FIRST, FIRE ALL THE DEANLETS.

The tenured faculty are stewards of the university.  Years ago, their recognition of that point might have come too late for dropout factory Chicago State.  "Do the working conditions and the academic environment have to deteriorate to the low estate of Chicago State before the faculty push back?"  I've been calling attention for a long time.  Perhaps those diversity hires who embarrassed themselves in Congressional hearings should have listened to their dissident faculty.  Some dissident faculty might be rediscovering their responsibilities.  Let the reckoning continue.

I don't care who gets the credit, as long as it gets done.  There are two sources of the current problem, first, the replacement of much of the tenured faculty with contingent lecturers and instructors, second, the faculty shares the sensibilities of the student affairs types, and went along with the early administrative usurpations accordingly.  Thus we find ourselves at the pass where Claudine Gay is no Drew Faust who is no Henry Rosovsky.

The punishment will have to continue, if Inside Higher Ed contributor Peter Eckel, associated with Penn's graduate school of education, is representative of the best and the brightest.

Higher education doesn’t give enough intentional attention to the variety of jobs of faculty governance.

Most of the talk about faculty governance, instead, centers on roles and responsibilities (stay-in-your-lane discussions, faculty handbooks), relationships between faculty and administrators (how to make them better), and power dynamics (how to change them or overcome them). But by focusing on the work itself, institutions will be able to construct more comprehensive and meaningful agendas for faculty governance.

Lots of management babble, seasoned with the therapeutic, and no recognition that it's the administrative usurpations that have demoralized faculty whilst doing nothing to make the students any smarter.

THE JOKES PRACTICALLY WRITE THEMSELVES.

Wind Blowing Out of Uranus Makes It Hard to Probe.  No, that's not scatological humor incoming, rather, it's bad luck, with a solar flare travelling much faster than Voyager hitting Uranus about when Voyager passed.

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Jamie] Jasinksi reexamined the data collected by Voyager 2 during its 1986 flyby and found that the probe had examined Uranus shortly after an intense solar wind event, which saw a huge surge of charged particles blast its way from the Sun.

The event compressed the planet's magnetosphere, they found, causing it to deform into a significantly asymmetrical shape that appeared to lack plasma.

"We postulate that such a compression of the magnetosphere could increase energetic electron fluxes within the radiation belts and empty the magnetosphere of its plasma temporarily," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Even if Voyager 2 had come to visit a mere week earlier, the researchers suggest, it would have found a far more recognizable magnetosphere, like those surrounding other planets in our solar system, including Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.

"Owing to the variation of the solar wind at Uranus, we suggest that there may be two magnetospheric cycles during solar minimum," the researchers suggested, referring to the calmest period of the Sun's 11-year solar cycle.

Intriguingly, Uranus' two most distant moons Titania and Oberon may be orbiting the planet outside the magnetosphere, which could give astronomers an unprecedented look at their subsurface oceans without any electromagnetic interference.

In short, we shouldn't draw any definitive conclusions from NASA's flyby almost 40 years ago.

I wonder if the auroras were spectacular, or if ionized particles require some sort of atmosphere.  It's not, though, as if there's a space probe standing by to do a Uranian fly-by in the next year or so, or if their luck avoiding a solar storm would be any better.

If I recall correctly, the two early Voyagers took advantage of alignments of the outer planets that made fly-bys of all of them practicable.  Thanks to the long orbits, those alignments are rare.

THE SUGAR HIGH WEARS OFF?

During the last Democrat nominating convention, former president Bill Clinton sought to credit his party with taking "It's the economy, stupid" seriously.

"You're going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it," Clinton said. "Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs….What's the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one"—meaning 50 million new jobs created under Democratic presidents, 1 million under Republican presidents.

Harvard's Jeffrey Frankel sees Mr Clinton and raises him the end of an earlier war.

Since World War II, Democrats have seen job creation average 1.7 % per year when in office, versus 1.0 % under the GOP.  US GDP has averaged a rate of growth of 4.23 percent per annum during Democratic administrations, versus 2.36 per cent under Republicans, a remarkable difference of 1.87 percentage points. This is postwar data, covering 19 presidential terms—from Truman through Biden.  If one goes back further, to the Great Depression, to include Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the difference in growth rates is even larger.

That's long been a ritualized dance in politics.  Republicans blame Democrats for wars and Democrats blame Republicans for recessions.  That the whole spat validates old-school Marxists who see war as the natural order of capitalist competition seems not to stop those partisans.

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE RACE COMMITTEE.

Wisconsin law specifies that absentee ballots cannot be counted until Election Day.  "At poll closing time, election workers announce, 'The polls are closed. We are now counting the absentee ballots.'"  Those generally get counted after closing unless there are quiet times during election day.  In Milwaukee, all the absentee ballots go to one counting site.  Counting can begin when polls open, although it takes a while to feed all those scan-trons through a properly calibrated counting machine.  Those returns come in all at once.

Conspiracy theories about this have raged on in the years since, often in false or misleading ways on social media. Visually, people can see red and blue lines going up concurrently along an arc as votes are tabulated, and then there’s a point where the blue line indicating votes for Joe Biden goes vertical and overtakes the red line for Donald Trump. This is the “ballot dump.”

What’s happening here is actually quite simple. It’s the city of Milwaukee reporting the results of all of its absentee ballots, all at once, in accordance with state law. In the 2020 election, because of the larger number of absentee ballots that were used during the covid-19 pandemic, these results were not counted and reported until after 3 a.m. local time.

Milwaukee is the most populous city in Wisconsin by a significant margin, with more than 550,000 residents. It has nearly twice the population of Madison, the second largest city, and therefore, there are a whole lot of votes to count there. Milwaukee uses a process called “Central Count” where all of the ballots are tabulated and counted all in one location. But because of decisions made by lawmakers at the state capitol in Madison, election workers at Central Count in Milwaukee are not allowed to begin counting those absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This is not how things work in most states.

What happened Tuesday a week ago was completely forseeable.

