SO MUCH DIMINUTION GOING AWAY.

Does anybody pay any attention to Ralph Nader any more? "The New York Times Is Rapidly Diminishing Itself."  Clearly, he couldn't write "failing" for fear of sounding like Donald Trump.  But how large an E-T-T-S moment is it?

Unfortunately, their changes to the print edition—which produces important content—have exhibited an accelerating stupefaction.

Huge photos replace what was serious content on its Sunday Business and Opinion Pages, formerly the Weekly Review. Repeatedly, the entire valuable front pages of those Sections are filled with photographs or graphic artwork. That space used to contain great investigative columnists like Gretchen Morgenson. The inside of these sections is not much better—with too many photos and soft articles replacing first-rate columnists on consumer rip-off cases and the abuses of airline passengers.

As one long-time reader, about to cancel his subscription, just told me—parts of the supposedly serious sections (apart from the vast entertainment sections) come across like People Magazine.

The Times has really gone overboard in diluting its storied editorial and op-ed pages. From as many as nearly 20 concise, meaty editorials, the Editorial Page is down to about three a week. This space is being occupied by often mediocre columns such as the lengthy superficial exchanges between "liberal" Gail Collins and "conservative" war hawk Bret Stephens who are supposed to disagree with one another but often engage in not so witty repartee.

As for the Editorial Page, the kinds of enlightening op-eds which were submitted by outsiders over the years now are preceded by the Time's regular columnists—ok—but also by a stable of countless designated "contributing opinion writers."

And -- the horror -- there aren't baseball box scores in the print edition either.

IT CAME TO THIS WHEN THE FACULTY ABDICATED ITS STEWARDSHIP.

Washington Examiner contributor Jay P. Greene looks at Florida governor Ron DeSantis's efforts to uproot the Diversity Weenies.

Public universities were thought to be outside of political control, and academic culture was thought to be too committed to DEI [diversity, inclusion, and equity -- Ed.] goals. But DeSantis is proving that something can be done. His plan is likely to make significant progress in dismantling DEI in higher education.

DeSantis is showing that DEI is not beyond the reach of elected officials, at least not at public universities. In most states, public universities are state agencies, just like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Game and Fish Commission. They may have their own boards of trustees, but those boards were created, and can be modified, by legislation, and their activities are governed by state laws and regulations. States can reorganize how public universities are structured to achieve public purposes better, just as they can reorganize the DMV. Lawmakers may alter the size and composition of the Game and Fish Commission, as well as the process for appointing those officials, and they can do the same with the boards of public universities.

Yes, legislators can do that, but should they?  "Years ago, pioneer economist Richard T. Ely engaged in some scholarship the legislators didn't like.  The regents responded, in a statement that has long been cast in bronze on Bascom Hall."

DON MCLEAN'S E-T-T-S DECADE.

Cold Spring Shops posts have taken the view that the end of the American High came with three shots in Dallas.  Singer Don McLean saw the ominous signs even before the day the news was on the doorstep.  "It seemed clear from the beginning that McLean was referring to a defining moment in music, with the lyrics pointing to something that has been lost and can’t be retrieved."  American Pie is free-verse poetry, and as such, it can be parsed, analyzed, scanned for hidden meanings.  "The sense of disillusion and loss that the song transmits isn’t just about deaths in the world of music, but also about a generation that could no longer believe in the utopian dreams of the 1950s."  Yes, and in a more tragic way than the sorts who thought it so groovy now that people are finally getting together could ever comprehend.

IF YOU CAN TRADE IT, YOU CAN ALLOCATE IT EFFICIENTLY.

Years ago, environmentalist wackos had a gripe that ran something like "We'll have abundant solar energy when Standard Oil can make money off it."  That's cathartic populist froth, but it misses the major point, that making money means engaging in mutually beneficial trade, a reality that is too often ignored by self-styled progressives.

Predictably, the opportunity to allocate Western waters efficiently sets off the current generation of environmentalist wackos.

Financial speculators are buying and selling rights to the Colorado River's dwindling water resources in a bid to profit as historic drought conditions intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis lead to worsening scarcity.

Wall Street investment firms "have identified the drought as an opportunity to make money," Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, told CBS News on Tuesday. "I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They're looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."

Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM), makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in the United States as "the biggest emerging market on Earth" and "a trillion-dollar market opportunity." The company's website declares that "scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful oil defined the last."

A newly published joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel found that WAM has purchased at least $20 million worth of land in Western Colorado over the past five years, making it one of the biggest landowners in a farming and ranching region known as the Grand Valley.

According to Mueller, WAM has bought more than 2,500 acres of farmland in the area. But "it's the water"—not the land—that investors are really interested in, he said, observing that the farmland comes with water rights.

To Kenny Stancil, it's apparently sufficient to use "making money" as an epithet, never mind the dynamic his very next paragraph reveals.

Notably, WAM has "hired Colorado's former top water official as one of its lawyers," CBS News reported. Diserio previously stated that "one of his firm's strategies is to profit from water in part by making the farms it buys more efficient and then selling parts of its water rights to other farmers and cities increasingly desperate for the natural resource."

It's not as if using the water more efficiently is some sort of superexploitative plot, the way precision scheduled railroading or adjunctification might be.  Or that the strings the national government attaches will be helpful.

As the long-brewing crisis surrounding the Colorado River grows more acute, the federal government has taken steps to compel state-level policymakers to improve how they manage water resources in the increasingly arid region.

For instance, "Congress recently allocated $4 billion in drought funding that can be used to pay farmers to fallow their land and not use their water," CBS News reported. "Some Western states, including Colorado, are also considering paying some farmers to keep their lands fallow." Agriculture accounts for 70% of withdrawals from the Colorado River.

The Jarrett regency, however, is full of self-styled progressives with lots of sentimentality and no common sense. Is it more sensible to figure out how to raise crops using less water, or to not raise crops at all?

The Future of Water Act, as the congressional Democrats' bicameral legislation is titled, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to affirm that water is a human right to be managed for public benefit—not a commodity to be bought and sold by investment firms. The bill would also prohibit the trading of water rights on futures markets—a recently invented financial ploy widely condemned as "dystopian."

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said at the time of the bill's introduction that "with the climate crisis delivering historically devastating droughts across the West, it is clearer than ever that water should be treated as a scarce, essential resource, not a commodity for Wall Street and financial speculators."

"This groundbreaking legislation would put a lid on dangerous water futures trading before it creates a crisis," said Hauter, "and it reinforces the fact that water must be managed as a public resource, not a corporate profit center."

As if the existing regime of public resource management has performed so well for us.

The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

On the other hand, perhaps the environmentalist wackos would just as soon there be no water projects.  Has the recent Californian flooding been worse for the absence of any new flood control projects?

