WHAT STANDARD CONSISTENCY?

The Green Bay Packers will continue with the same management team going into the 2026 season.

Matt LaFleur and Brian Gutekunst are set to lead the Green Bay Packers for years to come.

After nearly a week of negotiations, the Packers signed LaFleur to a multi-year contract extension that will guarantee he won’t go into 2026 with just one year left on his deal. At the same time, the Packers were also close to completing a contract extension for Gutekunst.

PackersNews confirmed the status of both deals and learned that executive vice president/director of football operations Russ Ball would also receive a contract extension.

Terms of the deals were not available and it's unclear whether LaFleur and Gutekunst will have matching years on their contracts.

Apparently headquarters had been inclined to continue irrespective of how the wild card playoff game turned out.

According to a person familiar with the talks with LaFleur, Gutekunst and Ball, the Packers' front office structure is staying the same. All three men will report to President and CEO Ed Policy, who made the decision to extend each of the three men's contracts.

The structure has been in place since 2018 when then-President Mark Murphy decided that the general manager would not have total authority over the football operation as had been the case since general manager Ron Wolf was hired in 1992.

LaFleur’s future with the Packers seemed like it was in question after the Packers suffered an embarrassing wild-card playoff loss to the Chicago Bears on Jan. 10. It was the third time in the past four playoff appearances that the Packers bowed out of the playoffs in their first game.

However, according to a source with knowledge of the talks Policy had with his leadership, there was no hesitation about bringing LaFleur back. As NFL Network had reported prior to the Packers' playoff loss to the Chicago Bears, the final game would not have a bearing on LaFleur's future.

It appears Policy had already decided that LaFleur would remain as head coach provided the two were able to reach a contract agreement. Although it took a week to get the deal done, it appears that it was mostly because Policy had three contracts to negotiate and not because there was any hesitation from LaFleur or Policy.

The challenge is always whether the turmoil of a coaching change and subsequent rebuild (Admiral Gallery's description of a command change at sea being akin to removing one head and grafting on another applies to coaching changes, irrespective of whether it's an internal promotion or the coaching square dance) is worth doing.

Part of Policy's decision was whether seven years was enough time for LaFleur to lead the Packers to a Super Bowl. Despite a 76-40-1 regular-season record, LaFleur has gotten the team to the NFC championship game twice, but no further.

Policy decided the Packers could win a Super Bowl under LaFleur.

At the end of Coach LaFleur's second season, we noted,

Every so often, a team management does go all in on making a Super Bowl run, and Tampa might have done so making Tom Brady the de facto director of personnel, and perhaps that will work out for them (this year) and perhaps the reckoning with the salary cap and free agency will not haunt them for ten seasons.  On the other hand, how often might a management make a big splash on free agency only to wind up with an angry locker room and no playoff appearances to show for it?  We know what the standard is, and being regularly in the mix is a better sort of frustration than regularly being out of the mix.

The Tom Brady - Rob Gronkowski farewell tour ended with a championship in Tampa Bay, but has anyone heard from them lately?  Or would you rather be the Bears, still shuffling after forty years?  The Vikings, going zero-for-Bud Grant?  The Lions, still carrying the curse of Bobby Layne?

MAKE THE COINAGE RESPECTABLE AGAIN.

The United States Mint will be issuing multiple semiquincentennial coins.  It's all too much for Outside the Beltway's James Joyner.

It has been quite some time since I routinely carried change in my pocket or, indeed, used coins. Unlike 1976, I suspect these coins will almost entirely be for collectors and those looking for souvenirs, rather than circulating currency.

I also suspect the floated Trump coin is merely trolling than something we’ll actually see. But the administration has certainly flouted longstanding norms before, so I won’t be absolutely shocked if it rolls out.

Certainly, given the anti-DEI tenor of the campaign and the administration, I’m not the least bit surprise that “woke” coins got canceled.

Outside the Beltway operate in the conventional establishmentarian lane, seasoned with what passes for academic skepticism these days, plus a pinch of Trump derangement, and that passage is in character.

WOKE RUINS EVERYTHING.

A Canadian musicologist, James Deaville, linked to by The College Fix, offers an essay (in something called The Conversation, I don't know if that qualifies as a Minimal Publishable Unit) describing It's A Wonderful Life as "A Christmas classic that reflects bigoted ideas about ‘proper’ music in the 1940s."  He could have stuck to the musicology, perhaps coming to grips with director Frank Capra and the soundtrack composer never collaborating again.  Instead, he has to inject contemporary sensibilities that might have not been relevant immediately after the War.

The movie’s soundtrack — including contributions by Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin — plays a central role in It’s a Wonderful Life, underscoring problems and tensions beneath the surface. Some depictions of music and sound beg analysis around how these reflect racist ideas about “proper” musical, social and community norms.

