KEEP THOSE SEAT BELTS BUCKLED.

When Donald Trump tells you who he is, Michael Tomasky of The New Republic says, "believe him."

Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service.… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.

Apparently many Americans need to. I woke up Sunday to a Latino man telling CNN, for a story about Trump gaining among Latinos, that well, under Trump, we didn’t have all this inflation. Which is true as far as it goes. The inflation wasn’t Joe Biden’s fault, but of course Biden and the Democrats can’t say that true thing because it sounds like excuse-making. And one can’t blame this man, who I assume is working hard to feed his children, for thinking this way.

But dear God. Can’t we get people to think about fascism, and what Trump would do to this country?

No doubt, the True Believers at Town Hall are all over the projection inherent in that excerpt, invoking social media companies and "Russian disinformation" and "weaponization of government" and all the rest.  Or they can just laugh, as Rick Moran does.

Hitler had brown shirts, the SS, the Gestapo, and the "whole odious apparatus" of Nazism. What's Trump got? The Proud Boys? Oath Keepers? Moms for Liberty? Let's get real.

No Trump is not a Nazi. He's not even close. He'd be a very bad dictator. As we saw in his first term, the promises on the left that Trump was going to destroy the Constitution or set up some kind of authoritarian nightmare of a government never came close to panning out.

Every time the left calls Trump a Nazi, he gets 10,000 more votes. By the time election day arrives Trump will have won in a landslide.

What I observed three years ago might still be relevant today.

The past few years there has been a struggle between a Trumpified Republican party and a fractious coalition of Establishment grifters and Resistance militants. In a Biden presidency, the grifters and the militants will have their spats, with Mr Biden playing the part of a college president who pays lip service to the traditional verities whilst caving to the student militants, and the Trump supporters representing a wild card.

I'm going to continue to be the purist here: if you don't like the idea of a president acting like an elected despot, vest fewer powers in the presidency.

THE BEST WAY FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO HELP MIGHT BE TO GO AWAY.

Common Dreams contributor Rosalyn Vellurattil, with the University of Illinois at Chicago's pharmacy program, weighs in on the ongoing work-to-rule pharmacists at the major drug store chains have been engaging in.

I worked as a community pharmacist early in my career more than 20 years ago. I dreaded times when I was alone in the pharmacy—every shift—haphazardly filling prescriptions while getting tied up on the phone adjudicating insurance claims, all the while running from one end of the pharmacy to another inputting, verifying, and dispensing prescriptions rapidly.

I was also answering doctor calls, attending to the drive-through, and hurriedly ringing up and counseling patients as fast as I could, without any help for half of my workday. Admittedly, I did not have the added stress of administering vaccinations while performing those duties at that time.

Pharmacy walkout momentum has been on the rise since 2021. Chronic understaffing coupled with higher prescription volume and growing additional duties exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, with vaccinations and rapid test appointments, have led to unsafe working conditions for both employees and patients.

Downsizing is a false economy. If a retired economics professor isn't convincing, dear reader, maybe somebody who is on the line will be.

FAILING THEIR MARKET TESTS, FAILING THEIR COHERENCE TESTS TOO.

Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of "the humanities" as "those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby" and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise.

The latest efficiency measure in the State University of New York system elicits commentary from K. C. Johnson at Minding the Campus.

George Philip deserves a prominent place in any 2010 academic hall of shame. The SUNY Albany president recently terminated the university's French, Russian, Italian, Classics, and Theater departments, citing financial concerns. That Albany purports to be a quality university (and is, in fact, one of SUNY's better branches) makes Philip's move all the more unjustifiable.

Professor Johnson's essay is a reaction to a Stanley Fish column in the New York Times, a newspaper that once characterized the demolition of Pennsylvania Station as a "shameful act of vandalism"; in the same editorial suggesting that our era would be judged by the monuments we destroyed. So let it be with the humanities.

That post is from 2010, but it could be from 1995, or it could be, as this lament from 2018 indicates, Contemporary Relevance.

Greg Summers may go down as the history professor who ended the history major at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

He might also, potentially, become the guy who helped save history at the central Wisconsin university by finding its sweet spot.

The UW-Stevens Point provost is both a historian and the chief architect of a sweeping proposal that attempts to transform the school with 7,725 students into "a new kind of regional university." A regional university without a history major. Or majors in German, French, geography, geology and two tracks within art (two-dimensional and three-dimensional). It would be a school of interdisciplinary "career-focused" majors.

A few other universities have tried something similar, but so far there are no proven success stories. The truth is, no one knows for sure whether the idea will work. But UW-Stevens Point has its back against the wall, facing a nearly $8 million structural deficit and enrollment that has dipped to a 45-year low. Its leaders needed to think outside the box.

Stevens Point is one of several former normal schools now calling themselves universities along State Highway 29, where there is abundant excess capacity.  Efforts to combine departments have been common for years.  Put some mail cars on the California Zephyr and have it make the stops the mail train used to make.  Combine the Twentieth Century and New England States west of Buffalo.  Reduce administrative expenses by creating one Languages and Literatures department where there used to be  German and Russian and Italian and Latin.  Of course there are no proven success stories.  Because it's retrenchment, pure and simple.  But the academic enterprise is reluctant to retrench, let alone to rethink the curricular abuses that have alienated people.  There's a lot going on, and a lengthy post follows.

MAKE GAZA HOWL.

I've made reference to Sherman's March in previous musings about ending jihadi terrorism, including in Gaza.  Give Phil Sheridan an Iron Cross.  "This leads Chicago Boy Trent Telenko to suggest taking off the gloves elsewhere.  'Goldman suggests in his article that a General Sherman 'March Through Georgia' style of collective punishment of Muslim civilian populations in the West can work to end this random death in the Western civilization’s life support.'"

There's not much being released from Gaza, although John Hinderaker's "Israel is Winning" includes a photograph.

Israeli Defense Forces photograph retrieved from Power Line.

I hope that while they were in the parliament's meeting room, they convened a mock session of the legislature and repealed Hamas's charter, the way Sherman's men repealed Georgia's resolution of secession in such a session once they reached Augusta.

THE CONTINUING CHALLENGES OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

Twenty years ago, we noted a Trains preservation award being presented to a group restoring the Flying Yankee streamliner.  The money was to restore to operation one of the few Winton 201A diesel engines, the prime mover that offered proof of concept for the more successful two-stroke diesels General Motors subsequently created.  We have long been hopeful that the train will run again.  Alas, the gentleman who was the principal advocate of its restoration has crossed the final summit, and some combination of New Hampshire and ferroequinologist politics has kept that from happening.  Once, it seemed like the Yankee would be the third Budd articulated train of the Thirties either restored or operable.