JOE BIDEN, HAVE YOU HEARD OF FREDERIC BASTIAT?

I sensed, a few years ago, that Donald Trump might have.

Our [then] President might be toying with changing the way in which the federal government pays for internal improvements.  The Interstate Highway system, for instance, required the states to put up ten percent of the money for construction, while the other ninety percent went through Washington.  The states remained on the hook for policing and snow removal, as well as maintenance, and, not surprisingly, we ended up with potentially more mileage than the states could maintain, and, from time to time, new federal appropriations to make good on the repairs.  That's not the only way in which states get inefficiently much road capacity.

Propose, though, that the states take more ownership of their roads, and let the cries rise up to Heaven.

The current president might have no knowledge of political economy, but in his speech from the throne he surely understands politicians and their posturing.

These projects will put hundreds of thousands of people to work rebuilding our highways, bridges, railroads, tunnels, ports and airports, clean water, and high-speed internet across America.

Urban. Suburban. Rural. Tribal.

And we’re just getting started. I sincerely thank my Republican friends who voted for the law.

And to my Republican friends who voted against it but still ask to fund projects in their districts, don’t worry.

I promised to be the president for all Americans.

We’ll fund your projects. And I’ll see you at the ground-breaking.

More precisely, printed money from Uncle Sugar will pay to build the projects, and Washington politicians will turn up at the photo opportunities, but it will be local public officials, years on, who will have to maintain them.  "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."  Predictably, the speech acknowledged those workers who would soon be drawing paychecks building the  projects that were in the appropriations.  People in neighborhoods not favored thus?  "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.'"

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Did anybody notice there was a Speech from the Throne last Tuesday?  "What our politics lacks most is a sober insistence on reality."  The contradictions aren't to the heightening stage yet.  "Raising the debt ceiling without either cutting spending or raising more revenue simply ensures that we kick this can down the road."  Just wait.  "Existing spending commitments are rapidly shrinking the share of the budget that politicians have control over as their appetite for spending expands."

Official Washington offers us a choice between normal and crazy, for arbitrary values of crazy, which "touches on many Americans' sense that things have gone weirdly wrong in recent years."  We see it.  Official Washington does not.  "What you saw during Tuesday night's speech was a bipartisan suicide pact."  It's a suicide pact among the Correct Thinkers.  "This classist separation is often an intentional part of what drives the left, who has always believed, despite airy protestations to the contrary, in the necessity of an especially enlightened politburo to run the State for the good of a dull proletariat. Sadly, many on the right think the same way — though they tend to want less regulation and lower taxes."  Would a larger House of Representatives have more True Believers?

Look up in the sky.

Fasching will soon give way to Lent.  Oktoberfest will be here as summer gives way to fall.  The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

UNDOING MULTIPLE MISTAKES.

Passenger Rail service in Ohio, which has a number of large cities close enough together that they would have rated Trans Europ Express service fifty years ago, probably upgraded to electric fast trains of the ICE or TGV class by now, was just before Amtrak rudimentary and grubby, in part because the principal carriers of the Official Region were still thinking in terms of Chicago or St. Louis to the coasts through trains, never mind what that meant for the Ohio service, and what remained of the through trains was mostly for carrying mail and express, when it couldn't be chopped up into inconvenient and non-connecting short haul runs.

Early in the Obama administration, an appropriation of money for faster passenger trains included provisions for California (still bogged down) and three states, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, subsequently elected Republican governors who ran in part on not committing the states to bear the expense of operating the trains the federal money bought.  If only we saw that sort of common sense when it came to federal matching funds generally. Florida's Brightline is a privately funded intending to use an expressway median that might have been in those 2009-2010 appropriations.

There are stirrings of interest in a Passenger Rail network in Wisconsin.  I'll be more confident once I see that second train between Chicago and the Cities running: if they can't make that happen any sort of service to Madison or the Fox Cities or Eau Claire might as well be wishful thinking.

In Ohio, people have given thought to a proper regional rail service connecting the major cities, and, notably, a Republican governor appears to be supporting the effort.

Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday his administration has decided to apply for federal money to study the feasibility of expanding Amtrak service in Ohio for the first time in decades.

The acceptance, DeWine told The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com editorial board, marks the “first step” toward possibly adding new Amtrak along existing lines in Cleveland and Cincinnati, as well as potentially creating an entirely new route connecting those cities with Columbus, Dayton and other cities in between.

The Ohio Rail Development Commission is still deciding how many potentially new or expanded routes it wants to ask the federal government to provide study money for by the March 27 application deadline, according to commission spokeswoman Wende Jourdan.

As is always the case with these projects, there will be years of study and comment before a single spike is driven.  The lesson, a hundred years from now, might be that it is easier to keep an existing Passenger Rail network running than it will be to replace it in the name of progress only to have to put it back later, also in the name of progress.

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS.

Last night's Special Forces featured an instructive debriefing of Carli Lloyd, who holds all sorts of awards in women's footie. but has not been able to complete, successfully, any of the tasks the training staff have put the cast through.  A clip of the debriefing is not yet available, although the full episode is available if you re properly paid up.  People has part of that debriefing, although, it being People, it doesn't get to the serious stuff.

In an exclusive clip from Wednesday's episode, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and retired soccer star, 40, reveals that the experience of being estranged from her family was the impetus behind her joining the show's ranks.

"It was like being taught to become numb, emotionless, which then led into my life off the field and pushed my family out," she opens up to the Directing Staff. "We didn't speak for about 12 years."

She continues, "They suffered, I suffered. I missed out on weddings, birthdays, holidays — literally everything."

She hired a life coach of some kind, the better to be able to get to the highest levels of women's footie, and that might have contributed to the rift with her kin. "Lloyd has since cut ties with the man at the center of the conflict, James Galanis, who was her personal coach of 17 years."

So it always is with ambition, there are tradeoffs, whether it's going for Olympic gold, or a doctoral degree, or qualifying for the special services, and the trainers, in their role as Masonic masters, surely know something about being on long deployments and doing things they can never talk about, and possibly hearing well-meaning advice to "lighten up" or grousing from people who care but don't care about being "inside a wall".  There was a lot in that short clip for a unit psychologist or people who have a better understanding of human interaction to dip into.  One excerpt:

"They've missed out on my wedding," she says. "I didn't feel anything. The plan was for me to become the best in the world and accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish in the soccer world but it's freakin' hard though."

Yes. In the course of being the best in the world at something, or some set of things, one chooses, explicitly or implicitly, not to be the best, or even mediocre, at an infinity of other things.  Don't any of us who get good at something sometimes muse about how if it were easy enough that anyone could do it, it wouldn't be a goal worth pursuing?