Perhaps those depictions "begged" analysis in the sense that nobody would have perceived any cause to offer any, or perhaps the phrase the professor seeks is "provoke analysis," or "prompt me to inject my sensibilities," because that's what a lot of people who claim to be intellectual do these days.

AFTER SIXTY YEARS OF MODEL CITIES AND THE GREAT SOCIETY.

A holiday honoring a prominent civil rights leader ought be occasion for taking stock of the reforms his movement called for.  Let's visit the North Milwaukee neighborhood.

It is deeply troubling that the only Black-owned grocery store on Milwaukee’s north side is now at risk of closing, just six months after Pick ’n Save shut its doors. Now residents are facing yet another blow: Aldi has announced the closure of its northwest side location, giving the community just a two-day notice. This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

Each closure widens the food access gap and deepens food apartheid across our city. When corporations exit neighborhoods like ours, they do so quickly and quietly, protecting their bottom lines, not community stability. Short notice is not accidental, it is strategic. It limits public response, avoids accountability, and leaves residents scrambling to meet basic needs.

The authors, urban lobbyists Melody McCurtis and Nateya Taylor, use language deeply troubling to Tyler "Zero Hedge" Durden.  "This go-round, the media is replacing their loaded 'food desert' term with 'food apartheid'. Because, hey, when there isn't a World War II or full blown civil rights style crisis on the media's hands to all them to argue their ideologies...why not just invent one?"  In his view, "Grocery stores operate on thin margins and avoid areas where safety is a liability."

MORE LIKE A COACHING SQUARE DANCE THAN A COACHING CARROUSSEL.

Thus did a Milwaukee news analyst describe the annual ritual of unsuccessful head coaches cleaning out one office only to fill another.  The Babylon Bee is not wrong in its satire.  "Losing Football Team Excitedly Introduces New Coach Just Fired From Other Losing Football Team"  The stock photo accompanying the article is of Mike McCarthy, who went from winning a Super Bowl with America's Team to coaching a Dallas Cowboys team that was excused, a couple of years ago, from the playoffs, by America's Team.  Subsequently, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked Mr McCarthy to clean out his desk.  But his name might still be on this off-season's dance card.

A losing football team excitedly announced today it had hired a new head coach, who was just fired from a different losing football team.

Though the team's previous coach was also hired from yet another losing team, the general manager felt confident the new loser coach would stop the losing.

"This will change everything," announced general manager John Ryans. "With seven wins and twenty-nine losses over the past three years, our new coach knows what it takes to win. He also knows what it takes to not win. He's got that knowledge, and bringing that knowledge is huge. With our group of players who generally lose, plus a new coach who's been losing, we've never been in a better position to not lose."

According to league sources, all of the losing football teams are once again participating in the annual mandatory coach swap. "This time will be different, I know it," said local fan Marcus Denison. "He really was the best coach available, because the coaches that win didn't get fired. He may be a loser, but he's lost in very different ways than our old coach. I think it's going to be a great fit."

At publishing time, one unlucky coach was left at the end of the annual coach swap, thus becoming the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

It's a ritual common in organized sports.  How many baseball teams did Dave Bristol or Leo Durocher or Gene Mauch or Harry Walker manage in their careers?  Sparky Anderson, who had two very good runs with the Reds and Tigers cracked wise about enjoying a sort of tenure.  And Ned Yost couldn't secure the main prize in Milwaukee but subsequently did so with Kansas City.

ENABLING THE OVERSCHEDULED CHILDHOOD?

Strong Towns contributor Noah Toumert asks, "Why Do Cities Build Sports Complexes Instead of Neighborhood Fields?"  Maybe because the helicopter parents think of the local playgrounds as dangerous places, and the authorities crack down on unsupervised play as tantamount to neglect.

Perhaps, as Mr Toumert contends, the sports complexes are a way of showcasing the city as a destination, rather than as, oh, a place to live.

Large sports complexes are attractive to city governments because they are easy to explain. They arrive with economic impact studies attached: hotel nights, restaurant spending, regional visitors. They come with clear capital budgets, naming rights, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. They can be photographed from the air and branded as evidence of investment. A $30 million complex feels like progress because it is visible.

Neighborhood fields, by contrast, don’t always photograph well. A lit mini-pitch on a residential block looks like maintenance instead of transformation. Ten small investments scattered across a city do not produce a single moment of political credit in the way one large facility does.

In the end, cities are not only responding to community need; they are responding to the logic of governance. Centralized projects are legible to councils, donors, and the press. Distributed infrastructure is quieter and harder to narrate. The result is predictable: cities optimize for visibility rather than proximity.

Beyond politics, sports complexes solve a series of administrative challenges. They centralize scheduling, liability, maintenance, and security. They allow recreation departments to manage sport as a contained activity rather than a diffuse one. Insurance is simpler, permitting clearer, and staff can be concentrated in one place.

All of those things might be true, subject, however, to the caveat that such projects, like any other local improvement built with Other Peoples' Money, turn into liabilities when time comes to do the maintenance and security.