That the train was, by 1957, a bit clapped out as well as subject to the limitations of a fixed consist might have had something to do with its being retired. That some railway preservation societies have more will than they have wallet is a reality. I can think of a few Burlington Zephyrs of that era that are still extant but real basket cases.

Since then, one of those basket cases, the Mark Twain Zephyr, has been undergoing restoration in Wisconsin, with a realistic rollout date soon to come.  The Nebraska Zephyr set is back in service at Illinois Railway Museum, now that more conventional seat cleaning methods are again in order.  I do not know the status of the other Twin Zephyr set or the Denver Zephyr set that went to Saudi Arabia.

GOVERNMENT IS FORCE.

When "public affairs" programming turns almost all of its focus on National Policy, and within that focus on the Presidency (can't the guy just inaugurated at least arrange the busts in the Oval before the Sunday conversation turns to "Who's up next?") does it come as any surprise that the National Government, and the Presidency, become destructive of the Life and Liberty of the People?  Oh, it's in their interests to act that way.  "What would all those pontificators on the Sunday shows, and the noisier wannabes on the opinion networks ever do if the Conventional Wisdom stopped treating The Presidency as the secular incarnation of The Messiah?"

But if the point of the presidency is to have an elected king issuing ukases, is anybody surprised when base individuals seek the office to issue ukases?

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER, REMEMBERED.

Our annual Edmund Fitzgerald retrospective.

Paul Michaels photograph.

The 2015 post includes a roundup of previous posts and tributes, including Gordon Lightfoot's song.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE POWER BAR?

Hershey’s Crafted a Special Treat for the Troops.  It couldn't melt, and it couldn't be too tasty.

When Captain Paul Logan of the United States Army Quartermaster General’s office started concocting the tactically smartest chocolate to give to U.S. soldiers during operations, he issued an unusual directive: Don’t make it too delicious.

It was 1935, still the Great Depression, and the military was working with a limited budget. As Logan collaborated with Hershey’s to create these rations, he was firm that the product should “taste a little better than a boiled potato.” Logan wanted a bar dense with the most essential nutrients, supplying carbohydrates, protein, fats and minerals to replenish troops in emergencies—but not so irresistible that the soldiers would eat any more than they needed.

A lot of work went into those precursors.

Besides an unpleasant taste, Logan had other stipulations for the chocolate: It had to weigh no more than four ounces, for portability in pockets; it needed to be a strong and efficient energy source; and it needed to remain solid at high temperatures so it wouldn’t melt and go to waste.

Hershey’s chief chemist Sam Hinkle tackled the job of producing this innovative candy (if something so bitter can be called candy). He devised a creation that was tantamount to a rock in texture and feel, and that soldiers would have to cut with a sharp knife, as it was almost impossible to bite into—and certainly not advisable, if you valued your teeth. The guide for eating the Ration D, as Hershey’s called it, suggested nibbling on the bar over the course of half an hour, or else letting it dissolve in water as a drink. Each bar delivered a valuable 600 calories or more to armed consumers, who were directed only to eat them as a last resort, to prevent starvation in extraordinary circumstances. Hinkle also modified the recipe to incorporate vitamin B1 in the form of thiamine hydrochloride—useful in tropical climates, where troops might be susceptible to vitamin deficiencies and associated diseases, like beriberi. Astonishingly, given how many ration bars Hershey’s produced, these wartime chocolates had to be molded by hand, as they were too dense and rich for the machines of the day to have any accuracy; Hershey’s equipment required partially melted chocolate, and Ration D did not melt at any reasonable temperature.

On occasion, they fulfilled that mission. "In one instance, Louis Zamperini, an Olympic distance runner turned Army Air Corps lieutenant, gave thanks for Ration D after his aircraft crashed over the Pacific in 1943, forcing him to drift on a lifeboat for 47 days with only a few chocolate bars and whatever fish he could procure at sea for sustenance." In other instances, soldiers spurned them. "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians" is simply the latest way the troops grouse about the grub.

Over time, military commanders decided they wanted a more appetizing option. Consequently, the Army directed Hershey’s to remake the bar with a more appealing (but not too appealing) flavor. This need led to the creation in 1943 of the Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar, which came in both one- and two-ounce blocks. While production of the Ration D came to an end shortly after the end of World War II, the Tropical Bar remained a staple in subsequent wars, fed astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission to the moon in the summer of 1971 and was doled out to soldiers until as late as 1991.

It's possible that developments in the civilian nutrition bar market influenced subsequent procurement of emergency rations.

A MISLEADING "FIRST?"

It is a truth universally understood that the fourth estate's coverage of things that run on rails is going to be inaccurate.  So it goes with reporting out of Toledo.  "First ever all-electric switcher locomotive provides green alternative for railroads."  It's nowhere near the first all electric switching locomotive, nor the first battery-electric switching locomotive, nor the first battery-powered locomotive in a diesel carbody.

Midwest Terminals in Toledo reconfigured a diesel locomotive from the 1950s into a 100% battery-powered locomotive. This is the first of its kind within the United States.

The designers and builders of the recommissioned, zero-emission 1957 GP-9 locomotive say that the operations of battery-powered locomotives are all the same as its diesel counterparts, making the transitions from diesel to electric-powered locomotives seamless for its operators.

In the winter, this particular locomotive - a switcher - is often left idling overnight in order to keep its parts warm for operation. According to Midwest Terminals, this burns 4.5 gallons of gas per hour.

“It’s no different than an electric vehicle on the highway,” Robert Holtz, the Vice President of Operation for Midwest Terminals of Toledo said. “We just transformed that kind of technology to a locomotive space.”

The transportation sector emits the highest amount of greenhouse gases, with the rail industry only contributing to two percent of those emissions, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. However, any effort taken to combat global warming is integral, and Midwest Terminals of Toledo, with the help of the Ohio EPA, has recognized its role in the green initiative.

"Transformed that kind of technology" sounds so much more highfalutin' than "took out the prime mover and put batteries in its place."  Because the 1957 GP-9 locomotive is a diesel-electric locomotive with automatic transition, wiring the battery power circuits into the control stand is straightforward, and the engineer is still doing the same things with reverser, throttle, and brakes he was on the diesel.

Overnight, they plug the locomotive in for recharging, right?  On the traditional steeple cab switcher with a trolley pole, in the morning you put up the pole, wait for the compressor to charge the brake system, and off you go.