So on Nov. 5, or into the wee hours on Nov. 6, you should know two things. First, you should know that the results from tens of thousands of absentee ballots from Milwaukee will be reported all at once. This is the process that state lawmakers have allowed for, election workers will begin counting the ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day, and the results will be reported once all the votes are counted. Second, you should know that the Wisconsin State Legislature had every opportunity to reform this process over the last four years and even passed a bipartisan bill through the Assembly to do so about a year ago, but it did not pass and become law because of a few Republicans in the State Senate.

So now, we’re back to the same process we had four years ago. Hopefully, for this year, there will be a better understanding of how this all works and there won’t be as many conspiracy-laden accusations leveled at the city of Milwaukee and on election workers who are just doing their job in accordance with state law. And for future years, let’s hope we can build on the level of bipartisan cooperation established, and get something done to improve this process. But for now, we can expect another late night of reporting election results from absentee ballots in the city of Milwaukee.

The late night returns came in, the Trump campaign had secured enough of a cushion to win, pending certification, but senatorial candidate Eric Hovde had not.  Unleash the conspiracy buffs!

Milwaukee’s traditional early-morning ballot dump would be delayed from 1:00 on Wednesday morning to as late as 4:00 am. When those votes were finally counted and entered, Hovde’s statewide lead vanished. President-elect Donald Trump, who had been running very slightly ahead of Hovde all night, was able to withstand the overwhelmingly Democratic vote dump and went on to win Wisconsin by about one percent of the vote. Hovde, however, fell behind Baldwin by 0.9 percent.

Once again, the open doors on Milwaukee’s vote tabulators were suspect but not per se evidence of illegality. However, the lack of curiosity among members of the media and the Wisconsin Elections Commission has been apparent but should not be misinterpreted. What happened in Milwaukee on Election Day was suspicious in the extreme and, given the city’s past behavior in counting and reporting election results, it warrants a detailed investigation.

Even if the Baldwin campaign and Democratic Party did not benefit from outright fraud in Milwaukee, they most certainly engaged in the dirtiest of dirty politics by recruiting and funding a fake conservative candidate to siphon votes from Hovde, ultimately costing him the race.

Unofficial results Tuesday afternoon showed Baldwin leading Hovde by exactly 27,364 votes out of more than 3.2 million cast. That margin was nearly a thousand votes less than the 28,711 earned by America First Party candidate Thomas Leager.

First, there is no reason for voters not to vote their consciences.  Feel free to vote your conscience.  Second, let's suppose that Democrats ran advertisements suggesting either the Libertarian or the America First candidate offered a better policy bundle than Eric Hovde.  Maybe the way to win over voters might have been for him to call attention to Senator Baldwin's voting record, without invoking her Manhattan-based lady friend.  You know, stick to the substance.  Third, it might not have worked anyway.  Wisconsin voters are, to use long-ago Washington Senator (the elected kind, not the baseball kind) Henry "Scoop" Jackson's terminology, "independent as a hog on ice," and two years ago Republican Ron Johnson won re-election, now the ticket-splitters returned the Democrat, whilst favoring Donald Trump as president.  Fourth, Milwaukee stopped their absentee count when a Republican poll-observer observed defective seals on the tabulators.  The machines were reset, sealed, and all the ballots were counted. Fifth, the phantom registrants are back.

Hovde claims that people have raised numerous concerns about potential irregularities to him, including reports of “certain voting precincts in Milwaukee having a turnout of over 150% of registered voters and in some cases over 200%.” He also noted the anomaly that, despite a population decline in Milwaukee and a decrease of 26,330 registered voters, Kamala Harris received only slightly fewer votes than President Biden did in 2020.

As of this posting, though, Mr Hovde has not requested a formal recount.

When I note that all seekers of elective office have to do is not be crazy, that can be true of Republicans as well as of Democrats.

SCHADENFREUDELICIOUS.

The smart thing for university presidents might be to eschew using their status as academic leaders to hold forth on Controversies of the Day.  "I hold the position that university officials be circumspect in issuing statements about Matters of Public Import.  At the time, I noted, 'Too often, those statements make the professional protest communities within the university comfortable with their prejudices.'"

EXISTENCE EXISTS.

If the known universe as we understand it began with a Big Bang, what was before that?

There is no way of knowing that, although the opportunities for speculation, whether aided by prayer or by strong drink, proliferate.

Perhaps, particularly as very deep space anomalies come to the attention of researchers, and researchers look for ways to model those refractory phenomena, perhaps the good old principle of parsimony is there, deep in the math.  "What if the universe had no beginning?"

In the realm of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity have provided powerful frameworks for understanding the universe. However, these theories have limitations—particularly when describing extreme conditions, like those at the centers of black holes or the beginning of the universe, where gravity becomes extremely strong. Traditional physics considers space and time as continuous, allowing for the possibility of infinitely small points. This, however, leads to mathematical breakdowns at singularities like the Big Bang, where traditional equations produce infinite densities and fail to work.

That's going to be interesting, a theory that squares the existence of black holes, for which we have evidence, with a universe that has always existed, with hints of something much like a big bang.

THE TELL-ALL MEMOIRS PROMISE TO BE EPIC.

Red State's Streiff asks, "Did an Angry and Bitter Joe Biden Sandbag the Democrats' Chances in 2024 Out of Spite?"

Clearly, the Democrats could have recognized long before the Iowa caucuses and their South Carolina primary that they had a problem, which was becoming clear on Super Bowl weekend when their president couldn't even keep it together for the lighthearted pregame interview, even with regime friendly CBS carrying the game.  Militant Normals were noticing, and calling attention.

The Super Bowl preceded a belated State of the Union, which took place early in March, and the Jarrett regency's cheerleaders hailed it as pugnacious and had fun with the rebuttal from Mississippi's junior senator Katie Britt.  (Who is way hotter than Kamala Harris, but I digress.)

Then the Democrats got Our President to bait Our Once and Future President into a debate before the conventions adjourned, and it didn't go so well.  Then the Biden loyalists started bailing.  But even when the president abdicated the nomination, we saw none of the logical exits, which might have involved nods to the actuarial tables.  Into the void step the conspiracy buffs.