FIND YOUR VERSION OF A MODEL RAILROAD AND BUILD IT.

Retirement Planning for Professors.  Author Susan Shaw has the order of action items wrong.  "Start figuring out what you want to do when you're not a professor" ought to come first, even before "stay engaged" as it should go without saying that remaining responsible while still employed is right and proper.  Next up, buy (or have somebody buy you) the equivalent of that train set.

I already know I want to hike more, garden more, read all the British murder mysteries that have come out in the last decade that I’ve missed, learn to bake like they do on The Great British Bake-Off, keep traveling and learn to do mosaic tile. I want my brain to have a rest and not be worrying about the next article, the next class, the next deadline, the next strategic plan.

Exactly. Be reminded, dear academic reader, that "'Emeritus' is not Latin for 'doing for free that which I used to be paid to do.'"

By all means, if your colleagues want to schedule a retirement party, go for it.  Speak up.  And don't delude yourself that the administration will allocate your salary to hire two assistant professors.

LET'S DISCUSS A DIFFERENT CAREER.

The current vice president's infectious laugh is made for an amusement park.

When New York Times types think she's better suited for Coney Island:  "Even her allies are tired of waiting."

She has made history as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American ever to serve as vice president, but she has still struggled to define her role much beyond that legacy.

Her staff notes that she has made strides, emerging as a strong voice in the administration on abortion rights. She has positioned herself as a more visible advocate for the administration, giving a speech last week at the funeral for Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old who was beaten by Memphis police officers. And her critics and detractors alike acknowledge that the vice presidency is intended to be a supporting role, and many of her predecessors have labored to make themselves relevant, as well.

But the painful reality for Harris is that in private conversations over the past few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.

Is there anything in the first few sentences of that excerpt that indicates a future leader?  Put another token in the arcade and hope a prize falls out.

Given that Biden at 80 is the oldest president in American history, Republicans would most likely make Harris, who is 58, a prime attack line, arguing that a vote for Biden may in fact be a vote to put her in the Oval Office.

“That will be in my opinion one of the most hard-hitting arguments against Biden,” said John Morgan, a prominent fundraiser for Democrats, including Biden, and a former Florida finance chair for President Bill Clinton. “It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘Look, with his age, we have to really think about this.’”

So far, he said, she has not distinguished herself.

“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” he said.

So it often is with tokens, and even party elders recognize the problem.

Harris’ allies said she was trapped in a damned-if-she-does, damned-if-she-doesn’t conundrum — she is expected to not do anything to overshadow Biden while navigating intractable issues he has assigned her such as voting rights and illegal immigration. And some see a double standard applied to a prominent woman of color.

“That’s what being a first is all about,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., one of the nation’s most prominent Black lawmakers, who has been an outspoken supporter. “She’s got to work every day to make sure she’s not the last.”

Can you think of a clearer concession that there is an affirmative action asterisk than that last sentence?

POORLY PREDICATED, BADLY ARTICULATED.

Yes, I'm making fun of the stilted language common on political panels, where it would be bad form to accuse somebody of using talking points in support of tight priors that cannot long survive an encounter with reality.  That Dementia Joe becomes a foil for more direct mockery is a bonus.

"MAKE NO MISTAKE! If you try anything to raise the cost of frisizhnjubs I will veto it." pic.twitter.com/DaJIvDiRy2

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 8, 2023

That mumbling is close enough to "prescription drugs" to just cut the old guy some slack for the inarticulate enunciation.  The threat, though, is precisely a talking point in support of a foolish tight prior.  Among the "legislative accomplishments" the doddering ficus and his Morale Conditioners love to point to, as if they've done any good, is a law capping the retail price of a dose of insulin at $35, and the veto threat is aimed at any Congressional attempt to repeal the law.

But a retail price of $35 by force of law is no different from a streetcar fare of a nickel (or perhaps, as was the case with the Pernambuco Tramway, five centavos) and sooner or later the opportunity cost of a dose of insulin will exceed $35, which will have to be made up somehow, or else there will be no more insulin on offer.

It's telling, I suppose, that more people made fun of the "frisizhnjubs" than they did of the economic ignorance that a president, or any other secular or sacred official, can dictate what the cost of anything is.  In Official Washington, though, the fantasy is the policy.  "While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day."  Never mind the woke fantasies, dear reader, contemplate the belief that the president can command the price of prescription drugs, er, frisizhnjubs, to stay stable.

I confess to skipping the speech to see the approval of a provincial permit to build a proper mine shaft on Oak Island, and then to tune up some switch motors with a disappointing hockey game for background entertainment.  But people did watch the speech to catch misleading claims, notable claims lacking crucial context, and incomplete claims behind the rhetoric.  So it always is in Official Washington.  "Lots of partisan fanfare, some surface-level appeals to bipartisanship, and a whole lot of misleading spin."  Poorly predicated, badly articulated, and at the end of the day, the switch motors were working down cellar.

TREATING THE ROADS LIKE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS.

There are ways to tax fossil fuels at the point of sale, which is one way states raise money to maintain the roads they build.  Electric cars skip the pump, which leads to some reactions that might ... not have the desired effect of inducing more use of them.

The latest foolishness, raising the registration fee on electric and hybrid cars and trucks to collect in one lump sum what they're not collecting at the pump.  Kea Wilson for Strong Towns goes after Missouri, but the same foolishness is infecting Wisconsin lawmakers.  I can't make this stuff up.  "If what we want are safe roads that we can afford to repair, why on earth would we incentivize drivers to buy gas guzzling vehicles—which skew towards the heaviest vehicles most capable of causing extensive road damage—rather than light, fuel efficient vehicles that might help keep that pavement intact for longer?"

The reality:  registration fees and excise taxes don't even come close to covering the full cost of roads, and a reality-based accounting might lead to the highway commissioners choosing to close some roads, or let them revert to cattle paths.

In Iowa, it occurred to somebody that motorists use recharging stations, which have electric meters, and that in the same way all the motor fuel tax comes bundled with the price, the battery recharging tax could come bundled with the price.

While state lawmakers are currently debating new taxes for charging electric vehicles, Iowa is set to collect those taxes starting in July. Four years ago, when EVs were still rare on Iowa roads, legislators approved a law that taxes kilowatt hours sold.

Apparently -- the article does not provide details -- there are ways to charge residents a lower recharging tax than nonresidents.  The highway commissioners are focused more on having the resources to keep the roads in a state of good repair.

Some advocates questioned the creation of a new tax for EV users, arguing that it would discourage people from buying the cleaner vehicles. But lawmakers ultimately agreed to focus on how to keep road fund revenues steady.