I suppose we should be grateful nobody heard that compressor kick in and made reference to "chugging."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

War is the health of the Democrats.  "Democrats have been responsible for U.S. entry into a great many conflicts since the two World Wars." By their fruits: "Progressive doublethink has failed in foreign wars, and now it's bringing the wars home."

All hail the Messiah.  "We can finally see Obama for what he truly is: The man who set the world on fire."  It's on him.  "Obama was indeed complicit in the troubling events of our times."  And the horse he rode in on.  “I am SO pissed about what’s going on in America today!” Plus “[Biden] has no clue what’s going on.”

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

I WARNED YOU.

Never mind that partisan wrangling about the debt ceiling.

The crisis has not been averted, it has only been deferred.

What is the real debt ceiling?  The value of the federal debt beyond which bond traders will not buy Treasuries.

When will the day of default be?  Nobody knows the day or the hour.

The hour might not yet have come, but ominous signs appear.  "Demand for 30-Year Treasurys Proves Weak, Sending Yields Surging."  That's how it begins.  "The National Debt continues to accumulate, and one of these days the bond traders will only hold Treasuries at deep discounts."

One of the conditions for being a major bank is having to hold the Treasuries elective buyers elect not to buy.

The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield climbed above 4.8% on Thursday, from 4.655% the prior day, after a sale of $24 billion in bonds received far less demand from investors than the government is used to.

Primary dealers, big banks who are obligated to finance whatever portion of a Treasury auction isn't purchased by other investors, bought nearly a quarter of the issuance—more than double their average in recent 30-year auctions, according to BMO Capital Markets.

Waning demand for long-term Treasurys rattled the stock and bond markets in recent months before the Treasury Department offered a dose of relief with less-aggressive borrowing plans than many expected.

Today's auction could revive worries that buyers of U.S. debt will now require higher interest rates to step up.

Now try financing a new house or a new car, and look for credit card limits to be truncated because Our Political Masters pretend that capping credit card interest rates lowers borrowing costs.

SECOND SECTION:  Steven Hayward, "The Debt Bomb Starting to Go Off?"

EFFICIENCY IS ABOUT HARVESTING GAINS FROM TRADE.

That's the central lesson of price theory, one unfortunately too often incompletely taught to the beginning student, that is, when it's not buried under formulas, diagrams, and jargon.  That leaves too many people unprepared to rebut sophomoric notions that doing more with less is the Holy Grail of efficiency.  "I've long maintained that downsizing is a false economy in business.  There comes a time when you cut staff or add tasks and the goods or services are no longer useful."

You'd think that efficiency at the pharmacist would therefore include prompt delivery of the correct formula with the proper instructions for use.  Once upon a time, failure to do so meant a long prison term.

BAH, HUMBUG.

Once upon a time, the most common predicate to "all I want for Christmas" was "my two front teeth."  And yes, there are versions of the song that simulate the sound of speaking without those teeth, "tho I can with you Merry Chrithmath!"  No doubt the disability advocates will want to put coal in my stocking for even mentioning that.

Later, though, unrequited love took the place of those molars and incisors.  Lawsuits, predictably, followed.

Another year, another $20 million lawsuit from Andy Stone over Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You."

Stone, who performs as Vince Vance and the Valiants, filed a civil lawsuit against Carey, co-writer Walter Afanasieff, and Sony Music Entertainment in the Central District of California on Tuesday, alleging "copyright infringement and unjust enrichment" over a successful song — also titled "All I Want for Christmas Is You" — he co-wrote in Nashville and released in 1989.

A similar lawsuit was filed by Stone and co-writer Troy Powers (who is also a plaintiff on the current case) in Louisiana last June before it was dropped five months later.

Yes, that song came out before Mariah Carey's. Apart from the "all I want" part, are they really that similar? Judge for yourself.

Dear reader, when the composer even concedes that "all I want for Christmas" is public domain, is it even worth making a case over it?

In the new court documents obtained by PEOPLE, lawyers for Stone state that his "All I Want for Christmas Is You" received radio play in 1993 and became a hit on Billboard's Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart the following year, around the same time Carey's now-classic festive anthem was released.

The filing claims that Carey copied the "compositional structure" of Stone's 1989 song, even though the documents also acknowledge the phrase "all I want for Christmas is you" wasn't originated by Stone.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs claim Carey and her collaborators "undoubtedly had access" to Stone's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" at the time of writing her homonymous song "given its wide commercial and cultural success."

If that's not litigation enough for you, there's also a Liam Payne song, "All I Want for Christmas," but that one includes "Is you and me to fix this."  Never mind Parson Brown or taking the girls tonight, the hits are in the frustration.

HIGHER GAS PRICES, HIGHER CARS?

In the United States, a combination of rent-seeking industrial policy, carving out a "light truck" exemption from the fuel economy standards big enough to drive an Escalade through, with gasoline prices cheaper than they are elsewhere, and with enough political support that even the Jarrett regency had to suspend the beautiful transition and draw down the strategic petroleum reserve in advance of the Congressional elections that owning an Escalade doesn't break the bank, it's no surprise that there would be a lot of Escalades and the like.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FAMOUSLY LEFT RONALD REAGAN.

These days, it might infamously be leaving its Jewish mainstays.  James "Long Emergency" Kunstler offers a meditation on that phenomenon, notable particularly for its sober tone.

At this moment, when there is an awful struggle over the Hebrews’ place in the world — so dire that you’re waiting for World War Three to vaporize everything you’ve ever cared about — one observes the Jewish American scene with trepidation. Since I am a Jewish American, I’m just going to flop this one on the table like so much meat to see what kind of animals it brings out of the woodwork to fight over it.

The Hamas war has exposed a deep current of animosity against Israel and against Jews generally world-wide, even here. This, you understand, is happening at a time of what we might call epic global political mental illness. A mass formation psychosis appears to grip many population groups, each in its own way, but often expressing itself as a longing for death, ranging from the economic suicide of Western Europe to the rise of Jihad to the desolate nihilism of American nose-ring youth.

Jewish Americans have played a leading role in American intellectual and political life through the 20^thcentury and into this one. We Jews increasingly dominated the arenas of literature, academia, medicine, law, news media, and show biz. Business and government, too. In America, we mostly overcame (or seemed to) the deep, old-world superstitions against us, thanks to successful near-total cultural assimilation. I, for example, came from a Jewish family far more interested in baseball than Talmud, who put up a Christmas tree in the living room, and ate sweet-and-sour pork frequently. Perhaps this made us “bad” Jews, but frankly, it was more important to be good Americans — that is, people who cared more about our country than our ancestral origins.