By now, it is generally accepted that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama were working behind the scenes to push Joey SoftServe out of the race because they thought he couldn't win a rematch against Trump. At the time, reporting based on informed sources indicated the plan was for Biden to withdraw and for a new candidate to emerge at an "open," and by that, I mean "Obama-controlled," convention.

I've already broken down how any political hardball involving the 25th Amendment would require the participation of the vice president, and her dominant strategy would be to support that threat in return for a guarantee of the nomination.  That's not, though, how Madame Speaker saw things unfolding.  “'Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,' the former House speaker said in an interview with The New York Times, suggesting she had anticipated an 'open primary.'”  If, as scuttlebutt has it, she was among the Democrat poobahs advising Mr Biden "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," what, if not the 25th Amendment, did she have in mind?  Disclosures of Biden Family involvement in corrupt bargains?  If so, that could have given Mr Biden incentives to behave in the way he did?

Taken as a whole, the facts paint a picture of Biden as an embittered man who was elbowed out of the way rather than voluntarily stepping aside. His decision to endorse Kamala in his withdrawal speech locked the Democrats into a convention that was a coronation rather than a contest. As a result, the Democrat king-makers lost their say on who would lead the party in the upcoming campaign and created an electoral Chernobyl that will smolder for years to come.

Think this through, dear reader.  If he abdicates the nomination, the Democrats don't start leaking those records.  But if Donald Trump wins, doesn't his administration have the opportunity to release those records as part of a general swamp-draining effort?  That is to say, fight the Democrat poobahs or lose the election, the Biden Family corruption becomes public.

Well, no.  Eight years ago, to the great disappointment of the Breitbart wing of the Trump coalition, "Crooked Hillary" ended with the campaign.  "Trump says he’s not interested in pursuing case against Clinton."  In like manner, getting his Cabinet appointees confirmed (for what it's worth, some I like, some are clinkers) might take a lot of his energy.

In that game tree, the Biden camp's dominant strategy is to abdicate and undermine the Harris campaign by endorsing it.

I hope the tell-alls will tell all.

THE HEAD COACH IS THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB.

"The Jets fired their coach to save their season. Except he wasn't the problem."

The New York Jets, 2-3 through five weeks, could have looked at the glass as half full.

In a 10-9 loss to the Denver Broncos in Week 4, New York missed a potential game-winning field goal late in the fourth quarter. And against the Minnesota Vikings the following week, the Jets were driving for a potential game-winning score until Aaron Rodgers threw an interception, his third of the game, to fall 23-17.

An optimist would say that New York was under .500 but that its last two losses had come by a combined seven points. It was a field goal away from being 3-2. One fewer bad throw away from somehow being 4-1. And despite their 2-3 record, the Jets entered Week 6 only one game behind the Buffalo Bills for the lead in the AFC East.

Instead, New York decided to fire head coach Robert Saleh after the Vikings loss, a glass-half-empty move by a desperate team desperate to salvage a season under massive expectations. And the decision hasn’t worked.

Well, yeah.  Sports pundits can be unsparing.

In the five games since they fired Saleh, the Jets are only 1-4. And their season reached a new low in Week 10, as the Arizona Cardinals dominated them in all three phases of the game for a 31-6 win.

Where has the Jets' season gone wrong? It starts with Rodgers.

Rodgers, 40, who played only four snaps last season before he tore an Achilles tendon, has looked like a shell of the player he used to be. A four-time MVP and Super Bowl champion, Rodgers has been unable to capture his past form in New York.

The Packers were thinking about the succession starting five or six years ago.  The Jets have brought in receivers Randall Cobb and Davante Adams and now placekicker Anders Carlson.

Coaches enjoy a form of tenure.  Mr Saleh has been serving as a consultant to several teams, including advising the offensive coordinator in Green Bay on how opposing defenses might react to Packer formations and tendencies.

SEASONS CHANGE.

A week or so ago, the leaves were mostly in prime leaf-peeping condition.

There was a raw, blustery stretch right after Hallowe'en.  That brought beneficial rain, as well as many of the leaves stripped off the branches.

Yes, I obeyed the flag hoist.  Now it's time for a few days away from this.  Thanks for looking in.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Peanut and Fred did not die in vain.  They provided clarity about the nanny state.  "Peanut is for everyone who has ever feared that someone more powerful than you could walk into your home and take something that you absolutely cherish away from you, for absolutely no good reason, with no recourse."

The normies struck back.  They said enough.  They are here to stay.  "They have seen what the power of the cultural curators in our country, in academia, media, Hollywood, institutions, and corporations, and in the bureaucracies has done to their lives, and they have rejected it."  It's called agency.  "Trump defeated Harris in large part because very many Americans are like my siblings: ordinary, good, honest, hard-working people who are sick of being treated as if they are ignorant and helpless bigots."

It wasn't complicated.  "Trump won because people are worse off now than they were four years ago when he was president. Prices are higher, the border is broken and the world teeters on the edge of World War Three. That all happened on Harris’s watch."  All Our Past and Future President had to do was call attention.  "Trump has exploited the widespread disillusionment that has curdled into cynicism about a ruling class rife with hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement and bad judgment."  The past few years have felt anything but normal.  America is not a country that kowtows to the elites.

Now it is time to restore a state of good repair.  "The backlash against a failed elite was the phenomenon. He was just the face of it. If it weren’t Donald Trump, it would be someone else."

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

LET'S MAKE THE STATION WAGON GREAT AGAIN.

Now that the election returns are in, dear reader, let us consider a few topics that might not have been top of mind during the hype and hysteria.  "Sustainable transport" advocates called attention to one I have been following for a long time.  "The feds won't be restraining car bloat."

Well, no, nor can they, because they caused the problem in the first place.  Bruce "Bootleggers and Baptists" Yandle might have begun thinking about that phenomenon when he worked on technology-forcing legislation during the Carter administration.

Back in 1977, as a senior economist on President Jimmy Carter's Council on Wage and Price Stability, I participated in Department of Transportation (DOT) proceedings that set the first fuel economy standards for the U.S. fleet. What transpired is a great example of what can happen when federal regulations become completely entangled with a major economic sector. The forces at play help to explain why a woman happily drives a 5,000-pound SUV to transport 10 pounds of groceries.