“Iowa is very much a pay-as-you-go, user-fee-based system for roads and bridges. We don’t bond for it,” [Iowa transportation staffer Stuart] Anderson explained. He said the discussion centered on how to make sure electric vehicle owners were paying their “fair share” for the upkeep and construction of the road network.

“We did not make our recommendations and establish those rates to generate new money. This was solely based on how we could capture what we’re losing in fuel tax revenue,” he said.

For all the talk about "user fees" and "pay-as-you-go" apparently tolling is not yet an option.

The increased registration fee is intended to capture most, but not all, of the lost fuel taxes from Iowa residents. The kilowatt-hour charge, however, would ensure that out-of-state EV drivers contributed to Iowa’s roads.

That’s especially important for large commercial trucks, which pass through the state on Interstate 80 and other major highways. Electric trucks are far less common than electric passenger vehicles, but they will likely become a bigger factor in coming years, Anderson said.

There's no reason Interstate 80 couldn't be a turnpike, is there?

CAPTAIN AHAB COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT.

Never change your unintentionally funny style, Common Dreams.  "Oil Lobby Prompts Right-Wing Media to Save Whales—From Wind Power."  No, the Beautiful Transition does not yet involve going back to whale oil in our lanterns, in order to keep the lights on when the wind isn't blowing.  Nor, the article argues, does the deprivation implied by greater use of solar and wind power provide a chain of causation by which offshore construction of wind farms (as long as they're out of sight of the nomenklatura) is driving the whales out of their minds.

Before the sudden concern for whales, opposition to wind farms off the coast of the Jersey Shore was based on a not-in-my-backyard attitude from residents who didn’t want their ocean views altered, and who were concerned about the subsequent effect on tourism (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/15/21).

“They will not be able to look out on the horizon and dream,” one woman was quoted.

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts,” declared an NBC 10 Philadelphia headline (6/17/22) last summer. Note that the wind farm in question will be approximately 15 miles out to sea.

That's OK, recreational travel to the seashore is one more unsustainable thing Our Progressive Betters would just as soon we do without.

SHODDY SERVICE, PART OF THE GLORIOUS TRANSITION?

Apparently I can't be too pessimistic.  Remember? "Some of Our Intellectual Betters would like to shame us into not flying or driving; the air traffic control system and the security theater do nothing to enhance the experience, and the airway infrastructure joins the highway infrastructure as markers of government failure: and Amtrak's failure to offer a serious choice to even the small number of travellers who aren't driving or flying is almost enough to make me think Our Intellectual Betters would prefer that we stay home."

That's occurred to Free Beacon contributor Collin Anderson.

The COVID-19 pandemic wasn't all bad, a new Biden administration plan to fight climate change argues: It at least "highlighted major opportunities" to reduce travel demand and lower carbon emissions through "remote work and virtual interactions."

The plan — which President Joe Biden's Environmental Protection Agency and Energy, Transportation, and Housing departments released in January—aims to "eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas emissions" from the transportation sector by 2050, mostly through a transition to electric vehicles. Also included in the plan, however, is a controversial call to reduce "commuting miles" through "an increase in remote work and virtual engagements," including in education.

"Telework and other components of a digital economy … can improve convenience by reducing travel demand, especially for work commuting," the plan states. "The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted major opportunities for telework, with some studies showing the possibility of 10 percent long-term reduction in annual vehicle miles traveled." The plan goes on to identify "remote access to services like health care and education" as one of the "key determinants of future travel demand."

Recreational travel, on the other hand, is less appealing thanks to the unreliability that has become common of late.  The limited range of those electric cars is a feature.

THESE GIRLS CAN'T HANDLE BIG BALLS.

Get your mind out of the gutter, already.

The coach of the Duke University women's basketball team expressed her disdain for how an alleged ball mix-up was handled after a Thursday game.

Coach Kara Lawson ended her news conference after Duke's win against the University of Pittsburgh by calling out her issues during a previous game against Florida State. According to Lawson, the Blue Devils and Seminoles spent the first half of Sunday's game playing with a men's basketball. Duke went on to lose the matchup by 13 points, 57-70.

"This would never happen in a men's game. This would never happen," she said at the postgame conference. "It's embarrassing for our sport."

Lawson said her players complained about the ball, making seven shots out of 34 attempts in the first 20 minutes of the game. Their opponents made 10 of their 30 shots in the first half, ESPN reported.

Sometimes the shots just don't fall. Deal with it.

Basketballs used by men in the NBA and at the college-level have a circumference of about 29.5 inches while balls used by the WNBA and women's college teams are 28.5 inches, according to digital sports publication Stack.com. Lawson and her team allege the correct balls were swapped in after Duke assistant coach Winston Gandy alerted officials at halftime.

"To have a game that, at the end of the season, could be the difference between a seed, between a title, my players don't deserve that and neither do their players," she said in the news conference.

Despite her outrage, Atlantic Coast Conference and Florida State officials concluded the ball used during the first half of Sunday's game, which was played in Florida, wasn't a men's basketball.

At least everybody agrees it was a basketball, not a beach ball, not a Chinese weather balloon.

Somebody should tell the coach to check her privilege.  How many teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference are going to be playing into March?  As opposed to teams from the Mid-American Conference, where one oopsie in the conference tournament means a team with a solid regular season record doesn't rate an at-large bid.

THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS FRIGHTFUL.

The train ride is not delightful.  "Lack of standby equipment and the inability of Amtrak mechanical forces to sufficiently prepare cars and locomotives for service led to the cancellation of one pair of Chicago-based trains and departure delays to 11 others on Thursday, Feb. 2."  The network is so tightly coupled (management-speak concealing the folly that is doing more with less) that a failure early in the day disrupts workings all day, and in the case of the overnight trains, well into the week.

Occurring at the beginning of the work day, pervasive delays like these can have a significant impact on repeat business. In addition, a 45-minute late arrival of the first Hiawatha from Milwaukee caused the next departure, No. 331, to leave 44 minutes late at 9:09 a.m. The same equipment that left the Windy City on No. 329 returned to Chicago more than 2 hours late, so train No. 333, a scheduled 11:05 a.m. departure, was cancelled.

Putting additional strain on mechanical forces was the overnight arrival of two trains from the West Coast that should have come in the previous afternoon: the California Zephyr,11 hours, 28 minutes late at 2:18 a.m., and the Empire Builder, 12 hours, 45 minutes late at 5:30 a.m.

Both trains had to contend with a late departure from their originating terminal, inclement weather, and freight congestion on their way to Chicago, but the major source of delays were “mechanical issues.” The Zephyr and the Builder each lost four hours —the Zephyr at Denver, and the Builder between Milwaukee and Glenview, Ill., to equipment failures.