American Jews have also been major players in the political Left through the past hundred-odd years, and especially within the Democratic Party. Lately, it appears that the Democratic Party is bent on destroying the country, so one is naturally left to wonder how this happened and what is the role of American Jews in this.

Yes, he works in the gloom and doom that we have come to expect, and yet he recognizes that his kin have brought their own version of the Social Gospel into U. S. politics.

For the Jews who arrived here in the late 19^thand early 20^th century, America became even more of a promised land than that sliver of Biblical real estate on the Mediterranean. They succeeded here beyond their wildest dreams. Why dream idly about returning to the Middle East when the USA turned out to be the real Land of Milk and Honey?  Hence, a revision in American Judaism became necessary. Next year in Jerusalem was replaced as a central animating principle by an alternate shibboleth: tikkun olam.

Tikkun Olam means repair the world. This has been driving American Judaism since the early 20^th century. Meanwhile, the genocide of the 1940s gave new impetus to next year in Jerusalem for what remained of the European Jews, and thus you get the establishment of Israel in 1948 — notwithstanding the geopolitical legerdemain that actually brought it about. American Jews, while sympathetic to a fault with the founding of Israel, and deeply vested emotionally in its success, had a different agenda in the USA after World War Two. They endeavored to repair America. Tikkun Olam!

Mostly this expressed itself in Jewish support and involvement in the Civil Rights movement, since the end of discrimination against anybody was considered a good thing for the Jews as well as humanity in general. The country needed a moral repair job, especially after defeating manifest evil in the big war. That effort climaxed in the mid 1960s with the federal legislation that ended Jim Crow policy in voting and public accommodations. Much of the actual on-the-ground work to make this happen was accomplished by Jewish lawyers. This is a fact, not an accusation.

It didn't hurt that there was a Victory Dividend to spend. Interstate Highways! Urban Renewal! Moon shots!

JUST TRANSFER TO RUTGERS ALREADY.

I expect student columnists at sub-prime party schools to lament the classwork, but Princeton???  "Princeton’s mindless pursuit of academic rigor undermines student flourishing."  Faculty at the Ivies might well be pleased to encounter students who are not excellent sheep.  That's not the problem, though, rather it's the consequences of a coreless curriculum, or perhaps the pressure of bickering at the right eating clubs.

I’m not entirely sure, however, why Princeton feels the onus to create a high-aspiration environment. Doesn’t Princeton naturally create one when it selects less than 6 percent of 30,000 of the most ambitious applicants to join the first-year class each year? What’s more, does rigor ipso facto really create “thoughtful, resilient, and intelligent leaders?” I think not. Academic rigor and the challenges associated with it do not inherently create great leaders, and blindly pursuing academic rigor for its own sake is foolish.

First, there are more major and distribution requirements than students can handle in productive ways. Currently, all students must generally experience a minimum of one semester — or four if they are BSE — where they take five classes. It has become commonplace for students to take, what they refer to as “an easy fifth” to resolve both of the aforementioned requirements. What this “easy fifth” lingo suggests is that students are optimizing ease over intellectual interest to fulfill these rigorous requirements. In fact, I’ve heard countless instances in which my friends have told me they felt bad for submitting terrible academic work in the fifth class that they are PDFing but must take to hit all their distribution requirements.

That first paragraph puts me in mind of what I've learned about Japanese universities: the pecking order is more strictly defined than that in the States, and the pressure to get good grades in high school all the more severe, and thus university life in Japan is one long party, but you'd better be prepared to revert to that high school work model upon becoming novice salaryman.

TODAY IN FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

Meet Richard Heinberg, environmentalist wacko, today's idiot.  "The Problem With Leaf Blowers."  Don't those illegal aliens that Dementia Joe is waving into this country have to do something?

Every Thursday our next-door neighbor hires a worker to use a leaf blower. This infernal machine drives me nuts. Rather than letting a pet peeve render me literally insane, I’ve decided to explore the leaf blower’s deeper significance. A psychologist might call this writing therapy. Maybe the result can also provide a little relief for you, the reader, if you share my irritation.

The most obvious critique of the leaf blower is that it’s an obnoxious, destructive piece of machinery. As everyone within earshot of one knows, gasoline-powered leaf blowers are noisy.

Couldn't he talk with his neighbor about the timing of yard work? Pay the landscaper a bribe to show up later? Find one of those Third Places to hang out at on Thursdays?  No, it's so much more fun, I suppose, to dabble in the idiocies of culture studies, of which there are plenty when detached houses are involved.

[C]oherence is a Sin in the Culture Studies world.  (Apparently some architects are pushing back, as I noted last week.)  Thus can Ms Harris at one passage write of gardening as leisure or hobby, whilst devoting an entire chapter to landscaping, structured by such gems as "[L]andscapes and gardens are powerful conveyors of ideological content if we consider ideology according to conventional ways of understanding its operations."  (Page 265.  Whatever.)  Thus, keeping one's lawn tidy is either a way of distinguishing one's property from the disorderly dwellings of the Lower Orders, or a Major Time Suck.  But testing such an hypothesis is beyond Ms Harris's capabilities.

California, whether because it is going to be residually inhabited by the Lower Orders, happy not to be living in an old camper or a tent, or because of its ban on gasoline powered landscaping equipment, will from the river to the sea be free of internal combustion leaf blowers. The battery electric or plug in ones are also noisy, because, well, they're ground-confined turbojets.

SHADES OF POOLE BROTHERS!

I've on occasion referred to one of the finest examples of ferroequinological writing, David P. Morgan's "The Mohawk that Refused to Abdicate, and Other Tales."

Philip R. Hastings, "All the implications of the Book of Revelations," Shelby, Ohio.

That article also included a meditation on the way railroads drew maps for their Official Guide entries and public timetables, in such a way as to exaggerate the size of their territory relative to the continent, to show only the friendliest of connections, and to give the illusion that their lines pursued the most direct course.

Years later, ferroequinologist Gregory Ames wrote a scholarly article in Railroad History, "Forgetting St. Louis and Other Map Mischief: The oddities and deceptions of railroad mapmaking," expanding and attempting to offer understanding of that phenomenon.

That article is behind a JSTOR paywall, sadly.  I'm pleased to report, though, that for now Trains have made "The Mohawk that Refused to Abdicate," which is part of their countdown to a thousand issues in their Best of Trains series, as the best of issues 100-199, is now available to a general audience.

GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME TOO BIG AND ATTEMPTS TOO MUCH.

Yes, Ronald Reagan followed the conjunction with "spends too much."  Reality will take care of that: "Catastrophic default will occur with runaway inflation and a contracting economy."  The End Times have a Biblical flavor to them, as nobody will know the day or the hour of that catastrophic default.