I can assure readers that no one in those proceedings thought the Ford F-150 pickup, beginning in 1982, would top the all-vehicle bestseller list for 41 consecutive years. And we could have never guessed that truck-like SUVs would become vehicles of choice for U.S. consumers. We couldn't have; SUVs did not exist at the time.

We expected just the reverse. Cars would get smaller, we thought. Fuel economy would rise, and large, weighty vehicles would be a thing of the past, primarily because of the regulations being put in place.

The F-150 of the time was smaller than its current version, and the Suburban and assorted Jeep knock-offs were utilitarian, intended to be a cheaper version of the Land Rover for going bushwhacking.  These days, whenever commentary about the size of those land yachts and the hazard they pose to pedestrians comes up, it quickly degenerates into slanging matches about whether the skippers of those land yachts or their critics have the lowest testosterone.  And thus serious policy analysis goes by the board.

REMAKING AUSFALL WITH A MORE DIVERSE CAST.

The first time Donald Trump prevented an opponent from shattering a glass ceiling, the wags had fun.

The movie in question was first produced in German, as Ausfall, and an English version came out later.

A few years later, when Dunkirk came out, the usual sort of scolds complained about a movie set in Britain, France, and Belgium having too white a cast, and no girls on the beach.  (My Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom didn't lose the plot.)

If there's going to be a remake, this time there's a new cast of staffers to drown in liberal tears.

KSN photograph retrieved from Google Images.

Kevin Dietsch photo retrieved from NBC.

And, of course, the Hitler Rants parody has dropped.  "Would those who are unburdened by what has been, please leave the room"

Now the work of governing must begin.  I am pleased to be done with the Jarrett regency.  I will not hesitate to call attention to sloppiness on the part of what comes next.

EXILED FOR SPEAKING THE TRUTH?

The San Jose State women's co-rec volleyball team has won a number of games by forfeit as women's teams object to a crosser playing at the net.  The presence of the crosser has not pleased players, and the internal dynamics have led to an assistant coach, Melissa Batie-Smoose, filing a civil rights complaint.  "In a scathing Title IX Complaint obtained by Quillette, a San José State University women’s volleyball coach explains how her school’s aggressively enforced transgender-inclusion policy created a toxic environment for female athletes."

The lawsuit defies parody.  It alleges the crosser conspired with Colorado State players to injure San Jose's setter, Brooke Slusser, who has been the most outspoken critic of having a former guy in the dressing room.

WE REJECT MANAGED DECLINE.

Konstantin Kisin offers readers "10 Reasons You Didn't See This Coming."  His intended audience is British and European readers, and it's something that the quivering coastal cosmopolitans playing with teddy bears at their local universities or in their padded rooms might want to review.  He saved the best for last.  "America is a country whose founding story is one of resistance to government overreach. They loathe unnecessary restrictions, regulations and control. They understand that freedom comes with the price of self-reliance and they pay it gladly."

Amen.  Self-reliance works when Somebody Else can't do it.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

It is a truth universally accepted that the election of a populist president provokes panic among the poobahs of higher education.  "[F]or many years, professors understood the social contract obligated them to teach the controversies, to be careful about interjecting their own biases into class, to respect the discipline's discourse practices in writing up their thoughts. Thus, for example, could Hayek and Keynes work together to edit Economica."

KOOL AID, KOOL AID, TASTES GREAT.

The cope from the left flank of the Harris coalition is amazing.  "What Went Wrong."  Note how the column begins.

Various pundits have blamed just about everyone in North America for why Harris lost, especially Harris. She went too far left. She didn’t go left enough. Blah blah blah. I don’t fault her or her campaign, which I think was brilliant. But I see now the deck was stacked against her in many ways, and her being a woman of color was just part of that.

The best thing I’ve read so far about the election is by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian, Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.

Losing skippers blame the crew.  So of course Barbara "Mahablog" O'Brien continues to campaign for a job with the consultant class by getting in on the deplorable-shaming.  We could see that coming two weeks ago.

Psephologist Nate Silver recently posted "24 reasons that Trump could win," quite possibly in sadness rather than anger, or perhaps to stir up his fellow establishmentarians to do something right in the next ten days or so.  Town Hall's Matt Vespa honors the work. "I do like Silver calling out the uber-left, hyper-condescending Democratic consulting class who are so weird they don’t know how to talk to real people."

But Becky isn't done slagging on the Normals.

Young men seem particularly vulnerable to its offerings, and many dank corners of the internet recruit them into misogyny and white supremacy via influencers and incel subcultures, into antisemitism and conspiracy theories, and more than that into becoming unmoored, destabilized, unwell, isolated.

The Maga right with its indifference to the normal issues of good governance and its preoccupation with clickbait distractions is an online monster and it has succeeded in creating a more angry, aggressive form of masculinity, one more convinced that debasing and dominating women is essential to its identity, whether in porn or in Trump’s fantasizing aloud that Liz Cheney should face a firing squad and Harris face Mike Tyson. The endless memes of Trump as Rambo and rescuers and Jesus show how much the lost boys and Maga women want an authoritarian leader, and the fact they can make one out of the physically and mentally pathetic Trump is a testimony to the power of tech-fueled fantasy.

It's so much easier to make light of the bros, the better to put influencers in woman-face on Bud Light cans, than it is to recognize that "inflation coming down" still means "higher prices" and "open borders" means burdens on the communities so invaded.  Becky, though, has weird notions of who the damaged people are.  "They appear to be deeply damaged people and they have come to damage everything else, including the climate; human rights, especially women’s rights, trans rights and immigrants’ rights; and the US economy."

LET'S LOWER THE TEMPERATURE.

When Barack Obama became president, I quoted Theodore White from The Making of the President: 1960.

Good or bad, whatever the decision, America will accept the decision -- and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes. The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself.

So let it be with Donald Trump again becoming president.  The editorial board of our Northern Star offer a similar request.

Donald Trump was declared the 47th president of the United States in the early hours of the morning. With this historical race finally coming to a close, let America move into the new administration with grace.

