SMALL DECISIONS FOR THE WIN.

The net seller of something from his endowment might sell less of it if he's offered a higher price for it.  If that endowment is his labor time, that statement is still true.

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

Politicians, of course, will seek to claim credit for emergent phenomena, or to codify them as it is convenient. Case in point: Crazy Bernie. "With exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it's time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs."  The man is too old to change his thinking, and he's probably got no sensible answer to "entrepreneurs get rich by improving working conditions and lowering prices."  He's accordingly going to miss the emergence present in the study he's reacting to.

A large-scale pilot program, spanning over 3,000 workers, found that workers slept better, firms made more money, and employees were less likely to say they did not have enough time to care for loved ones.

As the Washington Post reports, most of the companies involved in the pilot plan on continuing to use a four-day work week.

The concept of a four-day work week has increasingly caught on over the last few years, with firms and researchers alike taking the plunge to cut back hours without reducing pay.

As Insider reported in December, 4 Day Week Global — a New Zealand-based nonprofit — conducted a study involving 33 participating companies that employed 969 people based in the US, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, who adopted a four-day work week in a pilot program over a six-month period, and it found it was a "resounding success on virtually every dimension."

"Companies are extremely pleased with their performance, productivity and overall experience, with almost all of them already committing or planning to continue with the 4 day week schedule," the report said.

"Revenue has risen over the course of the trial. Sick days and absenteeism are down," it continued. "Companies are hiring. Resignations fell slightly, a striking finding during the 'Great Resignation.' Employees are similarly enthusiastic. And climate impacts, while less well-measured, are also encouraging."

These results are all based on small samples, and generalization is hazardous. On the other hand, a testable implication of the way people behave when they sell from their endowments is precisely that the income effect of selling a more valuable endowment might lead to people selling less from that endowment to trade for other stuff.

Political types, however, will want to get out in front of the shift and call it leadership.

This isn't the first time a four-day work week has caught the attention of lawmakers — the Congressional Progressive Caucus previously endorsed the "32-Hour Workweek Act," with Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal saying in a statement at the time that it's "past time that we put people and communities over corporations and their profits — finally prioritizing the health, wellbeing, and basic human dignity of the working class rather than their employers' bottom line."

Rep. Mark Takano, a Democrat from California, proposed that legislation. He previously told Insider that a 32-hour work week — which would become the new standard under his proposal — would help Americans craft the new normal of work that they've been demanding.

"I think there was a Great Realization among a lot of Americans — how hard they're working and that they wanted to move on from the jobs that they were working at," Takano said. "So a four-day work week is something that connects a lot of Americans."

That last sentence is a non-sequitur, or perhaps it undoes all the talk about corporations over communities.  A job description that involves a comfortable salary and more time to enjoy it will connect a lot of workers with new jobs, irrespective of what the so-called progressives in Congress enact.  There might even be Chamber of Commerce types pushing for bipartisan support for such a law, perhaps because as a mandate it raises the costs of smaller competitors.

BUZZER BEATERS.

In basketball, if the shot is out of the player's hand before time expires, it counts.  Here's an example from a last 0.6 second victory of Northern Illinois at the University of Detroit (now something like Detroit Mercy).

Here's Emily Meinert's game-winning shot from today's 65-63 win over Detroit Mercy (video courtesy of Detroit Mercy Athletics) #SCtop10 pic.twitter.com/mjMQLvrP28

— NIU Women's Basketball (@GoHuskiesWBB) November 23, 2022

These dramatics would not have been necessary had the team not given away a fourteen point lead, but I'm going to wait for the end of the season to grouse about that.  There used to be a rule that one of the officials would turn away once a legal shot left a player's hand to indicate that it would count if it went in; I'm not sure what replay review has done to that rule, the general principle that replay incentivizes careless calls holds irrespective of the outcome.

In hockey, the shot has to cross the goal line before time expires.  Thus a rare Patrick Kane slapshot that was under way before the final horn sounded ultimately didn't stand as a good goal.

There's a green light interlocked with the official clock that automatically illuminates when the countdown hits zero, locking out the red light controlled by the goal judge. Look closely at the slower-motion wider-angle replay at about one minute of the clip, it appears that the green light was on before the puck crossed the goal line, the ruling stated by the referee after, presumably, better quality video from several angles, and a Canadian balloon tracker in Toronto.  That circuitry exists because the goal judge, who is supposed to be a neutral professional, might take a second or two to activate the red light, and once his switch is locked out, there will be no red light.  The goal horn, which is not official, is controlled by somebody in the arena, whose job it is to rile up the home arena fans.

The Blackhawks did get the sole goal of the shootout that followed, sending the fans home happy.

FASCHING IST.

These Germans see Karneval off with the proper rituals, including a few glasses of Kolsch.

There are a few pączki still on hand here, where "sacrificing for Lent" conflicts with "waste not, want not" we err on the side of wasting not. "If you don't eat at least one pączek, you will be unlucky all year long."

DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP.

A Northern Star editorial suggests an extension of Chicago's Metra to DeKalb would benefit many students.

These statistics mean the Metra line extending into DeKalb could serve a total of 61% of in-state students, regardless of whether they commute or live on and around campus.

The line’s extension could mean worthwhile accessibility to Chicago for students living in the DeKalb area, whether for entertainment or for ease of travel home to visit family and friends.

That editorial also quotes Greg Sparrow, who served as mayor in 1990, who noted, "To date, I don’t envision that we are going to get anything done."

No, the topic has been under consideration for as long as I have lived here, and experience speaks.

A sad prediction: the study will turn up some small benefit to the trains, but the necessary taxing district will come a cropper in the rest of the county.  "When I hired out at Northern Illinois University, local thinking was that the Metra commuter train would be coming to DeKalb sometime in the next ten years."  So it was in 2019, so it was in 2010, so it might always be.  Never mind that Genoa and Belvidere fight over the scraps that might be available for Amtrak service returning to Rockford.

I'll have something to write about, if nothing else.

Of late, keeping the existing Amtrak trains running has been a challenge.  Maybe the current president could ask the people who arranged a special movement from somewhere in Poland into Ukraine and return how it's done.

ONCE IN EVERY WEEK, DRANO IN EVERY CAR?

The first iteration of any new product or service is often expensive, and sometimes the ultimate winner might start as something impractical at what people understand as the proper scale.  Then inventive people look at the early iterations and start thinking.

Americans purchased more than 500,000 fully electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, accounting for more than 6 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. The Biden administration wants that number to exceed 50 percent domestically, and the International Energy Agency projects it to exceeed 60 percent globally by 2030. But getting those cars on the road—and storing increasing amounts of intermittent energy generated by solar panels, hydro plants, and wind turbines—would require a lot of lithium-ion batteries.