My formulation, "attempts too much," is the latest elaboration on my theme that the political bundles are too big.  "The federal bundles are too big, and Conservative, Inc. conserving the Coastal Establishment is only setting the stage for a bigger collapse of that order to come. Perhaps devolving more to the states and the localities will restore some stability."  The outcomes of last night's by-elections might be making the same point, some social media wag noted that abortion and marijuana were winning issues for Democrats.  It's possible that on abortion and marijuana, the Democrats have issues that appeal to the "Leave Us Alone" coalition; and in Ohio, an obscure referendum in Cincinnati approved the city selling its Cincinnati Southern Railway, better known as the "Rat Hole Division" once operated by the Cincinnati New Orleans and Texas Pacific to the successor operator, Norfolk Southern.  Privatization is a "Leave Us Alone" issue, isn't it?

Today, though, let me call your attention, dear reader, to the greatest absurdity of entrusting policy primacy to the national government, and within the national government, the presidency.  The pass we find ourselves at is that, should the major national parties continue on a path of renominating Donald "Orange Man" Trump and Joseph "Dementia Joe" Biden, the election may be as if a game for leaster, with the winner being the man with the most of his opponent's voters staying home.

SOME HIPPIES ATONED BY VOTING FOR RONALD REAGAN.

Elizabeth "Anchoress" Scalia (via Insta Pundit) contemplates today's counterculture.

I wondered whether, 20 years hence, they would tell their children about how they went about, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, marching and calling for the eradication of an entire nation and race of people.

Because chanting horrible, genocidal phrases in a crowd is sort of thing you do when your brain is not yet fully developed and you’ve been trained in neither critical thinking skills nor the sort of nuance that must flavor authentic justice – when your reason is still malleable, and it’s so much easier to go along with a moment, particularly if you get to feel powerful and anti-establishmentarian as you do it.

I'm old enough to remember "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" and "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win," and the oh-so-authentic "Lon Nol, U. S. stooge! Victory to the Khmer Rouge!"  It's surely an oversimplification to suggest that those campus protesters became Reagan Democrats en masse, and yet, with age sometimes comes maturity.

Someday, perhaps – if those students ever do learn to think critically; if they ever do discover that the world is much more about shades of gray than black-and-white absolutism, they may come to realize exactly what it was they were chanting for in 2023, exactly what they doing while standing, bravely face-covered in Harvard Square calling Jews “dirty, dirty animals” who “should be exterminated,” or cheering as Jewish students were locked away for their own protection at Cooper Union College, as threats against Jews canceled classes at Cornell, as Jewish travelers were being hunted down at a Russian airport.

They might even have the good sense to repent of it – to feel shame as they recall that all the cheers, all the chants, served a demon of chaos and mass murder.

There is a remnant who will. There are others who will not.  In the same way, though, that the aging hippie became a figure of fun in the late 1980s, the aging whatever this lot of protesters is will become a future figure of fun, that is, if we have a future to have figures of fun in.

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO DEVELOP A CONSCIENCE.

Yes, a call for free speech on campus in the wake of alumni withdrawing their support of universities being too obviously captured by progressive intolerance might be of a piece with Saddam Hussein trying to claim a victory in the middle of a rout.  And yet, it is a call worth noting.

[I]t is precisely in times of heightened crisis and fear that university leaders must remain steadfast in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. These principles are the bedrock of academic freedom at all universities. Moreover, the First Amendment requires public universities to protect the right of students and student groups to debate and demonstrate on campus.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a surge in efforts to punish and silence students for their speech. The Anti-Defamation League and The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law issued an open letter last week calling on university leaders to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups, alleging their speech constitutes “material support for terrorism,” punishable under federal and state law, despite no evidence to support such claims. That is why the ACLU sent its own open letter to the administrative leaders of each state’s public college system, reaching over 650 colleges and universities, expressing our strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses. The letter unequivocally urges universities to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights.

That open letter focuses narrowly on pro-Palestinian student groups. Presumably the same free speech rights protect advocacy of women's sports for women or cultural conservatism or Making America Great Again.  We know that university administrators are crossing their fingers and hoping the Gaza thing is resolved soon.  Then they can return to business as usual.

Cancel Culture affects you even if you don’t believe you’ll ever be canceled or threatened with cancellation. Its most profound harm for society as a whole — besides, perhaps, how it undermines interpersonal trust and is often simply merciless and cruel — is that it undermines trust in experts.

When even a single thinker is punished for their academic opinion or for engaging in thought experimentation, it leads the public to be justifiably skeptical that any expert on that topic is being fully honest. For example, if even a single professor, like Carole Hooven at Harvard, lands in hot water for arguing that biological sex is real and important, that would, for obvious reasons, undermine the public’s trust in anybody claiming that it isn’t. After all, given the incentives and the climate of either conformity or cancellation, would a professor even tell you if they thought otherwise?

Restoring a climate of open and skeptical inquiry and discourse will not alone restore higher education to a state of good repair.

[T]here are plenty of factors in addition to Cancel Culture which undermined higher education’s credibility — perhaps, above all, millions of Americans sinking into debt while universities expanded their bureaucracies rather than their teaching staff. But if even one professor gets in trouble for having the “wrong” academic opinion, especially in an environment that everyone knows already has a supermajority of professors of one political stripe, it is absolutely devastating to expert credibility.

And not knowing what facts or experts to trust is disastrous for the stability of a democratic society.

It is a step all the same worth taking.

These are difficult times, and we urge colleges across the country to hold fast to our nation’s best traditions and reject ill-advised proposals to restrict constitutionally protected speech. While one group is at the center of such affronts today, other students, groups, and speech could face similar attacks tomorrow. Restricting speech may seem like an attractive option for college administrators to quell campus tensions. But efforts to censor speech often prove counterproductive, and undermine the very mission of the university. We strongly caution universities against conflating the suppression of speech with the façade of safety.

It's what, ten, twenty, thirty years too late to say "safety" is a foolish notion.  And yet, it's worth noting that in allowing advocates of Palestinian terrorism the same opportunity advocates of Cambodian Marxism enjoyed fifty years ago to advocate for foolish causes, the principle of allowing advocates for other causes, foolish or not, on the basis of Constitutional principles, is a principle worth championing and defending.

GOOD NEWS.

At the start of the year, I called attention to two historic electric locomotives marooned at a construction site near Albany.

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

We were only looking at the technology that made Grand Central Terminal possible and contributed to the appearance of many a Christmas tree, and ferroequinologist financial support was in order.