They continue,

No matter their spot on the political spectrum, waiting for the results of such an impactful election created a stressful feeling of anticipation for many voters.

Now, it’s critical that all Americans find graceful ways to process the results of the election, whether that’s celebration or dismay.

Exactly. There will be more elections.

Then comes a pivot to that futile and stupid gesture at the Capitol.

Trump’s failure to completely condemn the actions of the Trump supporters that attacked the Capitol remains a cause of concern for Americans fearing history will repeat itself in the aftermath of the 2024 election.

These fears should not be so prevalent in a nation founded for democracy.

Voters must understand that to live in a democracy does not guarantee the name they select will win simply because they prefer a candidate.

Similarly, voters must understand that should their preferred candidate lose, America’s highly regulated election system has not suddenly gone corrupt, much as losing a board game doesn’t automatically mean someone cheated.

Indeed.  Let us also hope that the somewhat surprising Republican win up and down the ballot might bring an end to Democrat flummery in Republican primaries.  That's something else Ted White called attention to, voters crossing over to frustrate candidates they dislike.  One reason there were so few votes for Mr Biden in the 2024 party primaries was Democrats running their version of Operation Chaos, crossing over where permissible to elevate Mr Trump and knock first Governor DeSantis and then Ambassador Haley out of contention.

Oops.

GOVERNMENT IS STILL THE PROBLEM.

Yes, I'm on record as wanting Democrats out of power for a generation, and voting Republican as the surest way to deliver that punishment.

I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING.

Brat summer is over.

There was a campaign talking point in a similar vein.

Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue.

Proclaim Liberty unto the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.

Bottom line: it's going to be OK.

Keep calm and party on.

BUCKLE IN.

Among today's Cafe Hayek links is a storm warning from Dominic Pino.

Whoever wins the US presidential election today is unprepared for the scheduled crisis that will take place in his or her first year in office. Here’s why 2025 is going to present a fiscal test that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump is ready to pass.

In 2017, Republicans in Congress passed and then-President Donald Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Legislation usually requires 60 votes to pass the 100-member Senate because of the necessity of securing a three-fifths majority vote to end debate on a bill. But there’s a special legislative procedure called ‘budget reconciliation’ that allows the Senate to bypass that requirement and pass a bill with a simple majority of 51. Republicans used that procedure to pass the TCJA with 51 votes exactly.

Because the bill was passed under budget reconciliation, it is not allowed to increase the deficit beyond a ten-year budget window. To get the math to work to satisfy that requirement, nearly all the individual provisions of the TCJA expire at the end of 2025. That means if Congress does nothing, nearly all taxpayers will face a tax hike as the tax code reverts to its pre-TCJA state.

Democrats knew that would be unpopular. They say they oppose the TCJA and often say it only cut taxes for the wealthy (which is not true), but in practice they would be very unlikely to allow the TCJA to expire for the vast majority of taxpayers. Because Republicans would be likely to get something they want extended at the end of 2025, Democrats set a deadline for something they want extended to coincide with it.

In the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, both of which Democrats passed using the same budget reconciliation process Republicans used for the TCJA, they suspended income limits on subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). To make the math work for reconciliation, they set the expiration date for that suspension to the end of 2025, just like the individual provisions of the TCJA.

This set up a budget-busting bipartisan exchange for the end of next year: Republicans get their tax-cut extension, Democrats get their health insurance subsidies extension, everyone is happy (except the Treasury). Congress loves to pass giant spending bills like this at the end of the calendar year, around Christmas when most people aren’t paying close attention to politics.

Then in 2023, President Joe Biden and then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy made a deal to raise the debt limit, the ceiling above which the US government cannot borrow. The government will run into the debt limit again in, you guessed it, 2025. Also expiring in 2025 are the caps on discretionary spending that were included in the debt-limit deal.

That's a lot of cans kicked down the road to about the same place.

All of this will happen in the first year of the presidency of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. One might think that this completely predictable confluence of fiscal issues would be a major focus of the campaign, but it has not been. Neither candidate has any plan to substantively deal with these issues, decisions on which will need to be made next year, whether they like the thought of that or not.

This ‘mother of all fiscal cliffs’ could blow a $5trn hole in the US economy just to keep current law in place. Making matters worse for the US fiscal situation, the first year of a new administration is generally a time when presidents want to spend more to reward their various voting blocs for electing them. So not only is no candidate promising fiscal rectitude, but the political winds will be at the president’s back to spend more on new initiatives next year.

And that rather grim picture is just for the stuff that we know is going to happen. Any number of other problems could present themselves in the course of an entire year of world events which could demand more tough decisions and possible need for government spending. The potential reemergence of inflation should not be discounted, as neither candidate seems willing to acknowledge economic trade-offs in government budgeting, and the electorate demonstrates little patience for any talk of actual spending cuts that would significantly alter the US fiscal trajectory.

Yes, let alone bond traders finally wearing of the nonsense and dropping the real debt ceiling in on Official Washington.

THINKING BEYOND THE ELECTION RETURNS.

Irrespective of what transpires in the next few hours, or will it be weeks, government will continue to be the problem.  Reason's Nick Gillespie is unsparing.  "Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are polling terribly because they are terrible people representing terrible parties."

Although I'm in the Trump is your final warning camp, whether he wins or loses and whether the national government is gridlocked or slightly under one party's sway, I align for the most part with Mr Gillespie's rejection of the process.

With a day left before the 2024 polls close, I'd like to say something to the Republicans and the Democrats, the Trump chads and the Harris stans: Don't blame me for not voting for your shitty candidate.

There's a reason why presidential contests have been as tight as they have been for a while, and why control of Congress has flipped back and forth so much over the last couple of decades. It's not because of voters like me, who just want to vote for politicians and policies that won't bankrupt the country or rob me of the ability to make meaningful decisions in my life. It's not too much to ask for candidates who aren't colossal assholes, mental incompetents, or fakers that routinely lie and dissemble about all sorts of stuff. Your parties don't stand for anything consistent or appealing or responsible or responsive. You're not going to win elections easily until you stand for something consistent, productive, and respectful of the people you seek to govern.