With current technology and lithium resources, that would be a daunting challenge. But ongoing battery innovation promises to address the gap.

Lithium is in the same column of the periodic table as sodium.

Electrochemists are already addressing the shortfalls he described, and their work will drive down the cost of powering electric vehicles.

Natron Energy in the U.S. and CATL in China are working on sodium-ion batteries. At $960 per ton, sodium hydroxide is much cheaper than lithium. In 2022, CATL announced that its next generation of sodium-ion batteries will reach an energy density of 200 watt-hours per kilogram, which compares well with the 220 watt-hours per kilogram of current lithium-ion batteries. CATL's sodium-ion batteries could be as much as 75 percent cheaper per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion batteries.

While sodium-ion batteries weigh more, CATL says they will charge in just 15 minutes, last through 3,000 charge cycles, and work well in the cold and heat. Lithium-ion batteries take 30 minutes to charge, last 1,500 cycles, and do not perform well in cold or heat.

I'm old enough to remember when Dick Tracy's wrist radio was an animation, and pop cans had to be galvanized steel because the carbonated water was reactive with ordinary steel or aluminum.

GIVING UP PEPSI FOR LENT?

Not quite, although as Culver's switch from Pepsi products to Coke products in their dispensers, there are people decrying the heresy.

“Love Culvers, but not happy to hear that you have switched away from Pepsi. Bad choice,” reads another comment, this time on Facebook.

“Culver’s has been my favorite place to eat for quite some time now. Maybe up to 4 times a week,” commented another Facebook user. “But I am soooooo upset that they switched from PEPSI to coke that I will go other places sometimes, especially when they have a flavor of the day I don’t particularly care for. The employees are great and that is one reason I continue to go there.”

“Bring back the Pepsi please! That is one of the main reasons I went there,” reads another Facebook comment.

Some folks seem to be taking the switch especially hard, vowing to never come back for a ButterBurger or a Concrete Mixer ever again.

There are Cokeaholics who hail the change, and then there are devotees who see in Culver's a worthy Upper Midwest replacement for A&W.

And then there are those who don't really care about Coke or Pepsi — they're just interested in Culver's famous root beer.

“This whole story seems like a lot of hoopla,” Ben Shaver, Wisconsin native and former Culver’s crew leader, tells TODAY.com. “Who wants to drink a Pepsi or a Coke with a ButterBurger? There’s only one correct drink pairing for a ButterBurger and that’s a Culver’s root beer.”

Well, luckily for Shaver, Culver’s Signature Root Beer, which customers are known to enjoy on its own or paired with a scoop of the eatery’s Vanilla Fresh Frozen Custard, is not going anywhere — at least for now.

"For now." Let's see if Culver's contract with Sprecher for the root beer.

SLOWLY, THEY CATCH ON.

Former Davidson College president Carol Quillen looks beyond the immediate breakdown of good academic order at Hamline College to consider what else had gone wrong.

First, we lack a common language. Words are the tools through which we mark distinctions and build a shared reality. How does an idea differ from an epithet? Or a sense of belonging from a sense of comfort? A cultural practice from an identity? A community of learning from a family? When we don’t share a vocabulary, vaguely defined terms (“antiracism,” “free speech,” “fascism” and “identity” are good examples) obscure significant distinctions and then stand in for some unstated argument. Say the sentence, “I am committed to building an antiracist classroom,” and different listeners will hear a range of contradictory things, from “each individual will have an equal shot at learning,” to “white students, stay away,” to “this professor will handwave a lot to make herself feel virtuous.”

That's what happens when you attempt to introduce new private vocabularies, without any notion of a common vocabulary.

Relearning from scratch, though, seems to be where we are headed.  Consider privilege.  We could apply the argument to any other emergent phenomenon.  Take seriously the arguments from outrage about "inherited" or "unearned" advantage or privilege or custom or what have you: aren't you reduced to having to construct your rules of interaction ab initio?  Just for fun, dear reader, consider a future privilege training session in which a novice, skeptical of the message yet alert to the irony, asks the trainer what he (or she, or it, or whatever the pronoun conventions are) did to earn the right to conduct the training and introduce that material.  Sometimes you undermine them with mockery, and sometimes, you undermine them by asking difficult questions.

Let us take the partial win and return to the column.

Second, it’s hard to learn when your surroundings whisper, “You don’t belong.” Universities that are becoming ever more heterogeneous are asking how a residential, pluralistic community committed to free inquiry can most effectively function. This will cause conflict, especially at institutions whose basic rhythm—calendars, student traditions, curricular requirements, holiday celebrations and dining options, among others—arise from a particular tradition. Do we play sports or hold theater performances on Saturday? Open multiple kitchens? Require courses in emerging fields? Can we dethrone the practices of the tradition out of which we arose? Should we? What if one person’s religious practice violates another person’s sense of dignity? How can we build shared experiences and an identity as a campus while respecting all cultures and traditions? Pretending that this is easy serves no one.

Good. I could add: any invocation of "heteronormativity" (let alone "cisheteropatriarchy") as Badthink, or any marketing of "deconstructing whiteness" or "decolonizing music."  Any social organization will have institutions and conventions by which insiders can identify outsiders, and successful organizations will be receptive to some practices of outsiders.  Nobody ever said that emergence was easy.

Finally, because learning can be earth-shattering, it’s helpful to distinguish the “why” behind similar feelings. There’s a difference between intellectual vertigo (“I’m learning things about myself or the world that shock me”) and individual marginalization (“I’m not welcome as a participant in this community” or “I’m only welcome as a representative of a huge, diverse group”). Both differ from personal reactions to difficult subject matter. Institutions claiming to be inclusive must address practices that lead to marginalization. And as professors we fall short if we fail either to challenge students’ worldviews or to offer them tools to move from an initial reaction through a process of analysis to the satisfaction that comes with understanding.

When a Hamline happens, we can react or we can get curious. Reacting feels good and changes nothing. Thinking offers a way forward and is, in the end, liberating. People who care about free inquiry can’t be afraid to move beyond even deeply entrenched views to engage in it.

So mote it be.

OH, SHUT UP.

Look, if you don't want to go cruising with the Beach Boys, don't hang out at the drive-in.

In a study accompanying the [French] campaign, researchers found that familiar toxic masculine stereotypes “are easily reflected behind the wheel” among male-identified drivers, including disturbingly violent beliefs about appropriate ways to express their frustration with other people on the road, as well as men’s “natural aptitude for driving” — even when they’re drunk or traveling at dangerous speeds.