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

Good news on what has otherwise been a stressful day. The two locomotives have been disassembled and loaded onto low-boys for transportation to Danbury.

As the land the electrics were sitting on began to be redeveloped a few years ago, it appeared the end was near for the motors. But thanks to a frantic fundraising effort and a series of temporary moves, the museum was able to get the motors out of the way, at least momentarily.

Officials have not provided a set schedule for the move or information about when they will be unloaded, but it’s likely to be in the coming days. The motors are currently on private property.

People interested in donating to the effort to restore the motors can visit DanburyRail.org/Donate.

They're on my "Nice" list for Christmas.

ONE PRETEND, TWO PRETEND, THREE PRETEND INDIANS.

The Census Bureau's latest population surveys report a population explosion.  Specifically, "The Native American population exploded."  In part, that's an artifact of a change in the way people get to self-report their ethnicity, it's now possible to tick more than one box, and there are many more boxes to tick.

We’re pretty sure the most anticipated debut related to Native Americans this year is a much-delayed and much-less-snappily named release from the U.S. Census Bureau known as Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A.

The report provides the most detailed data we’ve ever had on America’s racial and ethnic origins, including stunningly exhaustive data on nearly 1,200 tribes, native villages and other entities. We hoped it would shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in the 2020 Census: Why did the Native American population skyrocket by 85 percent over the past decade?

The number of Americans claiming Indigenous heritage jumped from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.6 million in 2020, a stark increase that probably was not the result of good old-fashioned procreation. Native Americans had the lowest fertility rate of any group measured last year, roughly tied with Asian Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We could make some less-than-educated guesses, informed by the observation that the rise was largest among Native Americans claiming a mixed heritage.

In higher education, that "less-than-educated guess" might be "to get on the preferential hiring list," and we'll get to that anon.  When politicians and pundits as diverse as George Wallace and Joe Biden can point to the shameful treatment of the First Nations by the government in Washington, there might be a case for corrective policies, and we'll get to the abuses thereof anon.  The "anon" will be the coda to a mini-dissertation that continues beyond the jump.

OH, SHUT UP.

Meet Alexander Nazaryan, senior Yahoo White House correspondent, idiot.  "Halloween is an ecological disaster."

Every parent of young children has awoken on Nov. 1 to the aftermath of Halloween: piles of candy wrappers, discarded costumes, molding pumpkins and decorations demanding to be taken down.

Halloween is an expensive holiday, wreaking havoc on family budgets. And with children expected to consume as much as 7,000 calories on Oct. 31 because of all the added sugar in their diets, the holiday is also a public health calamity.

I grew up the child of Depression babies who knew how to squeeze nickels, and yet we managed to enjoy trick or treating, and our dental checkups were generally satisfactory. The Nazaryan household sounds like a real fun place to live.

But scariest of all is the damage Halloween does to the planet.

All those candy wrappers have to go somewhere. So do all the plastic pumpkins, plastic vampire teeth, plastic Harry Potter wands.

And where they go, for the most part, is into landfills and waterways, where they contribute to a plastics problem that has become a global challenge. New research suggests that many of the single-use plastics we discard turn into invisible particles called microplastics that can cause serious damage to human health.

We all imbibe the equivalent of a credit card in microplastics each week, scientists say.

Now that’s a scary thought.

No, the scary thought is that this guy is part of the regime media.  Does the plastics consumption from even the most gluttonous haul of trick or treating compare with the plastic involved in bottled water consumed on a random day during beach season?

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOUR PLEDGE BOOKS BY NOW.

Alexandra Robbins has made a career out of exploring the lives of the young and ambitious, whether it's the overscheduled kids of the upscale suburbs or the social climbing of the southern sororities, and she continues her work in Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men.  The "becoming" leaves the "boys" at different stages and fraternity life has an uneven effect on the maturation of the members.

In Book Review N^o. 13, two months after the twelfth, so much for making the half-century this year, I'll focus on reinforcing that assertion.  Tellingly, the author buys into the "toxic masculinity" school of ethnography, titling the eighth chapter "What Makes a (College) Man: How Students View Masculinity, with the concluding ninth chapter "Good Fraternities vs. Bad Frats: How to Tell the Difference."  Dear reader, does anything scream "playing to the academic ethos" like chapter titles with subtitles, and there's probably a semiotics essay somewhere on the connotations of "fraternities" as opposed to "frats."  A sample from page 292 in chapter eight will make my point.

Some scholars say that because there is a "hierarchy of masculinities in which some will have more privilege than others," school administrators should better recognize college men who excel outside Greek life and sports.

Another way universities could help college guys would be to increase their consistent exposure to less stereotypical interpretations of masculinity.  A handful of once- or twice-yearly presentations about alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and hazing is a Band-Aid reaction that condemns what brothers might do without addressing why they might be compelled to do it in the first place.  To get to the root of fraternity issues, universities and national offices would be better served by concurrently trying to reframe how students perceive gender roles.

I don't know, does that mean putting Hefty Bags over the urinals? Seriously, though, those "Some scholars say" alludes to two essays in Journal of College Student Development: the endnotes are as blundering around in the Colossal Cave to find the first reference.  Such blundering around is instructive as many of the sources, such as Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Jezebel, are not exactly known for their objectivity.  Do we really gain by creating more men without chests?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Now the World Series is done, and Mighty Reality comes up to bat.  "Savages are not distinguished by their nobility."  No illusions.  "Because if the civilized won’t stand for civilization, savagery wins."  "Social justice" is worse than an oxymoron.  "Everything the social justice crowd has said for the past 15 years has been a lie."  Discrimination for equality makes as much sense as queers for Palestine.  "About as convincing as 'minks for fur coats.'"

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

HAMAS IS TO GAZA AS BLACK LIVES MATTER IS TO CHICAGO.

I keep returning to that theme, and to a post originally composed during the Obama presidency.

The commentariat, so marinated in the Eastern Liberal Establishment's vision of Activist Presidents Promoting The Common Good in order to be able to devote Sunday mornings to mutual admiration with High Government Officials under pictures of the Capitol Dome, seem surprised that Our President is campaigning, rather than governing.  Read the full transcript, which summarizes the failings of Activist Government as seen by the ditto-heads.

The key to Our President remaining popular despite disappointing the commentariat by a lack of activism is in this passage.

You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that's been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you'll see an utter disaster. You've got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It's not just Obama. This is who liberals are.

More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate.  There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

Jason Shvili of Facts and Logic About the Middle East, an Israeli advocacy site, sees a similar dynamic at work, perpetuating the plight of those dispossessed Palestinians.  "Why Palestinians’ bad behavior has made them pariahs in the Arab world."