The problem is that being modest about what governments, especially large, continental governments can do isn't exactly a way to get elected to office, particularly in a milieu where a career politician is hailed for "a lifetime in public service" and where people who should know better speak of government as "solving collective action problems."  If you sense a rant coming on, dear reader, you're right, but today we'll leave the ranting to Mr Gillespie.

They each threaten free speech in their own ways and traffic in delusion (Trump, for instance, can't admit he lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, while Kamala won't say when she knew that President Joe Biden's brain was cooked).

We know what a Trump presidency will look like because he's served already. It wasn't great, considering that most of the new debt he added to the nation's came before COVID-19 tanked the economy. But it wasn't a disaster either, at least until COVID-19 came along and he pushed to shut the country down and put together the very team of awful public health bureaucrats he spends a lot of time railing against now, as if they just showed in the Oval Office one day.

As part of the Biden administration, Harris was co-pilot during an equally mediocre run in the White House, especially when it came to prolonging or intensifying many of the worst COVID-19 policies that started under Trump. But if we're being honest, despite all the best attempts of Biden/Harris to utterly tank the economy, it seems to be doing just fine, just like it was doing under Trump (which is to say, OK but not anywhere close to where it should be). The Dow Jones is doing swell, and for all their bitching and moaning, younger Americans are doing better than previous generations, with Millennials and older Gen Zers accruing more wealth than Gen X. And miracles of miracles: Gen Z is outpacing Millennials when it comes to home ownership. The genius of America is that we survive almost any fool presiding over us.

Whatever else you can say about Trump and Harris, this much is indisputable: They are not popular. Each is pulling under 50 percent of voters the day before the election. And their parties aren't exactly reeling them in, either. Per Gallup's survey during the last two weeks of October, just 29 percent of Americans identify as Republican and just 32 percent as Democrats—figures that are near all-time lows. Let the partisans explain why the rest of us are so misguided in our indifference or hostility to these candidates and their parties. Maybe one of these years, those partisans will get around to figuring out how to appeal to people outside of the shrinking groups who already agree with them.

That, however, would involve reducing the size of the political bundles, and what would ever happen to the so-called public affairs programming, the premise of which is that out of those Excessively Earnest Discussions will come the outlines of (Nonexistent) Solutions to Collective Action Problems.  Or somebody coming out and saying straight away, "I'm running to make my office less intrusive."

SUBMITTING YOUR CLOSING ARGUMENTS.

Power Line's Scott Johnson closes the campaign coverage with random thoughts, then turns the closing argument over to Megyn Kelly.  "In her compelling manner, Megyn invokes the reality principle. In a few minutes she nails the case for Trump."

Red State's Jennifer O'Connell liked the speech.  Illegal immigrant crime, boys playing in girls' sports, and authentic masculinity.

Last point, what I don't want, what I don't think you want is the Left's version of masculinity. Did you see that ad they did about Trump voters trying to encourage women to lie to their husband so they could vote for her instead of Trump? That's their version of what marriage looks like. An overbearing husband, who bullies his wife into saying she voted one way, as opposed to an honest, open relationship--oh, wait, I"m talking about Kamala and Doug.

CNN's Dana Bash pulled a long face.

Dana Bash is not handling @megynkelly speaking at Trump’s rally tonight very well😂😂😅

MEOW!pic.twitter.com/bQKXytO6IN

— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) November 4, 2024

In a few hours, we'll see who is glum and who is not.

ONE LAST "IN YOUR FACE" TO THE PALACE GUARD MEDIA.

Power Line's John Hinderaker is having none of the "submissive women" calumny.  "I would say that Trump, more than most politicians, has associated himself with highly impressive women–Sara Huckabee Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Kayleigh McEnany, Riley Gaines, and, obviously, Karoline Leavitt, just to name a few off the top of my head."

Karoline Leavitt just wiped the smirk off some Drive-By infobabe's face.

HOLY SHT! @kleavittnh absolutely destroyed this ABC host to oblivion 🔥🔥🔥

She will crying herself to sleep later 😂

Best clip of the day 👏🏼pic.twitter.com/hKZ6oqC4b6

— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) November 1, 2024

That concludes our election season coverage.

The next few days I intend to comment on some topics that have been on my mind irrespective of the state of the vote count or the governing majorities in Washington or Springfield.

MEDIOCRITIES AND SCOUNDRELS.

George Will is a Cub fan, which means he has more than a passing acquaintance with both, but he's writing about the presidential campaign about to wrap up.  "Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history."  Time for it to end.

Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?

Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.

Apparently the only thing worse than a presidency offering up shiny things is a presidency offering up vacuity.  David "Iowahawk" Burge offers an apposite bon mot.  "Remember: the entire future of our nation, nay planet, depends on you selecting the least horrifying imbecile we decided to offer you." Back to you, Mr Will.

Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.

Or perhaps one of the Brothers Grimm: Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality. The 2024 campaign has revealed the recklessness of Joe Biden’s 2020 choice of a running mate. Trump, who is 78 and who is not a martyr to the strictures of healthy living, was as reckless in choosing Vance.

And, as disaffected Republican strategist Mick Mulvaney notes, if either of the candidates loses, the reasons will not be hard to see.  It's either the current vice president not making clear why she seeks the office, or the former president having riled up his supporters in the wake of his loss last time.

Some percentage of Americans are voting for Trump — 45 percent? — and a roughly equal percentage are voting for Harris. The people in the middle are trying to figure out who she is, and she hasn’t told them. They are also trying to figure out if they can trust him in office again —  and the only reason they are even asking that question is because of Jan. 6. How they break on those basic questions will determine the outcome next week.

Commentators, politicos and the media tend to want to make politics seem very complex and profound. And I suppose sometimes it can be. But more often than not, winning and losing are ultimately about simple things.

That might be, and yet, pace Mr Will, can the soul-searching at least wait until Fasching Dienstag?

Whoever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.

Perhaps, if the real debt ceiling crashes in before the Iowa caucuses or whatever nomination fakement the Democrats rig, any presidential planning early on will be overtaken by events.

THE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH DECEPTION.

