when the faculty might have been working on research, well, that failed.  The mission and vision statement that Steven Hayward flagged at Power Line, as well as the faculty response to it, are as they were last spring.  Apparently in that opening item of the vision statement, diversity and inclusion trump shared governance, and the faculty in the rigorous disciplines are woke to the lie that "expansive notions of excellence" is anything other than declaring idiocy a form of intellect.

Some comments at Power Line note that the story is nine months old.  Have the science and math faculty stopped the adoption of the new mission and vision, or did that become policy, those objections notwithstanding?

RIGHT CONCEPT, WRONG HUB.

Matthew Yglesias, who has noted a number of things gone wrong with Amtrak in the Official Region, recently took issue with Amtrak's latest crack at establishing a network of emerging corridors.

Amtrak released their new vision for passenger rail expansion in the United States, and I don’t really know what to say except that it sucks. They’re proposing incremental expansion of a national network of slow, infrequent trains that I guess will serve the needs of weirdos and hobbyists who want to ride a train from Birmingham to Shreveport or from Athens to Fort Wayne via Columbus but serves no particular transportation purpose.

He'd rather, I reckon, put the money into the Northeast Corridor, which makes sense as that's his back yard.

I really think Amtrak should be doing basically the reverse. They should draw no new lines on the map, but instead invest meaningful money in building true high-speed rail infrastructure along one of the best high-speed rail corridors on God’s green earth, connecting Washington, D.C. to New York and Boston via Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Haven, and Providence.

I wonder what transportation historians, a century from now, assuming we last that long, will say about a bankrupt New Haven Railroad assiduously acquiring parcels of land at Depression values in order to straighten out their line north of New Haven, only for a subsequent management selling those parcels to the Connecticut Turnpike in order to delay another bankruptcy.

Sixty years ago, the Wise Experts were of the view that upgrading highways was the winning choice for infrastructure spending.  And thus when a cash-strapped New Haven Railroad sold parcels of land it had painstakingly purchased to straighten out the Shore Line to the Connecticut Turnpike Authority, everyone hailed it as in the public interest.

Never mind that. Let's focus om Mr Yglesias in the present.

I was looking into some potential future travel in France, a country that’s put a lot of money and engineering resources into high-speed rail as a national project, and I was struck by how bad the underlying population geography is. One problem is that outside of Paris, none of France’s cities are really all that large. But also, France is sort of a pentagon with Paris in the center, whereas the whole deal with trains is that they work best in straight lines. If Paris, Rennes, and Bordeaux were all in the same direction that might be a great train route, but as things stand it’s all pretty marginal.

There are a couple of possible extensions of his thinking.  One is to consider, as he does, extending the Northeast Corridor south to Richmond, and perhaps on to the Research Triangle and Atlanta.  As long as you're considering all new trackage, heading north to Portland goes along with his "in the same direction" thinking, and there's potential for another line using the empty right of way of the old Water Level Route onward to Buffalo and possibly Toronto.