These problems, including disrupted workings on the Milwaukee service, are nothing new, although it appears that the new coaching stock and motive power is not up to the rigors of winter.

Amtrak does not routinely disclose the nature of its trains’ mechanical problems. Sources tell Trains News Wire cold weather has adversely affected both the state-owned SC44 and long-distance ALC42 Siemens Charger locomotives and caused inoperable toilets on Horizon coaches and cafe cars.

There have been repeated instances during the last three weeks of trains returning to Chicago Union Station after leaving on time, an indication that all necessary maintenance may not have been completed.

Some of Our Intellectual Betters would like to shame us into not flying or driving; the air traffic control system and the security theater do nothing to enhance the experience, and the airway infrastructure joins the highway infrastructure as markers of government failure: and Amtrak's failure to offer a serious choice to even the small number of travellers who aren't driving or flying is almost enough to make me think Our Intellectual Betters would prefer that we stay home.

THERE MIGHT BE A SIMPLER EXPLANATION.

Hot Air contributor David Strom sounds the alarm about a National Institutes of Health research project that appears to have vanished.  "NIH quashed study because it wouldn't show what they wanted."

The study announcement involves a delay in participants getting their corona shots.

The open-label randomized trial, which began on Thursday, will test whether vaccine prevents both infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among college students, and will "help inform science-based decisions about mask use and about social distancing post-vaccination," [Anthony "Schnickel Fritz] Fauci added.

The NIH-funded study will include 12,000 college students ages 18 to 26 from more than 20 universities, and is expected to last 5 months, Fauci said. One group of 6,000 students will receive their first dose of the Moderna vaccine immediately. The others will serve as controls and will receive their vaccine 4 months later.

All participants will ultimately receive the usual two doses.

Participants will swab their noses daily for SARS-CoV-2 infection, provide blood samples periodically, and complete surveys through an electronic diary app. They will also be asked to follow their university's SARS-CoV-2 protocols and get tested twice each week, according to the study's website.

Anyone who tests positive will be asked to follow additional protocols.

Another 25,000 individuals whom participants name as "close contacts" -- for example, roommates or co-workers -- will also provide blood samples to the researchers, take daily nose swabs for 2 weeks, and answer weekly questionnaires (if they agree to participate, of course).

Right there in that "asked to follow their university's protocols" might be a clue to what came next, even before we get into those close contacts who are invited to participate.  The study, however, went away before the data analysts could fill out a single spreadsheet.  "We are no longer enrolling new participants in the study and are ending the study earlier than anticipated. This is because of the success of COVID-19 vaccination programs across the US! This may mean that your study participation will be shorter than expected."

Did nobody at Hot Air or any of the other Town Hall or Pajamas Media services recall how much bandwidth has gone to slagging on universities for their corona tyranny?  Does anybody recall Schnickel Fritz raising a stink about superspreading events at college football games?  A student who contemplated postponing the course of corona shots into July or August of 2021 might as well be contemplating not enrolling for the fall semester.  Yes, dear reader, Our Political Masters have told us all sorts of misleading things; and somebody disposed to not trust the Wise Experts might suspect that the study discovered the vaccines weren't effective.  I submit, though, that "success of vaccination programs" combined with university inoculation requirements quickly depleted whatever pool the investigators were hoping to set up as a control group.

SORRY, STANFORD, THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

In the matter of a shared photograph that might be of sorority girls grappling with Mein Kampf, a Stanford Morale Conditioner defended the university's investigation of the matter with "No one is being punished or investigated by the university for reading a book."  The Morale Conditioners don't have to investigate reading, because the possibility that someone, somewhere, might be troubled by the sight of that image, is enough reason for the Grossfahndung.

Whether the student was reading the book for a course, independent study, or using it as a prop in a joke, our concerns remain. The presence of the book is what prompted the filing of the PIH report. IHE’s description of the photo suggests that the book was being used as part of a joke. (That said, it’s difficult to ascertain whether someone is “actually” reading a book in a photo or simply posing.). But even if the book was simply part of a joke, the photograph is still protected expression.

It used to be that "inappropriately directed laughter" had to involve, you know, somebody laughing. To the current crop of humorless functionaries at Stanford, now, apparently that the picture gives somebody the opportunity to snicker is thoughtcrime enough.

FULL CIRCLE.

For a few years, a Morristown and Erie property called Maine Eastern offered excursion-style passenger trains between Brunswick and Rockland,  Some of those trains connected with Amtrak's Downeasters for Portland, Old Orchard Beach, and Boston, where there was a sort-of-connection to the rest of Amtrak's national network.

I lose track of all the machinations by which Morristown and Erie opted out of the contract to run Maine Eastern, and subsequent operators have continued the freight service (serving, among other shippers, Bath Shipbuilding) but shied away from running passenger trains.  In what might be an unrelated development, at least one Morristown and Erie diesel has made it into preservation near Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

That, though, is not the closing circle.  Rather, it is the work of the Maine Department of Transportation with current operating company Midcoast Rail Services.  "The prospect of regular passenger service on a state-owned route between Brunswick and Rockland, Maine, received a big boost last week when Maine’s Department of Transportation budgeted $3 million to advance a two-year pilot project utilizing 1950s-era Budd Rail Diesel Cars."  Whatever transpired between Maine and Maine Eastern did not mean an end to passenger trains.

Plans to extend the reach of NNEPRA’s Boston-Brunswick Downeaster an additional 56 miles to Rockland have been contemplated since seasonal excursions on the branch ended in 2015. That’s the year that the state declined to renew the operating lease of Maine Eastern, the company that had operated summer-only round trips since 2004.

The Budd Cars are being spiffed up from their previous service as commuter cars.  That, dear reader, is the circle closed.  In the late 1950s, the Boston and Maine under Patrick McGinnis sought to replace all locomotive-hauled passenger trains with Budd Cars.  That brought an early manifestation of the too-light-for-track-circuits problem and gave Maine Central, no longer under common management with Boston and Maine, reason to keep the Budd Cars south of Portland.  Through service from Boston to Bangor and a few Maine Coast points ended in the early 1960s. Only now have the Budd Cars, styled Coastliners, come into the mix.  Let us hope it works well, the participants are not fans of analysis paralysis.  “We can just run the damn service and see if it works!”

I approve of the spiffing up of Budd Cars for excursion service.  Maine Eastern rolled out a proper club car back in the day.