Respondents, for instance, often agreed with statements like “[If another driver] annoys me by wanting to overtake me, I won’t let him” “and “I go a bit fast, but I’m in control,” as well as “Two drinks won’t change my behavior.”

Give. Me. A. Break. "Male-identified drivers???"  It's not that there's anything new about the nation's sissy classes attempting to impose their aesthetics on everybody else.

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

Of late, though, the nation's sissy classes have positively been wetting themselves over "toxic car culture."  Common Dreams contributor Stan Cox, in escalating the wetting, gets off what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone."

In so doing, those aesthetes only ensure that the anger among the last subset of the population that it's safe to mock grows.  To Streetsblog readers, though, such subtleties are lost.

[E]ven more lives couldn’t be saved by researching the complex question of why, exactly, men are so likely to spend so much time and take so many risks on the road — and taking action to address those root causes.

In an interview with the Guardian about the new French campaign, sociologist Alain Mergier postulates that the car has become “a symbolic object of masculinity, male identity and virility” in French culture, and that young males are often called upon to “prove [themselves] by ‘mastering’ a vehicle, such as accelerating or breaking speed limits to show, ‘I’m a real man.’”

Whether those hypotheses are true for male-identified people around the world, of course, isn’t clear yet, nor is it clear whether education campaigns like the new ad will have an effect in uprooting such deeply-embedded cultural beliefs. One PSA alone probably won’t have the same impact as, say, fining automakers who produce car commercials that explicitly tie masculinity to owning a big truck and driving it dangerously (yes, even if that car is electric), incorporating education about common toxic masculine stereotypes into mandatory drivers’ education programs, or even simply recognizing that roadway aggression is often a symptom of a larger cultural and emotional problem, and expanding access to therapy for men to help address it.

Should we start by recommending therapy for anyone who uses the expression "male-identified people?"  No, and a Common Dreams contributor, in the course of reinforcing the Franco-Streetsblog argument, actually recognizes the root root cause.

Aggrieved manhood is reactive: the gnawing feeling that “real men”—especially the straight white Western Christian kind—have been getting a bad rap and shouldn’t take it anymore.

DeSantis is one node in this booming backlash, which reframes any awareness of “toxic masculinity” and “white male privilege” as itself victimizing white men. Sociologist Michael Kimmel called this clever reversal “aggrieved entitlement.”

It's not a "clever reversal;" it's simple understanding of whose transgressivity gets a pass, and whose does not.  That there seems to be substantial overlap between the sensibilities of the urban cosmopolitans and that of the church of intersectionality only makes the pushback, particularly among Normals, greater.  You'd think that people interested in building political coalitions would get that.

Aggrieved manhood is everywhere these days, a throughline linking many confounding recent events: COVID anti-masking and lockdown protests, insurrections (now plural), climate denial, election denial, mass shootings and other supremacy crimes, and the spate of recent anti-trans bills and other “parental rights” scares. So why have so many pundits and commentators failed to recognize it for what it is?

Go ahead, make my day. Insulting voters is not an effective way to win them over.  "Tell voters you hate them often enough, and they'll believe you."  That's as true as the guy with a decked-out pickup truck as it is of the single cat lady.  What Ben Domenech advised his side is equally true of the rely-less-on-cars side.

Their repeated denunciations of single women as sad homebound “cat ladies” send a clear message: your life choices are bad, and you should feel bad. Don’t vote for us or our candidates, under any circumstances. It’s honestly a bizarre approach to people who purportedly want to be successful at politics.

The extension to pickup trucks, or country living, or getting around to the drive-ins is immediate.

We'll leave the failures of other Nanny State policies, such as lockdowns, vaccination and mask mandates, deinstitutionalization of crazy people, and school board follies, for another day.

THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS.

Of course, it's fake, but watch the palace guard media wet themselves.

pic.twitter.com/ZAHMS4vTnm

— Alan Jacoby 🎙🇺🇸 (@AlanJacoby1776) February 4, 2023

"Old stumble-butt."  Chortle.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE.

Having a little fun one morning.

Drink up!

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Cabaret is currently playing in Chicago, and radio promotions have suggested the themes of the show are of Contemporary Relevance.  I suspect that message offers one connotation to lakefront liberals, and another connotation to people less impressed by camp.  Children are paying the price.  "Yes, the answer to five decades of social Leftism resulting in two generations unmoored from mental health is... more social Leftism!"  It's a deadly modern problem.  "Too many Americans are failing to civilize their children."  "No society can hold together where people have nothing in common, they don’t speak the same language, they don’t practice the same things." Let the producers and fans of Cabaret remember this:  "You don’t get Hitler because of Hitler. There are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the people charged with maintaining a liberal polity are too corrupt and incompetent — or crazy — to maintain a liberal polity."  The crazy is strong these days.  "The end game, of course, is total lawless chaos, which creates the perfect conditions for the growth of progressivism. Or communism. Or fascism."

Case in point:  "The Chinese-spy-balloon incident appears to have quickly evolved from embarrassing national-security failure to national farce."  I was wondering as news broke of those other shoot-downs whether Dementia Joe had authorized the splashing of some kid's science fair project.  It was almost that good.  "The intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather, or conducting other scientific research."  Or ham radio operators soliciting QSL cards.  “I’m guessing probably they were pico balloons.”  Might be my neighbors?  "A group of hobbyists in Illinois that says one of its balloons is missing."

No response yet from NORAD, either about hobbyist balloons or the Santa Tracker.  The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

A CONCATENATION OF FAILURES?

On Super Bowl Sunday, conditions at Cold Spring Shops headquarters were favorable for a start to the outdoor grilling season.  By Wednesday night, though, the worst possible driving conditions hit the area, with freezing rain changing to snow.  To our north came the heavy snow, and reason to be grateful the hazardous chemicals tend to travel by train.

Racine, Dodge and Ozaukee counties experienced severe freeway closures Thursday after crashes led to car pileups and landed semi-trucks in ditches.

Three people were hurt with non-life-threatening injuries after 30 vehicles including six semi-trucks were in a series of crashes at 1:55 p.m. near Kewaskum in Dodge County. I-41 southbound remains closed at Wis. 28 while crews are still clearing the crash. Washington County Sheriff’s Office told TMJ4 that heavy snow and winter conditions also led to several multi-vehicle crashes just north of HWY D in the town of Wayne.

Two vehicles crashed near the median on I-41 near Raymond in Racine County at 12:40 p.m. Two semis jackknifed after one could not slow to a stop approaching the crash and a third semi hit a box truck and a van. Three people were injured but are all expected to make full recoveries. Roads were opened by 2:45 p.m. TMJ4 reported that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation believes that people driving too fast for the wet conditions led to the crashes.