The canard that abortion policy is a "women's issue" is bad enough.  "For years, the women of the fevered brow have treated their stance on abortion as the One True Stance, and they have used their cultural power to excommunicate those women who disagree, and the only proper role for men is to nod and say nothing more than 'Yes, dear.'"  For the most part, though, that policy advocacy has trafficked in the rubric of "reproductive health" and any Serious Discussion has to trot out "rapeincestlifeofthemother" within a few words of any mention of abortion.

THE ETERNAL VERITIES OF VOTER TURNOUT.

A New Yorker cartoon from 2016 had it down.

"Ultimately, it all comes down to Waukesha County." A cartoon by Paul Noth, from 2016. pic.twitter.com/MrjubqHeUH

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 16, 2018

It still might.  Let us call the roll of "8 key counties that could decide the Trump-Harris election."  First up, Cobb County, outside Atlanta.

You’ve probably heard that “the suburbs” are the secret to Democratic success in recent elections. Cobb County is a great example of this phenomenon.

Located just northwest of Atlanta, Cobb was solidly Republican for decades — in part because it was majority white. But the county has diversified fast, and now its population is 30% Black, 15% Latino and about 6% Asian. Nearly 16% of residents are immigrants.

At the same time, Cobb County has remained affluent and highly educated; the Home Depot and the Weather Channel are headquartered there, and Coca-Cola, UPS and Delta are just a short drive away.

This has not been good news for Trump. In 2016, Hillary Clinton bucked Cobb’s historical GOP lean, winning there by just over 2 points; in 2020, Biden expanded that edge to more than 14 points. As a result, Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Georgia since 1992.

The Democrats might be courting new problems becoming a party for and by the professional-managerial classes.  We'll turn to that in a day or two.

AS THE CHICAGO COACHING CARROUSSEL CRANKS UP.

Last weekend, it was "Hail Mary, full of grace, Chicago Bears are in last place."

After this weekend, it is "Bears fans believe Matt Eberflus finally coached his way out of a job."  This is Alyssa Barbieri with Bears Wire writing, not some wishful thinking from the cheery side of the Cheddar Curtain.

The Chicago Bears came into Sunday's game against the Arizona Cardinals with plenty to prove after a chaotic week where players were openly questioning coaching decisions and cornerback Tyrique Stevenson's antics led to a game-winning Hail Mary for the Washington Commanders.

In a lot of ways, it felt like a must-win given the week as a whole, where head coach Matt Eberflus had a chance to rally his team against a four-win Cardinals team that had eked out close wins in the past two weeks. Instead, Eberflus' team came out unprepared and undisciplined as they lost their 18th road game under Eberflus and fell to 4-4 this season.

To make matters worse, Eberflus kept rookie quarterback Caleb Williams in the final drive of the game, which was well out of reach, and he tweaked his ankle after getting battered all game. It's coaching malpractice and the biggest reason why Chicago should consider moving on from Eberflus.

While the Bears have never fired a head coach midseason, it certainly seems like we're finally nearing the end of the Matt Eberflus era.

I lose track of how many Bears head coaches there have been since  Mike McCarthy gave way to Matt LaFleur.  A few weeks ago, all four Black & Blue Division teams were in the playoff mix.  This year, both the Lions and the Vikings have taken it to the Packers in Green Bay.  Whether or not the Bears still suck, the Packers have some work to do earning a playoff spot.

CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS EVOLVED BEFORE STANDARD TIME BECAME A THING.

We'll close out our Daylight Saving Time posts with an elaboration on that claim.

While dark mornings are inevitable in winter, turning the clocks back gives us an extra hour of natural light. At least 15 minutes' exposure to natural daylight, as early as possible in the day, is crucial for good sleep and for falling asleep faster at night.

Why? Because natural light plays a big role in regulating circadian rhythm (your internal body clock), signalling when to be alert and when to sleep. Natural light suppresses melatonin (the sleepy hormone) to help you feel more alert in the day. But when the evening arrives and natural light fades, your circadian rhythm starts to increase melatonin production again. Your sleep drive (hunger to sleep) will therefore be at its highest come bedtime, helping you to fall asleep faster.

So winding the clocks back an hour gives you a chance to get more natural daylight exposure straight after waking and before getting on with the rest of your day. If the clocks didn't go back, you'd be travelling to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, which would make it much harder for your circadian rhythm to regulate as it should.

Working to the clock is a few seconds ago in an evolutionary hour.  If you're hunting, gathering, or farming, and you awake with the sun and nod off after dark, what matters is more alert time when there is work to be done, which is to say from spring planting to fall harvest, and more rest time when you're stretching out the food you've put up for winter.  Factories with time-clocks, and railroads with time-tables, and all the rest are still novelties.  It's easier, though, to adjust the clocks, sort of, to our circadian rhythms than it would be to have summer and winter business hours.

Turning the clocks back an hour during autumn provides more sunlight in the morning, whereas pushing them forward in spring brings lighter evenings.

Theoretically, mornings should get lighter when the clocks go back as the purpose of this time change is to gain an extra hour of light in the morning. This extra morning light is noticeable for a good few weeks. However, as sunrise gets so much later during winter months, light soon ends up coming later than it does in the summer despite the clocks changing.

Ultimately there is no way to avoid dark mornings and evenings in winter, but the clocks going back do give an extra hour of light in the morning to make cold commutes somewhat easier. Without the clocks going back, we wouldn't see the sun until around 9am in the winter.

Our agrarian ancestors would simply sleep in, unless they had cows to milk.  Fifty years ago, Our Political Masters went to year-round daylight saving time as a way to keep the evening commute in daylight, but that proved hazardous to the kiddos off to school in the morning.  Clocks proved easier to adjust than school schedules, and after a while spring ahead, fall back returned, although daylight saving time has crept earlier into spring and later into fall.  (Wisconsin, once upon a time, went off daylight saving time the final Sunday morning of September.  Made for interesting railroad timetables with Illinois staying on until the final Sunday morning of October.)

Those first hints of daylight, however, serve as a clue to your metabolism.

Getting sunlight exposure as early as possible in the morning boosts our cortisol levels. Cortisol is the stress hormone responsible for waking us up faster and making us feel alert. Therefore, spikes in the morning give us energy and alertness to power us through our daily tasks.