Let's see what the summer travel season brings.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Let's give thanks for small victories.  "Hamline Faculty vote 71-12 to urge president to step down after academic freedom scandal."  That's what stewardship looks like.  Now, stewards, turf out the purveyors of crying towels.  "Substituting 'offensive' with 'harmful' serves only one purpose: to control others whose thoughts one finds personally disturbing." I mean, when you get hauled before the Holy Inquisition for reading a book in public?  Maybe, faculty, tidy up your institutions rather than have a Governor DeSantis have his way with you?  "Georgetown joins Yale University, Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and DePaul University on our list of Lifetime Censorship Award recipients. "

Let us also give thanks for Dave Barry.  "In the end, as is so often the case with these burning issues that consume the nation’s capital, nothing happens, which is the whole point of the constitutional system of checks and balances put into place by the Founding Fathers, all of whom — and this is a testament to their wisdom and foresight — are dead."

Let us also note the deprivation aspired to in progressivism. "At stake in this current debt ceiling struggle is preserving what sets the United States apart from Europe. In the United States, working people get to keep most of what they earn and decide how to spend it. Don't let the Washington pols treat your paycheck as if it belongs to them."

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

VIKTOR ORBAN AND JOE BIDEN CONCUR.

In the grand fiction that state action to cap prices "lowers costs."  It will not turn out well.  Hungary first:

Viktor Orbán is a hero to American national conservatives. So when in January 2022 the Hungarian Prime Minister announced he would supplement price caps on fuel and mortgage rates by mandating that sugar, flour, sunflower oil, chicken breasts, pork legs, and certain milk products be sold to consumers at lower October 2021 prices, some of this anti–free market cohort celebrated his decisive action to "protect families" from inflation. "But, but, but, what would Milton Friedman say!" tweeted Compact magazine editor Sohrab Ahmari, mocking advocates of market economics. This was "the party of the state for the win."

We get the same sort of nonsense out of the Jarrett regency, whether it's selling off the strategic petroleum reserves, putting price caps on insulin sales, or somehow pretending that limiting individual Medicare payments "lowers costs".  Earlier today came the nonsense.  "We’re going to keep lowering costs for families — from lowering costs in healthcare, prescription drugs, clean energy — because we passed that legislation. We’re going to be rolling it out this whole year."  We have much to look forward to.

Well, we know what Friedman would have said: These price controls will not work as you intend. Limited to a small range of goods, they won't dampen even measured inflation rates. They cannot suppress actual inflationary pressure, which is determined by the intersection of total spending and output. Even if almost all prices were controlled, as in the U.S. during World War II, a lower measured inflation would ill reflect the reduced quality and product reformulations that sellers would reach for to circumvent price controls. When controls are removed, the official price level would surge again anyway.

Yes, and the sort of emergency measures a government takes when there is a war on is not an endorsement of emergency measures when there is not a war on.  Let the national conservatives, whoever those are, in Hungary and the United States recall the lesson, and pray that technocrats of the Welfare Economics Paradigm sort eventually realize the error of their ways.

Rather than reaching for a scapegoat, national conservatives should heed the lesson. They may believe that the national interest demands overriding market outcomes, especially when war is undoubtedly squeezing living standards. But junking market prices has a cost, even if it's your ideological ally doing the junking.

Logic and content will carry the day. Wishful thinking does not.

SO MUCH FOR THE ALL WEATHER MODE.

The current winter has been a missed opportunity for Amtrak.  First came those Christmas storms and a cold snap that made a total hash of airline service.  "Airlines cancel more than 12,000 flights during severe winter storms and scramble to rebook holiday travelers."  That story dominated the news cycle into the new year.  Now there's another cold snap under way, with more cancellations and delays at the airports.  This time, the big coastal cities might be less affected, and the news cycle less agitated.

Those cold snaps have not been as much fun on the roads, lately, between impatient motorists playing ducks and drakes with the semis, and electric cars running out of juice more quickly and stalling somewhere short of a charging station.

There aren't that many trains running, whether in the regional corridors, or elsewhere, and those that are running are either running with short consists, or subject to diesel failures.  The short consist problem has many causes, including the rolling stock getting old (the average age of legacy cars Amtrak acquired in 1971 and 1972 was less than that of the current Superliner and Amfleet II cars), the maintenance being deferred, and some silly axle count rules on Canadian National metals.

Trailing two P42 locomotives on the Capitol into Chicago on Jan. 15 were a Viewliner II baggage car, sleeper, diner-lounge, and one coach. Since early January, a second coach has been dropped; for most of 2022, the Chicago-Washington, D.C., train ran with two sleeping cars. The Capitol previously had lost a third coach, transition sleeper and glass-topped Sightseer Lounge during frequency and capacity cutbacks coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite increasing demand for longer-distance travel beginning in mid-2020, Amtrak management failed to reverse fiscal-year operating plans to forego the expense of Federal Railroad Administration-mandated air brake inspections and rehabilitation. Instead of preparing for a post-COVID surge, sidelined equipment accumulated as each car’s four-year brake expiration date approached.

Some overhaul maintenance capacity has been diverted to restorative brake work on Amfleet and Horizon single-level coaches used in corridor service, but Superliners had yet to get that special treatment when Trains News Wire spoke with Amtrak’s Vice President, Chief Mechanical Officer, George Hull, at the company’s public Board of Directors meeting in December.

Things have not gotten better with the new stock coming to the coach yards for the regional trains.

Given the equipment shortage made worse by the delayed deployment of state-owned Venture coaches, it isn’t clear whether Amtrak has an alternative to Superliners on the route it gets paid by Illinois to run. In the meantime, travelers attempting to ride long-distance trains are paying the price.

Those diesels, also built by Siemens, are less than stellar in rough weather.

The Amtrak locomotives that sustained mid-route failures on the Empire Builder in December, stranding the eastbound train in rural Minnesota, are undergoing software and hardware modifications intended to prevent the problems from recurring.

Responding to a Trains News Wire inquiry asking Amtrak why the Builder didn’t operate west of the Twin Cities for more than a week [see “Weather cancellations impact Amtrak and its western network,” News Wire, Jan. 6, 2023], Siemens acknowledged that issues have been identified and are being rectified.

In a statement to News Wire, a Siemens spokeswoman says, “Over the course of the past couple of weeks, Siemens Mobility has been working closely with Amtrak to identify the root cause of a number of isolated incidents of ALC42 power loss occurring under very specific and unusually extreme circumstances, where the locomotive experiences drastic changes in temperature. As a result, we’ve identified both a software solution and an additional hardware improvement that will eliminate the issue experienced. The software update has been implemented to the entire fleet, greatly reducing the potential for incidents. The hardware modification, replacement of a pipe, will be completed as quickly as possible. The [issues were] not encountered on other Charger locomotives, which have different power arrangements than the long-distance ALC42 locomotives.”

West of the Cities, the Builder comes close to serving the middle of nowhere, and its routing is a long way from any interstate highways, serving cities and towns that sometimes have rudimentary air service, if any at all.