INDUSTRIAL POLICY MEANS PICKING LOSERS.

It fails every time it's tried, notes Reason's Christian Britschgi.  "Presidential administrations from both parties keep trying to make 'place-based' economic development work."  You could try establishing place-based orange groves in Maine, or sugar bushes in Arizona, and no amount of money printing would develop those activities in those states.

Ah, dear reader, but Dementia Joe is throwing money at information technology.  That should bloom wherever it's planted, right?

On [October 23] the White House announced the selection of 31 regional "technology hubs" that will spur innovation, manufacturing capacity, and employment with the help of generous federal subsidies.

"We're going to invest in critical technologies like biotechnology, critical materials, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing—so the U.S. will lead the world again in innovation across the board," Biden said in a press conference announcing the new initiative, per the Associated Press.

These new hubs, spread across the country, will receive an initial $500 million in federal subsidies—a slice of the $10 billion included in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act to stimulate investment in high-tech industries.

The hope is to create innovation centers outside the country's existing "superstar" cities like Seattle, Austin, and New York City—where high-tech employment is currently concentrated.

It's possible, isn't it, that those central places emerged for reasons beyond some public money being thrown at them?  Without the right sort of pollinators to go with the growing conditions, there won't be any oranges.  Those central places offer favorable conditions for ideas to have sex, or to appropriate a William Arrowsmith line, you have to provide forests in order to get druids.

For all the president's optimism and federal funding, the history of "place-based" investment policies and economic theory suggest that this latest effort to create dispersed tech hubs will be unsuccessful.

Indeed, the idea of federally subsidized, special investment zones is hardly a new one.

As part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress created the Opportunity Zones program, which gives investors tax credits for investing in state-designated census tracts with high concentrations of poverty. The idea was to direct investment to areas in desperate need of it.

The problem with such well-intentioned wastes of money is that the correlation of forces in those tracts is conducive to concentrating poverty.  The correlation of forces that creates a Marshallian industrial district is emergent, and public money alone is insufficient pollination.

There's a reason federal subsidies have a difficult time creating innovation centers from scratch. As it turns out, it's easiest to produce innovation in places where there's already a lot of economic activity happening. Firms can draw off a wider pool of highly skilled workers. These workers can flit between more employers, carrying skills and new ideas with them. The close proximity of capital and labor allows more collaboration (planned or spontaneous). A larger market allows for greater specialization and division of labor.

This positive-sum agglomeration explains why so much high-tech industry and innovation is currently concentrated in a few large urban areas. The Biden administration is explicitly going to war with the logic of agglomeration by trying to seed new tech centers in places where they don't exist currently.

Odds are that the White House's tech hubs will be a similar flop to previous efforts at creating "opportunity zones" and "manufacturing hubs" out of nothing. At best, it will likely shift a few more jobs and federal dollars to existing, federally funded research centers.

A few years ago, Richard Florida looked into the identifying features of the most prosperous Marshallian districts.  I fear he mistook symptoms for causes: the music clubs and the bars catering to, shall we say, alternative lifestyles, followed the creatives.  The humans having sex might have met compatible partners trading the ideas that were having sex.  We can be grateful that the current administration isn't subsidizing the clubs and bars, although such an effort would highlight the failure of throwing money at a few rent-seekers in a way more worthy of a Golden Fleece award.

IT MIGHT BE WISE TO IDENTIFY THE NEAR-LEAST EVIL.

I'm of the view that political processes are a drag on civilization, because the policy bundles are too darned big, which makes any notion of an election yielding a consensus absurd, and because weighing the tradeoffs among appealing and unpleasant elements of the various bundles requires thought, which is to say, it diverts brain-power from other aspects of life.  "You don't get do-overs in life, and the best you can do is support as much of the bundle you got as you can, and work to change the policy elements that aren't turning out the way you like."

MALE-TO-FEMALE CROSSERS CAN STILL DEVELOP PROSTATE CANCERS.

Once upon a time, those beards men started growing in the fall served the practical purpose of insulating the face against the Gales of November, whether in the deer stand or in the grandstand.  Somewhere, though, the people who have to turn everything into a Political Statement glommed onto the practice, for a while calling attention to prostate cancer (see the beards, make a note to schedule the screening, drink orange juice and eat lettuce) and more recently the Political Statement has become Movember, with mission creep.  "To take on mental health, suicide, prostate cancer and testicular cancer."  I don't know, if the women of the fevered brow and the near men who couldn't carry water for a patternmaker would just, you know, stop nagging on about "toxic masculinity" and let guys work on their cars and go hunting, mental health among men might improve immediately.

Let's add cultural appropriation to the mission creep.

No-Shave November is here, and it’s time we all participate – this month’s tradition isn’t just for cisgender men. Body hair activism is on the rise.

The human body has around five million hair follicles from head to toe, according to Better Health Channel, and body hair activists like Esther Calixte-Bea aren’t afraid of them.

Calixte-Bea is the creator of the Lavender Project: a self-photography project embracing femininity and body hair. The photos are perfect inspiration for No-Shave November and push against a beauty standard that’s clearly rooted in sexism.

But, the body hair stigma isn’t only an issue for cisgender and transgender women.

As Molly Holmes, director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, explains, oppressive beauty standards affect everyone negatively, including non-binary people, trans-masculine people, trans-feminine people and even cisgender men. It’s crucial to understand where the body hair stigma comes from and how it’s impacting each individual personally.

“I’m always gonna think a little bit more about being critical in our understanding, or educating ourselves, to not only think about like a stigma, or what we might have been taught or told, but, like, what is true and what is right for a person individually,” Holmes said.

Body hair removal has been practiced across cultures and centuries for countless reasons. However, today’s stigma is closely related to racism, white supremacy and social Darwinism in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College, who investigated the stigma in her 2015 book “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal.”

I suppose showing solidarity with a campaign to improve mens' mental health by signalling that you're not into the dating pool might be a good thing.  Demonstrating that culture studies is empty wordnoise is also a good thing.

“I think if we can kind of get to a place where we have and give ourselves that, that gentleness, to say: ‘Hey this is a, this is something that’s been going on for centuries, and it’s not our fault if we have, you know, challenges around, you know, body image – you know, hair, etc,’” Holmes said. “It’s okay to at least give ourselves a space to wander and to be curious about, like: ‘Is this serving me?’”

When razors for women reached the market in the early 1900s and began appearing in public ads, the standard spread like wildfire, causing many of us to hate those beautiful little forests of hair on our skin, according to the Smithsonian.