"Too fast for conditions" is more commonly a thing earlier in the winter, before people catch on, although I suspect there's a false confidence people with all-wheel drive get that being able to get moving and keep moving more easily also means being able to stop more easily.  Sorry, no.  All vehicles have all wheel braking.

NOW DO NORTH AMERICA.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time in North American higher education finds an administrative overreach it can deplore. Iran Forces Dissenters Out of Academe.

Reports of scholars being retired early or dismissed indicate that the Iranian government has ordered a cleansing of academia in the wake of protests that have gripped the country since September. Demonstrations were triggered by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was accused of wearing her hijab “improperly.”

“We can expect more expulsions of students and faculty and a more conservative academic curriculum in the coming months,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West and vice provost of Missouri University of Science and Technology.

A ministry for the encouragement of virtue and prevention of vice is not a good thing in Iran. Isn't that, though, what diversity, inclusion, and equity types do to impose their vision of a curriculum?

Meanwhile, the government is taking steps to install regime loyalists in the top ranks of academia, recently appointing the ultra-conservative cleric Abdolhossein Khosrowpanah as secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution—the body responsible for appointing university deans and heads of scholarly academies.

Boroujerdi said the appointment was another “signal that the regime is doubling down.”

“The state will use this opportunity to water down the quality of the curriculum,” he added.

Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, agreed. He predicted a top-down push to ensure that academics are “all reading from same playbook,” with those who criticize the regime facing an end to their careers.

Islamic orthodoxy: watering down. Diversity, inclusion, and equity? Not so much. Never mind that the conformity and groupthink is in neither case emergent from the faculty.  Then, dear reader, enjoy this.

That year, supreme leader Ali Khamenei warned that the country had too many students in social sciences and the humanities—disciplines seen as “not inculcating loyal citizens.”

“Very similar things were done … A lot of professors were forced to retire,” Hashemi said.

Even before these recent layoffs, the ranks of scholars willing to criticize the regime had already been thinned, with anyone hired by a university having to undergo extensive background checks aimed at weeding out dissenters.

Nevertheless, Hashemi said he suspected that the number of academics affected by the regime’s clear-out was “much higher” than latest reports suggest.

“This is something the regime doesn’t want to advertise,” he said, adding that outspoken professors were “embarrassing” for the government and “difficult to spin” positively.

Chortle. Now discuss those diversity statements required in tenure dossiers.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay.

THERE ARE NO LONGER ENOUGH EYES ON THE TRAINS.

That East Palestine, Ohio train derailment has the political observers riled up.  Victory Girl Kim Hirsch weighs in.  "Train Derailment and the Pointing of Fingers."  It's gotten so that right-populist webloggers and Trotskyist socialists are sounding the same themes.

Perhaps Norfolk Southern feared that they might have to answer concerns that some of their employees knew the train was dangerous. They feared that the company’s implementation of “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” or PSR, a management philosophy which uses technology to improve efficiency — and profits — would lead to accidents like the event in East Palestine.

Or maybe they feared having to answer why doorbell camera videos showed that the axle on one of the cars was on fire some 20 miles before the derailment. “Hot box detectors” which are placed at intervals are supposed to alert personnel. Yet the alert came too late, and the fiery axle led to the derailment.

Precision Scheduled Railroading is a false economy, leading to tired and overstressed crews. The festering labor relations that almost led to a railroaders' strike last fall might also be leading to the remaining railroaders cutting corners.  Part of Precision Scheduled Railroading might be giving due regard to the possibility of false positives with those talking defect detectors.  They can happen.  But for a derailment of East Palestine proportions to take place, both the train crew and the dispatcher on duty must concur that the defect recorded is a false positive.  Note, dear reader, that a talking defect detector broadcasts a radio message which must be acknowledged by the engineer, and the dispatcher also hears it.  I don't know how far back in the train the defect was, but if the culture of possible false positives is also a culture of cutting corners, it's a good bet that any defect at axle count of 300 or higher is more likely to be thought of as a false positive.  Alternatively, the thinking might be with a train that long to get it to someplace where it's easier to service the defect.

Either way, the absence of responsible eyes contributes to the wreck.  Years ago, the passage of a train was shepherded by station agents, if the station was open; by interlocking tower operators required to go trackside and look the train over (thus those fixed train-order hoops in preference to the operator standing at trackside to physically deliver the orders); and by crossing tenders.  Yes, that's a lot of expensive labor prone to sickness, to nodding off at night, to showing up buzzed, and a lot of the train movements and crossing protection can be handled automatically.  On the other hand, when an Erie freight train crew thought they saw sticking brakes, which the crew corrected by applying and then releasing the brakes, ending the sparks they saw back in the train, there was a crossing tender whose crossing planks were torn up by that train: the dispatcher set a train order signal under his control to "stop and call in," appraised the crew of those facts, and the crew, including the head brakeman and the conductor in his caboose, inspected the train ... to find a fractured wheel jammed into a sliding position that could have caught on a switch frog and piled up a few cars.  (Trains, November 1980, pages 58-59).

It might be worth the risk to get fewer, longer trains over the road with fewer eyes on the movement, but doing so degrades the margin of error.

HOLD THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS TO THEIR OWN ILLOGICAL STANDARDS.

That's what Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman does.

The Woke ideology, dominant in almost all our universities today, holds two contradictory notions of reality: One, postmodernist in nature, according to which truth is a social construct determined solely by contests of power, and another one according to which it alone is in the possession of the ultimate Truth. The Woke ideology's belief system divides people based on the perceived position of power of the group, or groups, to which the people belong, according to a crude scheme of "intersectionality." The proposed remedy to this is a reparation strategy that calls for affirmative action and reverse discrimination. The ideology underlies many things we now associate with campus culture such as critical race theory, queer theory, and, most importantly, the administrative monster that is DEI. Like all totalitarian ideologies that claim to be in sole possession of the Truth, the Woke ideology rejects free inquiry and robust debate, which are denounced as tools of oppression. In the name of higher morality, fanatics "cancel" those who challenge it, and seek to compel all others to pledge fealty to it.

That's an area of dispute that I've been involved in for a long time, and a column in Newsweek, as well as the ongoing work of Governor DeSantis, continues the encouraging trend. "The good news from that recent post is that people with bigger platforms than mine are paying attention to those more serious failings. When I wrote the essay, it was with the hope of persuading people to pursue a different course from the one the trendy scholarship was pursuing."  The people pursuing that trendy course might have had to hit rock bottom first, or perhaps there was still enough rigor left in higher education years ago for the common culture to live off of it.  No more.