That outcome used to be natural, and nobody would make a fuss about slug-a-beds when the wake-up call was sunrise, rather than a church bell or your clock radio.  "Morning light is crucial to allow us to initiate sleep early enough in the evening, and wake early enough in the morning (preferably naturally without an alarm clock) for work and school starts."  And getting daylight during daylight hours helps calibrate one's internal clock.

We should aim for as much natural light as possible during the day as it can improve both sleep quality and morning alertness, making you feel more awake and prepared for the day.

Natural light is especially important in the morning, so I recommend sitting by a window when eating your breakfast or stepping outside to drink your morning coffee. That said, natural light exposure is beneficial throughout the day too. A walk in nature is a great way of combating the winter blues and promoting good sleep.

Plus it's not all about light exposure, fresh air can also help you sleep better.

Perhaps a few minutes of outdoor recess, morning and afternoon, ought to be something businesses and factories consider, and schools consider reviving.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I can't wait for this election to be over.  People are tired of the bullshit.  And the bullying.  And the argumentum ad Hitlerum.  "Like the massive overuse of the charge of 'racist' during the Obama years, the 'fascist' label has lost its power to do damage."  And of Flibbertigibbet.  “Somehow believing that accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist is a winning closing argument – nothing could be further from the truth. They’re in real trouble and they know it.”  And her political agenda.  “We’re left with the consequences of these failed, progressive policies.”  It's not hard to see why.  "She is what she always was: an incompetent, dull-witted woman who achieved her success through horizontal negotiations and pretty privilege."  Her panic is palpable.  "Kamala is turning out to be the starburst firework that ends the show for DEI and she’s in real trouble out on a stage she cannot climb down from."

The progressive moment is well and truly over.  None too soon.  "The Gore campaign failed to win enough votes in 2000, and the Clinton campaign failed in 2016. It is not the fault of those progressives who refused to support them."  Perhaps we can have a different sort of Friday short takes in another week.  "I don’t know who is going to win this election, but at the end of the day, I would rather be on the side of authentic rabble, then the arrogant establishment."  The only response to nonsense from Democrats is laughter.  Democrats don't have a sense of humor.  This week's meme suggested itself.

By next week we'll see how well that commentary held up.  The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

BEAR DOWN, CHICAGO BEARS.

New season, same story.  "Bears CB Tyrique Stevenson was responsible for defending Noah Brown on Hail Mary."  If you're going to play your position, play your position.

The Washington Commanders shocked Chicago for a 18-15 win after successfully hitting a Hail Mary with no time left on the clock. Stevenson, who had been taunting Washington fans while the ball had already gone into play, missed his coverage and accidentally tipped the ball into Commander receiver Noah Brown's hands.

Per Eberflus, Stevenson was the player who was supposed to defend Brown, but that he was thrown off by a lapse in concentration. Stevenson took full accountability for his role in the loss when speaking to his teammates, Eberflus said.

"It was a really good moment for him to be able to do that, show responsibility and accountability," Eberflus said, via Chris Emma of 670 The Score.

Stevenson issued an apology on social media after the game, saying "notes taken, improvement will happen."

Eberflus told reporters the team would "look at" potential punishment for Stevenson, but that plans for any discipline would remain internal, per WGN TV's Chris Boden.

One of Stevenson's teammates, Bears tight end Cole Kmet, also spoke reporters about the apology, saying that Stevenson admitted that what he did was unacceptable and that the team appreciated his honesty, via Boden.

"A lapse in concentration" doesn't quite rise to the understatement of "Obviously a major malfunction," and yet the tape of what happened is going to be a coachable moment for defensive back coaches for years.

Hail Mary, full of grace, Chicago Bears are in last place.

DER, DIE, DAS, TEUFEL DICH!

When social scientists decided to bowdlerize demography by replacing the overworked word "sex" (as a noun:  Help Wanted: Female; as a verb:  Help Wanted: Female) with "gender" and then the culture-studies types began overworking "gender" trouble followed.

I was brought up to understand that "sex" was a biological term and "gender," a grammatical term. I understand that some people use the term "gender" as a way of making the point that the actions people take, including acting on their sex, have elements that have evolved over time, something loosely described as "socially constructed." My sense is that your office is using the term "gender" to determine my biological makeup, which is "male." You probably are not interested in my gender, which is "Non-Quiche Eating Real Guy," a category probably deserving of protected status as under-represented around the University.

If academicians had burdened the vocabulary with a few more terms, perhaps Inside Higher Ed contributor Nicholas Henriksen could have a life.  Instead, he offers "Beyond Masculine and Feminine: Teaching Romance Languages in a Nonbinary World."

In the case of Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan, one of the most fundamental aspects of grammar is gender. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are typically categorized as masculine or feminine, clashing with our more complex, 21st-century understanding of gender identity. This rigid linguistic structure can alienate students whose identities may not fit within the traditional gender binary. It is difficult for them to feel fully seen or respected in the classroom, where they often feel pressured to misgender themselves or prematurely out themselves due to their limited descriptive options.

In a world increasingly aware of the fluidity of gender, this issue is becoming more pronounced.

The problem is not limited to the Romance languages nor is it about boats (das Boot) preferring to be addressed as "she" or garages (die Garage) identifying as male, it is about snowflakey students who see German or Latin grammar as somehow triggering, and possibly oppressive, and the faculty who enable them. No, seriously.

No initiative aimed at fostering inclusivity can succeed without the active involvement of the communities it seeks to serve. In our case, trans and nonbinary departmental members were instrumental in helping us understand the unique challenges they face in the language classroom. Through surveys and direct involvement in the committee, these members of the RLL community provided invaluable insights that shaped our approach.

It’s crucial to listen and learn from firsthand experiences. Misgendering, for instance, can be profoundly painful for students, signaling a lack of recognition or respect for their identity. By ensuring that trans and nonbinary students have a voice in the conversation, we can better meet their needs and create spaces where they feel seen and valued.

How hard is it to explain that grammatical rules of construction come from a different place than the conventions of abnormal psychology?