We can stop that still-raging inferno – and protect our little forests – by acknowledging the normalcy of body hair.

Left unsaid in that story: any consideration of the possibility that there was evolutionary advantage to be gained from participating in that "raging inferno."

FROST ON THE PUMPKIN, AND MARIAH CAREY ON THE RADIO.

For Hallowe'en, cities along Lake Michigan got a dose of lake effect snow.  (So much for snowfalls being a thing of the past?)  In DeKalb, conditions were chilly and blustery, but clear enough skies for people to be out and about.

That house won the people's choice award in the DeKalb house decorating contest two years running.  No three-peat for them, despite a few more features and animations being present for this year.  Cold Spring Shops headquarters added a modest electric pumpkin, just to get in on the spirit.

The porch light is on, which used to be the signal that treats are available.

Fewer than a hundred youngsters braved the elements, and the traffic skewed to middle schoolers more than it does on more temperate nights.

This year, apparently Music Choice wanted to get to the Festive Season, with Frank Sinatra's "Got your love to keep me warm" just after midnight, eastern time, followed by the Four Freshmen's rendition of "Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas."  Fifty minutes later Mariah Carey got into the rotation.

INTERSECTIONAL INCOHERENCE.

Hallowe'en is behind us, which makes it a good time to think about Pramila Jayapal.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) expressed her concern over President Joe Biden's position regarding Israel, warning him that it could cost him support among his base in 2024.

In an appearance on NBC News's Meet the Press, Jayapal expressed her support for Biden but pushed back on his stance toward Israel. She warned that his strong support for the Middle Eastern nation could cost him support among much of his base, who she said are on a different page in regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict."

The president needs to be just as courageous on this issue so that we keep the unity within our country for the support of the incredible things he has done," the Washington Democrat said. "He is, I think, you know, going to be challenged to explain an issue of this moral significance to people. The American people are actually quite far away from where the president and even Congress, the majority of Congress, has been on Israel and Gaza. They support the right for Israel to defend itself, to exist, but they do not support a war crime exchanged for another war crime. And I think the president has to be careful about that."

That "support for the right for Israel to defend itself, to exist" is no longer that strong within the Democrats' coalition.  "Biden's staunch support for Israel has exposed fault lines within the Democratic Party, as younger, progressive representatives continue to denounce Israel's behavior in the conflict and call for more support for the Palestinian cause." That's what happens when you try to stuff two parties into one.

The Democratic Party’s yearslong unity behind President Biden is beginning to erode over his steadfast support of Israel in its escalating war with the Palestinians, with a left-leaning coalition of young voters and people of color showing more discontent toward him than at any point since he was elected.

From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, in labor unions and liberal activist groups, and on college campuses and in high school cafeterias, a raw emotional divide over the conflict is convulsing liberal America.

While moderate Democrats and critics on the right have applauded Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel, he faces new resistance from an energized faction of his party that views the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that dominated American politics in the summer of 2020.

Put another way, the professional protest constituencies dialed it back toward fall, when it became clear that "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" stepped on the message that Dementia Joe was an anodyne Democrat.  Now when he has to pretend he's an anodyne Democrat after having run on and then implemented as much of the Bernie Sanders platform as Joe Manchin could swallow, the Moslem Caucus is going to discipline him.

REFEREES ARE LESS ACCURATE BECAUSE THEY HAVE REPLAY REVIEW.

The why isn't that hard to explain.

The games go on long enough, and a factoid that I saw someplace earlier this week noted that "only 37%" of calls that were challenged were reversed on review.

Put another way, almost four of ten calls that prompt a review are incorrect calls.  Yes, the referees' union argues that the referees are evaluated for accuracy.  All the same, I can't help but suspect that in the absence of replay review, there would be fewer controversial calls because the opportunity to make a decision and have it clarified on appeal would no longer be present.  Think of it as a corollary to the Peltzman effect.

Rather than work on improving the officiating, the go-to for a system that is not robust against mistakes is to make it less robust.

Colts owner Jim Irsay wants to see the NFL make a drastic rule change after watching his team lose a controversial game to the Browns on Sunday.

According to Irsay, the NFL admitted this week that the officiating crew botched two key calls that both went against the Colts in the final 50 seconds of the game. To keep that from happening again, Irsay is proposing a rule that would make ALL CALLS reviewable in the final two minutes.

"The NFL admits and understands that they did not make the correct calls at end of Sunday's Colts/Browns Game," Irsay wrote on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. "I believe we need to institute Instant Replay for all calls, including Penalties, in the last two minutes of All Games."

It appears as though Mr Irsay belongs to the Donald Trump school of Random Capitalization on social media.  He's also lobbying for making the concluding hour of professional football games less watchable than it was years ago.  Between the coaches taking time out, the quarterbacks spiking the ball, the station breaks at the two minute warning and each time out, and New York buzzing in with a review on the calls they currently review, it's the better part of an hour to get from the two minute warning to the final gun.

HAVE YOUR COUNTER-COUNTER PROTEST READY TO GO.

It is the way of the Perpetually Aggrieved to unleash verbal terrorism in order to disrupt any presentation or gathering that calls their tight priors into question.  Of late, university administrators are so in thrall to the professional protest communities in their midst that presentations, using university facilities and scheduled on the calendar are few in number, and possibly subject to security fees to protect the presenters from the hecklers.  Gatherings, too, are subject to verbal terrorism, and it won't always be the case that a local politician is present and can tell the contemporary version of Dean Wormer to crack down on the woke analogue to a zoo fraternity.

I don't know if there are any contemporary collegians of a Normal disposition reading Cold Spring Shops.  Whether there are, or not, let me note an instructive suggestion from Bookworm Room.  "I was thinking about the hecklers’ veto, and it occurred to me that the classic movie Casablanca might have an answer."

Face it, dear Normals, if you endorse Normal things on campus, you're going to offend somebody who finds fulfillment in an otherwise empty life by loudly endorsing something declinist, it doesn't matter whether it's the jihad or the sexual underground or invoking one of the eternally tedious -isms or -phobias.  Preparation favors the bold.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, the next time the leftist shrieking started, it turned out that the conservative speaker came prepared? I imagine the speaker pulling out his or her smartphone, turning the volume on as loudly as possible, sticking it right up to the microphone (also on top volume), and blasting the room with a patriotic song. Even better, those who came to hear the speech would sing along.

A commenter notes that counter-heckling the wokies also has potential. Either way, we're in the punishment cycle of a grim strategy equilibrium.  It came to this, though, when the Nash equilibrium of reasoned discourse became one more bourgeois (that was a sneer word back in the day) convention to be deconstructed.