A student body raised on a culture of grievances, sensitive to the slightest "micro-aggressions"; a professoriate that leans overwhelmingly to the Left; out-of-control university administrations both more left-wing than the professors and more interested in running their universities as businesses, rather than preserving their truth-seeking missions; toothless and corrupt boards of trustees; politicians that, on one hand, encumber the universities with ill-conceived mandates while, on the other hand, incentivizing their worst excesses through an out-of-control student loan program.

Yes, the denial of coherent beliefs has brought incoherence. I warned them then: "We are only beginning to see the consequences of our failure to carry out our mission. The employers who hire our students and the legislators who underwrite our efforts are questioning our effectiveness."  Perhaps, had the people in charge of higher education discharged their duties more diligently, we would not be at a place where the poobahs of Florida public universities are crying about censorship.  Academician Klainerman isn't sympathetic.

States invest huge amounts of money in their universities. As a result, and despite the hand-wringing of academics pleading for non-interference in the Woke take-over of our universities, states not only have the right, but a duty, to ensure that public funds are used wisely. The wise use of university funding means, at minimum, ensuring that they fulfill their primary truth-seeking mission. The failure of previous attempts to ensure that universities seek to pursue their highest mission, even in red states such as Texas, suggest that the only way to do so is with robust changes at the top. This is what Governor DeSantis has done at New College of Florida by appointing board members and senior executives steadfast in their goal of making sure that universities are accountable to the people and uphold their highest mission. DeSantis's initiative aligns with the recent model DEI legislation proposal of the Manhattan Institute, and it could inspire other states to do the same.

This is hopefully the beginning of the restoration of universities to their original mission: seeking truth and preserving knowledge. As a professor at Princeton University, ranked a dismal 169 out of 203 on freedom of expression by FIRE, I can only hope for an effective mechanism by which private universities, and not merely public universities, can themselves be pressured to reform.

We do have market tests. I wouldn't want to be managing the endowments at Oberlin or Hamline these days, and perhaps alumni of other private universities can send the latest fund raising letter straight to the recycle bin.

AN ECONOMICS POP QUIZ.

Composed by Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux.  A sample:  "True or false: Government-enforced prohibitions on all but the most highly qualified and certified electricians selling their services to the general public have resulted in fewer accidental electrocutions."

MILWAUKEE PIZZA.

That is a category, and here is more history of the pioneering Caradaro Club.  "Milwaukee – despite its Italian communities in the Third Ward, Bay View, West Allis and around Brady Street – was slow to the pizza party."  The Milwaukee version of pizza came after, and is different from, the deep dish or stuffed crust style that showed up in Chicago after the War.

John Caravella – born in Milwaukee in 1905 to immigrant parents from Naples – and Joe Todaro – himself a Sicilian immigrant – opened the Caradaro Club at 326 E. Erie St. on the ground floor of a three-story building at 326 E. Erie St., below a boarding house in 1945. That’s two years after Pizzeria Uno owner Ike Sewell and/or – depending on who you believe – Uno chef Rudy Malnati invented Chicago’s deep dish version at the restaurant in the Windy City’s River North neighborhood.

The article also mentions a few other pizzerias I recall from my youth. "Vince DeMarini opened his place on Wentworth and Potter in Bay View in 1952, and Zaffiro’s would land on Farwell Avenue in 1954. Lisa’s on Oakland dates to 1960, to name but a few that would come later." There still are Milwaukee area pizzerias in the Caradaro Club tradition, most notably Calderone Club.  It's apparently still possible to get pizza in Bay View.  "Santino's Little Italy, located at 352 E Stewart St, made [Yelp's] list at No. 46 in the country."  There's a DeMarinis on Conway Street as well.  Cheese, sausage, mushroom, onion, first option!  Is it time for a road trip?

BEWARE OF FREIGHT TRAINS.

A Norfolk Southern freight train loaded with all sorts of chemicals derailed and burned at East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, on the former Pennsylvania Railroad main line that also hosts Amtrak's Capitol Limited east of Alliance, Ohio.  The derailment, fire, evacuation, and aftermath have become a predictable political football.

Before the evacuation order was lifted on the evening of February 8, these three networks fell just shy of a combined 30 minutes on the topic. CBS led the pack with 593 seconds (9 min, 53 sec) of airtime, followed by ABC with 571 seconds (9 min, 31 sec) and NBC with 532 seconds (8 min, 52 sec).

However, once East Palestine residents were permitted to return home, the media’s interest in the story evaporated. ABC stopped covering it entirely. NBC gave the story just 38 additional seconds, and CBS was the only network to offer more than a minute of coverage (64 seconds) after the morning of February 8.

This sharp contrast in the data tells the story of an incurious media who were too eager to declare the issue resolved. Rather than healthy skepticism, reporters approached statements by Norfolk Southern and the Ohio EPA – both of whom had a blatant incentive to downplay the seriousness of the situation – with slavish credulity.

Perhaps this explains why they haven’t gone back to the story: because they abandoned it too early before asking any meaningful questions. For the broadcast networks to revisit East Palestine now would be to admit that their prior abandonment of it was an error born out of laziness and a lack of curiosity.

Unfortunately for East Palestine, their demographics and location in a red-tilting state like Ohio make them a wholly unappetizing topic for the corporate liberal media.

There is emerging bipartisan agreement that transportation secretary Pete "What, me worry?" Buttigieg is out of his depth.  From the left come calls for, predictably, more administrative state rulemaking.  "Progressives are demanding that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg improve rail safety regulations in response to the unfolding public health disaster in East Palestine, Ohio—the site of a recent fiery train crash and subsequent 'controlled release' of toxic fumes that critics say was entirely avoidable."  From the right comes slagging on the secretary for seeming to worry more about the multicultural makeup of construction workers than noting the crumbled infrastructure.  (Never mind that the railroads maintain the freight mains out of their own funds.)  In some cases, there is agreement across political lines, with Erin Brockovich being quoted in that Common Dreams roundup, and also appearing with Geraldo Rivera on Fox News Channel's morning report.

It is, however, the surprise observers are exhibiting at the cargo on that train that interests me.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine took to the podium on Tuesday to update reporters and citizens about the devastating train derailment in E. Palestine, Ohio, on February 3. The small town has been reeling in the wake of the derailment and subsequent controlled burn of dangerous chemicals days after the wreck.

One of the most astounding revelations from the press conference (watch below) was that the train was not classified as carrying hazardous chemicals.

“I learned today from the PUCO [Public Utilities Council of Ohio] that this train was not considered a high hazardous material train,” DeWine said. As a result, the railroad was not required to notify anyone in Ohio about what the train was carrying.