That's life in Amtrak Joe's America, isn't it?  You can't get there from here.

THE PATHETIC DELUSION THAT IS SOCIAL SECURITY.

Saying something is so doesn't make it so.  "Social Security Is a Sacred Contract—Not Something To Be Trifled With."  Really?  "Thus, the return on your investment is subject to reduction by Act of Congress, whether by increase of taxes or change of benefit formula or means-testing or subjecting benefit payments to tax."

Yes, you can kid yourself, as steelworker Cliff Carlton does.  "It’s not a gift. It’s money that we’re due. We put money into it. We deserve it back."  Yes, you put money into it.  The Social Security Administration either spent it, or lent it to the Treasury to make the national debt look smaller.  "The commingling of funds and the erosion of benefits is all perfectly legal."

You can also kid yourself that somehow the Federal Government can fix it.

Republicans long hoped to privatize Social Security, preferring to gamble Americans’ futures on the stock market rather than force the wealthy to pay their fair share of the taxes needed to sustain the program. Fortunately, congressional Democrats, union members and other Americans torpedoed these schemes.

But now there’s a new threat. To secure enough votes to become speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy toadied to extremist Republicans whose demands for radical budget cuts once again put Social Security and Medicare at risk.

Pro-corporate Republicans openly plot to cut Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age, moves that would force millions of Americans to work longer and delay their retirements. Some Republicans even want to gut the current funding formula, slashing payments to Americans with other income, regardless of how much they pay into the program.

Strip away the populist froth, dear reader, and it's clear Social Security is neither a defined benefit nor a defined contribution pension.  Means-testing is already present, in that Social Security benefits (and any other pension distributions) are subject to income tax, and income tax rates can be changed at any time.  In like manner, making all labor or business income subject to Social Security taxes, rather than capping it at some value, redefines the contribution and implicitly reduces the return on investment.  That retirement age?  In the depths of the Depression, half of the people who might have been eligible for Social Security payments were ... dead; and the brains trust sold the program as providing a baseline income, it was not anyone's sole source of retirement resources.  In a way, even the defenders of the program get that.  "In addition to providing a buffer against unexpected health crises, Social Security is the only resource many retirees have when they outlive the nest eggs they accumulated during their working years."  That's a good problem to have, but in that "outlive the nest eggs" is the basis for those proposals to raise the retirement age.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF TABLE MANNERS.

Here's the latest thing we could impound in nyekulturny.

The scene: It’s an hour into a dinner party you’re hosting for “friends.” (Note the quotes.) Most of your guests are on their second (or third) round of adult beverages and are tucking into the main course — sumptuous grilled shrimp paired with grits, the latter of which you made yourself according to an old family recipe. Shouts of approval echo from around the table, but then you hear a very audible murmur: “These grits are good. However, you know, when I make them I use real cream, not milk.”

Dear reader, do you require any more evidence that Puffington Host is for metrofexuals with ample spare time? That paragraph describes the latest microaggression, "invidious comparison eating".

Potentially the most passive-aggressive bad-dining habit, ICE is when [c.q.] a person indirectly asserts a dish they’re consuming is lesser by listing the “superior” merits of another version (usually their own). ICE can play out in any sort of group meal setting (e.g., restaurants or coffee shops), but it’s particularly offensive when it transpires in a domestic space, right in front of the home cook.

Lest you assume ICE is some newfangled fad, let it be known that this nasty behavior has been going on — and more importantly, recorded — for hundreds of years.

In his landmark 1899 study of wealth and consumerism, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen argued that invidious comparison is a key way in which members of the wealthy and/or moneyed class actively set out to distinguish themselves from those of lower socioeconomic status. He specifically posited invidious comparison as “a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth,” which plays out often by accumulating and (here’s the important part) displaying or publicizing superior assets.

In other words, it’s not enough that your dinner party “friend” can afford to purchase and deploy real cream when they make grits; this fact must also be broadcast to the masses to establish their superiority.

Veblen had bespoke suits or hand-tooled luggage or matching carriage horses in mind, but to a class of people that has trouble engaging in a social media kerfuffle without invoking their degree, or having the latest virtue signalling emojis and three names and pronouns in their tag, superiority-establishing is a thing, whether or not it's a kitchen table issue.

That article being for Puffington Host readers, a discourse of monumental proportions, complete with childhood trauma, ensues.  One of the contributors, however, provides a realistic conclusion.

[Nick Leighton] offered this advice for dealing with ICE: “As a host who has prepared a meal or as a fellow diner being subject to this behavior, there are many etiquette paths one can take. From addressing it politely yet directly to ignoring it completely, it all depends on one’s mood, tolerance and how deep the relationship is with this person. For today, I’d probably lean toward offering a weak smile and then a quick change of subject. And then, for the future, I’d think twice about my guest list.”

When all else fails, you always have bourgeois conventions.

AN ELECTRIC HUMVEE IS THE PERFECT ROAD TRIP CAR FOR AN OLD GUY.

A lengthy stop to recharge after two hours is mandatory.  "Broken chargers, full charging stations, single-digit temperatures, and optimistic range estimates have tested our patience." That's true in California under temperate conditions, and have fun going from Tennessee to Michigan in winter.

Finally made it home to Detroit. Total door-to-door time was 13 hours on the nose (2 hours more than the trip would take in a gas vehicle), including an extended charging session while the Lucid people talked me through a needed software reset after all the screens went dark in the Air, a 15-minute stop at a Kentucky booze store, and an extended second charging session due to the time it took to get a carry-out dinner. That extended last stop turned out to be a lucky thing, because it gave me enough extra cushion to do what I always do when I cross the Michigan border—drive 85 or 90 mph the remaining 80 miles or so to speed up the arrival time, which really burns down the battery. I rolled in with 37 miles (8 percent) left when the original projection was 130 or so. That EVgo DC fast charger in Cincinnati was the only one on the trip to approach the full 350 kW. Carefree long-distance EV road-tripping in America's heartland isn't a thing yet, in my experience.

I've suspected that the limited range is a feature, not a bug. Can't have all that recreational travel.

Speaking of old guys stopping to recharge, look who showed up endorsing that humvee.

Then he says under his watch, the “great American road trip is going to be fully electrified.” We’re not even sure “your watch” is going to be until 2024 and you think it’s going to be “fully electrified.” That’s delusional.

Um, Joe? If people are having trouble even buying gas for their cars because of the gas prices that you drove higher over these two years you’ve been in office, how do you think they’re going to be able to buy a car that costs over $100,000? And just a heads up. I know that you have a classic Corvette (next to the classified documents you keep in the garage) and can buy any car or beach house you want, but most other Americans can’t, particularly not after all you have taken out of their pockets. This car costs more than most Americans make in a year, with many living paycheck to paycheck under Biden’s oppressive economy.