“Even though some rail cars did have hazardous material on board, and while most of them did not, that’s why it was not categorized as a high hazardous material train,” said DeWine. “Frankly, if this is true, and I’m told it’s true, this is absurd. And we need to look at this. And Congress needs to take a look at how these things are handled. We should know when we are trains carrying hazardous materials that are going through the state of Ohio.” The governor called on Congress to investigate the matter and make changes to the law if necessary.

DeWine noted that around 50 railroad cars were involved in the crash; ten of those were hauling hazardous materials. He said that both the U.S. and Ohio EPA were on the scene almost immediately to slow the flow of contaminated water while firefighters worked to put out the fire. Two days later, “concerns began to arise in regard to the temperature in one of the cars,” which was described to him as “volatile.” He immediately activated the National Guard.

What was on that train?

According to a list of the chemicals released by the EPA, five of the cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen; one car contained ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, a highly combustible liquid; one car contained isobutylene, a flammable gas, one car contained ethylhexyl acrylate, a combustible liquid; one care contained butyl acrylates, a highly flammable clear liquid, and two cars contained benzene, another highly flammable chemical.

That has East Palestine residents and their neighbors worried.

Reports have been emerging about animals becoming ill and dying in the wake of the derailment and a controlled release of hazardous materials to prevent a potential explosion.

One woman said her chickens died after a controlled burn of chemicals took place.

News reports said resident of East Palestine have reported a strong odor remaining in their community and experiencing a burning sensation in their eyes.

Several residents have filed lawsuits against NS in the days following the derailment alleging negligence on the part of the Class 1 railroad.

Some of the plaintiffs are seeking a court-supervised medical screenings for anyone within a 30-mile radius of the derailment for serious illnesses that may be caused by exposure to those chemicals.

Environmental officials have said the air quality in East Palestine is safe as is the town’s drinking water.

Famous last words?

But is the manifest of that train so out of the ordinary?  Probably not.  Pay attention, dear reader, the next time you are stuck at the level crossing.  Tank cars carry placards, and each of those has a specific (and internationally understood) meaning.  Modellers of modern image freight trains add realism to their models by using the right placards.  In addition, if you're close enough to the train, you might see stencils on the tank noting what the car ordinarily carries.  There's some truly scary stuff in those tanks, and you wouldn't want to use any old available empty tank car for your next load: think putting bleach in a car that previously hauled anhydrous ammonia.

Now think: would you rather that stuff be hauled in tank trailers, with possibly overstressed truckers playing ducks and drakes with motorists who might not be licensed, who might have had too much to drink, who are road-ragey commuters, or who are vacationers now frazzled from all those construction zones, on roads that are sometimes in a worse state of repair than those tracks?  It seems like there's a semi crash involving a fire somewhere on a Milwaukee or Chicago expressway almost every day.  It's transportation business the railroads might not want, but do you want more of that stuff on the roads, even if you understand what the placards are telling you is just one distracted driver away from something bad?

And: lost in the shuffle has been the cancellation, for a week, of the Capitol Limited between Chicago and Washington.  Has it gotten to where a day with full operation of all the trains in Amtrak's national network is newsworthy?

THINKING ABOUT THE BEST WAY TO DO ECONOMICS.

Arnold Kling gets off an intriguing bon mot.  "Economics ought to be a branch of what sociology ought to be."  Sociology, he argues, got into an epistemically closed morass.

Actually-existing sociology fell into a tar pit of Marxism some time ago, and it cannot get out. Marxist sociology looks at society in terms of power relations. There is a powerful class and there are exploited classes. The whole point of Marxist sociology is to expose and try to overcome these power relations.

What sociology ought to be is a more nuanced study of societies. Human beings do not just play a zero-sum power game. They play many different types of games, some of which are positive sum, in that many people end up better off.

Humans have many cultural tools, and these are evolving. There is much to study in how we relate to one another, and this series of essays presents some of the interesting issues. Issues like how we often cooperate but sometimes defect, how we organize to keep peace and to engage in war, how our competitive instincts sometimes are in a positive-sum context, sometimes in a zero-sum context, and sometimes in a negative-sum context.

There well might be working sociologists who reject that characterization, and who have research projects structured in other ways, and I would be delighted to hear of such.  It's his discussion of the direction economics has taken that motivates what follows.

Actually-existing economics is still mostly following in the footsteps of Paul Samuelson. He was part of the non-Communist left that rose to prominence in American intellectual circles in between the end of World War II and the divisions that arose during the Vietnam War.

Samuelson thought that economics was an exercise in applied mathematical optimization subject to constraints. Households solve optimization problems in order to maximize utility. Firms solve optimization problems in order to maximize profits. And government comes in as a sort of deus ex machina to optimize overall economic well-being by correcting market failures, taming the business cycle with Keynesian fiscal policy, and improving the distribution of income.

That is, a lot of economics works in what I refer to as the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm, in which the precise nature of the inefficiency as the modeller writes it down is perceived by that Omniscient Planner, who can issue precisely the regulation or levy precisely the tax that corrects the inefficiency.  Somehow, it's impossible for other actors in the economy to see the opportunity.  There are any number of ways in which the economist can model that opportunity; or to suggest that the Omniscient Planner might well be a rational individualist who gets things wrong in a predictable way.

Public Choice theory tried to get away from this model of government as an omniscient social welfare optimizer. Instead, it looked at government policies as the result of optimizing behavior on the part of constituent groups and government officials. The constituent groups want “rents,” meaning wealth that can be obtained from favorable government policies. Officials want to remain in power and accrue wealth and status therefrom.

My short version of Public Choice theory is that government intervention in markets usually takes the form of “subsidize demand, restrict supply.” In health care, education, and housing, heavy intervention serves to raise prices and spending. This is certainly good for people who make a living in those sectors.

The sparring in the journals over whether the Welfare Economics Paradigm or the Public Choice paradigm or some institutional approach or extensions of price theory better makes sense of the anomalies is also good for people who make a living by writing in academic economics, or about academic economics.  But does that teach anything to people who don't pursue an academic career?  Mr Kling suggests not:  "A useful way to think about what economics ought to be is to contemplate what you would want a first-year student to unlearn."  His list skews to liberal bromides and quasi-Marxist beliefs, and yet, the questions he asks are good ones, and practitioners who help develop young skulls full of mush along the lines of inquiry he proposes, or, better, to contemplate the strengths and weaknesses of those lines, might have more success than practitioners who focus on the formulas, figures, and terminology.

WASHED AWAY.

There's a stretch of the Dawlish Warren sea wall modelled at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.  If that stretch ever washes out, there are worse problems I'll be dealing with.

The real one does wash out, whenever there are severe storms on the Channel, and for years, there have been hopes of building a new railway somewhere inland.

A beach-front rail line does offer sightseeing, at least on one side of the train, but the risk of building beach-front property is the risk of the tracks washing out, which has blown a hole in Amtrak service on one of the busier corridor services west of Interstate 95. "Full passenger service to San Diego not expected until April."  Seriously?  As if the all-weather mode hasn't done enough already to make the bitter jokes about "Amtrak Joe" keep coming.

Regular operation of Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliners, as well as Metrolink service to Oceanside, Calif., was suspended at the end of September [see “Pacific Surfliner, Metrolink halt operations …,” Trains News Wire, Sept. 30, 2022]. Weekend service through the area resumed Feb. 4 after instruments showed the initial stabilization work, which involves drilling ground anchors into the bedrock beneath the hillside, had stopped the slow-moving landside. Service remains suspended on weekdays to allow the stabilization work to continue.

The new cost estimate, presented at a Monday meeting of the Orange County Transportation Authority board, does not include costs still being negotiated with landowners for the right-of-way needed for the stabilization devices, or permitting and potential mitigation that may be required by the California Coastal Commission.

The interruption through San Clemente was initially estimated to last 60 days.

Shades of fifteen days to slow the spread?

California: from setting an example for the rest of the country to being an example of what's in store for the rest of the country.

PUBLIC FUNDING OF EDUCATION IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Legislators can engage in censorship, 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."

It has long been my position that higher education brought the Ron DeSantis problem, or was it the Scott Walker problem, or did it begin with Allan Bloom and Charlie Sykes, on itself.

NEXT BATTER, THE DESIGNATED HITTER, FREDERIC BASTIAT.

The stadium subsidy drama continues in the neighborhood, this time in Wisconsin.

Gov. Tony Evers will propose spending $290 million in state money on improvements at the Milwaukee Brewers' stadium as part of the budget he introduces to the Legislature Wednesday.

The investment in taxpayer funding at American Family Field would come in the form of a one-time payment, paid for by a portion of the state's projected $7.1 billion dollar budget surplus. As part of the deal, the Brewers would sign a new lease that would keep the team in Milwaukee until 2043.

In a statement announcing the change, Evers framed his proposal as keeping a Wisconsin tradition alive, floating the possibility that without public support, the Brewers might leave Milwaukee.

The framing is interesting, as the governor is extending an inducement to the Brewers prospectively, rather than being placed in the position Illinois has been in with respect to the White Sox (build us a new stadium or we're off to St. Petersburg) or the Bears (make improvements to Soldier Field or we'll build a new place to suck in Arlington Heights).  Once Big Time Sports, Incorporated gets used to living at the expense of others, though, it wants to go on living at the expense of others.

The debate over public funding for the Milwaukee Brewers goes back decades. In 1995, then-Gov. Tommy Thompson convinced fellow Republicans in the Legislature to support a stadium deal that paid for the construction of Miller Park to replace the team's old home at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Brewers played their first game at the stadium in 2001. Miller Park was renamed American Family Field in 2021.

The 1995 Brewers deal authorized government bonding, or borrowing, to pay for construction of the stadium. Borrowing for the project totaled more than $259 million, according to a 2019 memo from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Taxpayers in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha and Racine counties paid an extra 0.1 percent sales tax to retire that debt and the associated interest. Evers signed a law in 2019 requiring the local sales tax to expire in 2020.

Today, the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District is charged with overseeing and maintaining American Family Field. Evers' offices said that without funding from the state, the district does not have the resources to meet its obligations to maintain the stadium.

Evers' proposal would make a one-time payment of the district of $290 million, which the governor's office said would save the state interest costs.

As I'm typing, the Milwaukee radio station that carries Brewer games is taking calls on whether the state should pay the money.  It gets complicated, because the team does not own the stadium, that park district does, and it is the custom in Wisconsin for special taxes to finance sports stadium improvements to expire.  Brewer executive Rick Schlesinger is on record as not favoring that special sales tax being brought back.  The one-time payment hides the reality that the maintenance of a stadium goes on.

That Wisconsin's divided government might involve even more unpleasantness between an aged executive and a populist legislature than we see in Washington will only lead to more nastiness.

SCOVILLES ON THE SUPERMARKET SHELF.

The Cold Spring Shops Way when it comes to salsa and hot sauce is to brew up the former, and send out from time to time for high-test versions of the latter.  There are, according to Food and Wine editors, gems to be had at your local grocer.

To help get you started on your hot sauce journey, our editors performed a masked taste test of nine brands found at most grocery stores. Hot sauce taste testing is not for the faint of heart (or palate); we sampled these sauces along with a big stack of quesadillas. The hot sauce was poured into numbered containers and the testers rated them and gave comments.

For hot wings, they recommend Frank's Red Hot, which to my (possibly overstressed) taste, is Tabasco-adjacent; that might be a pattern as they also commended Zatarain's Cajun Hot, another Tabasco-adjacent product.  Recall, dear reader, that Tabasco grow all their peppers on sacred ground near New Iberia, Louisiana.  They also had good things to say about Cholula, which might have been out of the taco rotation here for too long.

PICKING UP SOME OF THAT MONEY ON THE TABLE.

The six major North American freight railroads would prefer to move single-cargo, single-destination trains, although they will work with short lines that are able to provide remunerative volumes of traffic at their interchanges.  Add Pennsylvania's Strasburg Rail Road, better known as a steam tourist operation, to the list of short lines soliciting traffic in remunerative volumes.

The nation’s oldest short line, the 4½-mile-long Strasburg Rail Road in southeast Pennsylvania, last week opened a $3.3 million, six-track yard to handle its growing freight business.

Situated at Leaman Place Junction along Amtrak’s double-track electrified Keystone Corridor, the 7-acre site and interchange lies just off U.S. 30, the Lincoln Highway. Freight is delivered by Norfolk Southern’s H26 local, operating out of NS’s Dillerville Yard in the city of Lancaster, 11 miles west.

Overshadowed by Strasburg’s popular steam passenger runs, which attract 250,000 to 300,000 riders a year, the road’s freight business has fluctuated over the years, but has been on the upswing since 2009. It’s grown from 10 cars a year to almost 500, and freight trains run five days a week. Usually they’re powered by Strasburg’s ex-New York Central SW8 diesel switcher No. 8618, but occasionally a steam engine pitches in as well.

That's right, dear reader, revenue steam freight trains.

Commodities handled include inbound retail and specialty lumber, grain (wheat, oats, soybeans, and corn), and fertilizer. Outbound loads include agricultural products such as meal used in making pet food and tank cars of chicken fat that are used to make cosmetics.