Yes, and part of that "transition" he keeps babbling about is not doing as much discretionary travel, unless it's on the trains (or maybe the airplanes) that haven't acquitted themselves so well of late.  The environmentalist wackos noticed.  "He also got attacked by many on the left for pushing the Hummer and how expensive it was."  In addition, spend a few minutes on urban transit social media, and see how quickly somebody will point out that traffic congestion with electric cars is still traffic congestion.

That summary of reactions concludes,

Not to mention that it may take an incredibly long time to charge.

But again, does Biden know any of this or even care? It doesn’t look like it.

He neither knew, nor had to care, because while the car was recharging, so was he.

A CASE FOR FACULTY STEWARDSHIP.

A few weeks ago, Swarthmore's Timothy "Easily Distracted" Burke counted the ways he'd prefer to be administered to.

1.  I want leadership that understands and respects that decentralized institutional structures are in many ways extremely efficient, highly functional.
2.  I want to led by people who believe that you should move from individual self-sufficiency to collaborations at all institutional scales via consultative, democratic processes.
3.  The #1 thing I need as an effective follower to function as a citizen of the institution is information. I need to know a lot about what goes on in my own institution, about why we’re enacting X policy and making Y change to our organization.
4.  I need to know that my leaders are plugged into the habitus of their institutions.
5.  I want leaders who very profoundly believe in the professional and social values that I want to uphold as a follower, or if they don’t, are coherent and legible in their dissent and are prepared to have a genuine discussion (full of forking paths and possibilities) of why they don’t share my values or the wider values of my colleagues or community.
6.  I want some sense of anticipation of future challenges and problems and some ability to call me and my colleagues (both faculty and staff) to the table to grapple with the future in ways that none of us can do by ourselves.

The elaboration on those points is in some ways idiosyncratic to his college, where some of his colleagues suggested he stand for provost.  He's not interested.  But do you not see in those main points a respect for emergence and self-organization as guiding principles for social organization, and an understanding that the responsibility for the curriculum and student development ought be that of the faculty, and that there might be elements idiosyncratic to the academy that outsiders brought in as so-called disrupters, or professional administrators whose only classroom experience is during registration and orientation, and whose research experience, such as it is, is looking at spreadsheets prepared by novice deanlets will not be able to grasp.

At Inside Higher Ed, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed responds to the essay in a way that reflects his development as a scholar.

Burke’s piece, occasioned by flirting with the idea of applying for a provostship, addresses the nature of leadership in an aggressively decentralized organization. He notes, correctly, that many institutional leaders regard decentralized decision-making structures as obstructionist or unwieldy, and that they often make the mistake of believing that the wisdom of a select few will routinely be better than the wisdom of many. As he puts it, “[a] decentralized institution is one where many people have their eyes on potential mistakes, simultaneously and independently of one another. The trick is to make sure that information flows between these compartments freely and that leadership doesn’t frivolously override or ignore decentralized practices and insights.”

Recall that he and I first tangled, years ago, over administrators being put off by faculty shunning meetings during summer.  Perhaps that's me being obstructionist still, but whatever.  Now, if people in higher education more generally would contemplate the deeper implications in that "mistake of believing that the wisdom of a select few" passage.  Too often, the academy is instinctively favorably disposed to Governance by Wise Experts.  But I digress.

TAP THE KEG OF BOCK!

Fill your steins!  The communist on corporatist fratricide among Democrats is about to get epic.  "Having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because Biden supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets, and controls the concession stands."  It's rich reading Norman Solomon, for the communist wing, accusing the corporatist wing of engaging in Leninist style democratic centralism, isn't it?

There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.

New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”

Those likely Democrat primary voters are refugees from Massachusetts who want to be taxed like Republicans and governed like Democrats. May they be damned.  Or amused.  Funny, isn't it, how quickly Georgia goes from the Poster State for Voter Suppression to a Refuge of Popular Soverignty.

But South Carolina, the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the country, offers the singular virtue of having rescued Biden’s presidential hopes with its 2020 primary. As the Associated Press explained last week, Biden is “seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27 percent of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.”

The president’s rationalization for putting South Carolina first is diversity. Yet the neighboring purple state of Georgia, which has an activist Democratic base, is more racially diverse -- and it’s a crucial swing state, where the party’s general-election prospects would benefit from being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Biden’s intervention has created a long-term political mess for Democrats in New Hampshire, where he’s now less popular than ever due to undermining the state’s first-primary status. Even New Hampshire’s normally compliant Democratic senators and representatives in Congress have been denouncing the move.

I've become less and less enthusiastic about party primaries, particularly of the first-past-the-post sort; and maybe if we saw the primary cycle off there'd be less pandering about ethanol subsidies and other sops to local rent-seekers.  For now, though, quaff that beer and draw another!  "Despite the best efforts of their flying monkeys in the mainstream media to make it seem as if everything is alright, the Democrats have been choking on buyer’s remorse for two years now."

EMERGENCE IN EVERY POT.

Virginia Postrel laments the culture-war dimensions of synthetic meat.

I was naively stuck in the 20th century.

Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.

Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.

There's a logic lesson in what follows.

The best argument against the development of cell-grown meat is that technocrats believe that anything good must be mandatory, especially if the good thing claims to help the environment. So if someone invents cell-grown meat, government mandates will soon follow. We therefore shouldn’t encourage alternatives to the status quo lest we be forced to adopt them. It’s the same argument we hear from people who believe that saying cities should allow property owners more flexibility about what they build on their land is tantamount to banning single-family homes. This culture-war form of the precautionary principle is as bad as every other form. It’s a prescription for stasis.

I suppose. Somebody invented the motor-car. What followed wasn't quite government mandates, but there was a lot of nudging in the form of infrastructure spending and zoning codes.  Are the zoning codes a tool of the self-styled progressives or a new refuge for latter-day traditionalists?  Same thing with the politicization of streetcars.  Everything gets turned into a purity test.  At any time, though, what we understand as best practice has emerged because it confers evolutionary advantage.

Contrary to this view, ethical standards evolve in a bottom-up way. They aren’t simply imposed, by me or anyone else. Their evolution is influenced not only by cultural ideas but by economics and technology. Authorities may try to impose ethical standards or to hold them still over time (see: the Taliban and women’s education), but standards do shift. To take a simple example, for 10,000 years of human civilization, child labor was completely normal; it still is in some places. It gradually vanished as people got richer and investing in children’s education made more economic sense than putting them to work. We now generally view child labor as unethical—not because that’s an eternal truth but because we can afford to.

Whether synthetic meat will ever pass the "can afford to" test (as well as any taste and texture tests) remains to be seen.