The 500-car volume “is considered a minor miracle in the railroad world,” says Steve Weaver, a Strasburg vice president. Freight now makes up 10% of SRC’s revenue.

Of interest to ferroequinologists: public money for internal improvements that run on rails is nothing new.

One of the tracks occupies the right of way of an ancestor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the state-owned Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, which opened in 1834. To honor that heritage, Strasburg named it the P&C track.

Funding was provided through a public-private partnership, with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation supplying $3.3 million through its Rail Transportation Assistance Program. For its match, Strasburg provided about $800,000.

Additionally, Strasburg were able to deliver a car to a consignee who unloaded it promptly, and return the car to interchange on the same day, without any of the demurrage charges the big carriers with their precision scheduled railroading are prone to charge.  The service is apparently good enough to get a local business on track.  "I never knew you did freight, I thought you only did passenger trains."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,728.

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 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.  I'm now noting what others are pointing out.  First, Anthony "Giftzwerg" Fauci, M.D., has conceded, "We’re not going to eradicate the virus from the face of the Earth," continuing with a plea that he, or the potbellied dictator of Illinois, hang on to their emergency powers. "Fauci, who also serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), hopes that at least by 2024, the circulation of the virus is low enough 'that it does not disrupt ... the economy, our ability to interact socially with each other, schools, and things like that.'"  A younger medical student, Kevin Bass, offers a sober verdict.  "I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives." Read the full article. Note, though, his rebuke of the lockdown governors.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

Or, because not all governors imposed the same sorts of foolish restrictions, they moved out of the state.

"Illinois used to be a relatively decent state for economic freedom, although it almost always did much better on fiscal policy than on regulatory policy. But the state has lost some of that edge while also, not surprisingly, losing some of its economic vitality," the editors observe of the best-ranked of the three. "Illinois was long our bête noire on personal freedom, but that has dramatically changed with federal court decisions that have overturned some extreme restrictions on gun rights, the legalization of same-sex marriage, marijuana reform, and the availability of driver's licenses to people without Social Security numbers."

That improvement in personal freedom seems insufficient to mollify those put off by eroding economic liberty and high taxes, given the net 141,656 residents who sought a new life elsewhere.

  But the lockdown governors and the Jarrett regency want to continue to rule by decree.

As we assess what our leaders did in the name of what was, for a time, a real emergency, we should recall that the "Covid debate" was not really about Covid, but other things for which the virus served as a proxy. When we debated whether to follow CDC guidance, we were really debating the competence of of our expert class. When we quarreled over which businesses were "essential," we were really talking about whether smoking weed was better than going to church. When we traded data about case-fatality rates, we were really asking whether there was any public policy consideration greater than minimizing the risk of death. When we debated how best to respond to the pandemic, we weren't debating virology, but things much more foundational than that: religion, authority, and, what type of lives we want to lead.

The Biden administration has been on the wrong side of that debate since 2020. Ending the state of emergency in May will do nothing to change that.

That is what Illinoisans voted for.  "We elect our worst and then expect them to do great things."  The good news is an independent judiciary can stop some of the Combine's other excesses.  Consider that flight of fantasy out of Springfield, 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.  And yes, the law is hung up in court.  "At the end of the day, what we’re seeing in Illinois is yet another attempt by a state to restrict what people can own out of a misdirected desire–or so they say, anyway–to keep people safe."

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 2,696,168 infections, down by 1,672 from last month, and 23,534 deaths, a change of 924 from the preceding report.  I warned you about the validity of the numbers.

The latest report from Illinois counts 4,040,139 infections, an increase of 70,307 over last month and 41,282 deaths, adding 584 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.    The winter spike we observed in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 has not appeared in Illinois, or Sweden. End the emergency decrees.

The most recent tally of vaccinations gives around 26.5 million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of February 10.  The state also appears to have ended their count of the scary variants, although the page was last updated to January 1 to show a mix of Omicron variants circulating.

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 18,068.

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 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL.

At Christmas, I called attention to a public service announcement.  "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."

CAN THE MONEY REALLY PUT RACE RELATIONS RIGHT?

Jeff Jacoby has long been critical of paying reparations for slavery, segregation, and snob zoning, and he continues the argument in a recent column.  "Present-day advocates of reparations cite redlining and other 20th-century harms. But the heart of the argument has always been that Black Americans should be repaid for the 240 years that their forebears were enslaved in this land. That’s far from a new idea. But it is also far from a sound idea."  His argument has generally been along the lines of there being a lot of restitution in existing public policies.  "In short, there has been for years in America a considerable, well-funded attempt to make amends for the legacy of slavery and segregation. Those today who wish to argue that an outstanding debt is owed to Black America have an obligation to account for all that has been done, in good faith and at great expense, to pay down that debt."

A few paragraphs later, he asks, "As the clamor for racial reparations grows more aggressive, will it lead to healing and closure and reconciliation?"  Would that the money could really put everything right.  Former president Lyndon Johnson, as quoted in that column, made the case for something more than simple procedural equality long ago.  “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”  In like manner, the person maimed in a car crash or an industrial accident receives monetary compensation, and yet, he's got to go through life in a wheelchair or with a limp or missing limbs.  So too might it be with, take your pick, people still hobbled by that legacy of slavery and lingering hostile attitudes, or people who would hope that whatever monetary payments a local, state, or national government makes squares the accounts, and means an end to any further accusations of implicit bias or privilege.  The money well might make some peoples' lives better.  The healing, closure, and reconciliation?  I fear that the people who would most hope the money makes the scolding go away might also be the first people called out as reason for the scolding to continue.

TREAT THE ROADS LIKE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS.

A Hot Air contributor called Beege Welborn would prefer you didn't.  In San Diego, a regional plan that might ... for the first time in forever ... ensure that the infrastructure doesn't crumble is horrible.  "A new plan from San Diego County's Regional Transportation Agency wants to make driving so expensive that you'll be forced to take the bus or the train."  The horror!  Here are the details.  "The plan adds three new half-cent sales tax increases, over 800 miles of San Diego County freeway lanes converted to toll lanes, and a mileage tax for every mile driven to pay for their $165 billion public mass transit plan."  Apparently money collected from motorists can only be used for road projects, even though that money is never enough; while money collected by other taxes must be used to make up the shortfall.  "It’s a bait and switch -- freeway dollars, gas tax dollars, and registration fees promised for road improvements instead pay for costly public mass transit projects that less than 3% of the public uses."  That leads Ms Welborn to conclude, "They have no intention of fixing the roads."  Well, no.  Somebody will write a federal appropriation into some future infrastructure porkulus.

Why should road socialism be any different from any other socialism, and why do conservative populists think road socialism is fine?