ADVANCED, OR NOT-SO-ADVANCED, TRIBAL SOCIETIES.

In "What's the Matter With Minnesota?," Michael Barone develops the argument that European social democracies might better be understood as advanced tribal societies, with an emphasis on Minnesota.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and its neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It's still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast.

Or, Cynical Me notes, perhaps putting a bureaucrat in charge of bailing out improvident relatives is a good thing.  "It's your third cousin once removed that your taxes are supporting.  That might not be so easy once enough immigration changes the dynamic between tax payer and benefit recipient."  So it has been going in Denmark and Sweden.  Here's where that led, ten years ago.  "Europe's migration problem is worse to the extent that the self-despising multiculturalists enable third worlders to continue to behave badly and not prosper, and in like measure, provide evidence of the absence of cosmic justice and cause for further social reform. In the United States, migrants become mascots for ward-heeler politicians."

Mr Barone doesn't quite go there, but he's tiptoeing along the sideline.

Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress on those dimensions. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.

The strength of these United States is in its origin as a creedal, not a tribal, nation.  Yes, let Minnesotans, or residents of any other state, buy into the aspirations of their new neighbors.  At the same time, let them encourage those new neighbors to buy into the ways that have persisted as the creed emerged, including high conscientiousness culture and bourgeois norms.

BY WAY OF COMIC RELIEF.

The Order of Perpetual Misery are at it again, with perpetual scold Stan Cox unleashing another jeremiad.  "How to Save the World: Give Up War, Cars, and Leaf-Blowers... and Unveil the Stars." The thinking becomes even more wishful in the subtitle. "It’s imperative that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon."  Imperative, huh?  Well, I suppose a guy with a beard worthy of Nathan Forrest would want to keep up the skeer about a climate emergency that isn't.

The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.

Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.

Imagine, dear reader, what the total weight of stuff would be if all those Third Worlders who used to eke out a living on a dollar a day had to devote their higher earnings to buying the radio or record player or land-line telephone they might have purchased but for the current generation of entrepreneurs having provided the same capabilities with a much lower material intensity.  Economists don't have a good grasp of economic growth in the sense of more stuff and more people, let alone what it would look like with rising living standards shared among fewer people using advanced stuff.  I note, further, that an increasing share of what we used to understand as the middle classes are participating both in the growth, and perhaps treating the noise of those leaf blowers as a tolerable consequence.

THE LOGIC OF DEATHBED CONVERSIONS.

A heavenly news report from The Babylon Bee.  "At publishing time, Scott Adams had been moved into a shared cubicle with French philosopher Blaise Pascal."

DONALD TRUMP SEEKS FRIENDSHIP OF DON CORLEONE.

Populist froth is populist froth, no matter who peddles it.  "Trump pushes a 1-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates."  Dear reader, for all the happy talk about bipartisanship and gauzy memories of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill quaffing a few after hours, bipartisanship is the political class doing dumb things.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to rein in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long.”

Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.

Hours before Trump’s post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.

If the lender can't price the risk premium in the finance charge, he can either refuse to make the loan, as the article notes is the case in states with existing usury laws, or increase the penalty for late payment.

Does anyone seriously think that when Our President and Fauxahontas agree on something, that's a course worth pursuing?

One irony in the calls for price caps from a certain type of populist, whether on the (nominally) left or (nominally) right, is that price levels are, in some respects, as representative of popular opinion as it is possible to get.

Should prices be set (directly or indirectly) by countless interactions between countless people, or should they be set by someone in government — in Washington — who supposedly knows best?

Oh well.

Yes, that's all standard stuff, as will be the predictable consequences for people with credit scores lower than the cruising speed of a Lear Jet.

If Donald Trump’s promise to institute “a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%” were to be measured in an opinion poll, it would likely prove extremely popular. Bolstered by the usual demagoguery, mawkishness, and indignation, the question would be abstracted into the heady realm of theory, and its opponents would be cast as the dastardly handmaidens of greed. In all probability, the public would be 80–20 in favor of the move — perhaps even more.

If, by contrast, Donald Trump’s promise to institute a one-year, 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates were to be implemented, it would provoke a populist backlash on a scale that we have not seen in the United States for a while. There is a reason that unsecured loans carry high rates when granted to risky debtors, and that reason does not evaporate in the face of good intentions or disgruntled rhetoric. If, in a fit of wide-eyed ideology, the president or Congress elects to change the law, they will create a set of ineluctable knock-on effects for which, before too long, they will be harshly blamed. In a matter of weeks, 80–20 would become 20–80.

When Trump and his acolytes imagine a 10 percent limit, they seem to envision the current system, unchanged but for that small detail. But this is absurd. Interest rates are inextricably tied to exposure. To restrict the ceiling to 10 percent APR is to inform banks that they may charge no more than 0.83 percent interest per month to anyone, irrespective of their financial history. The result of this would not be some lofty 10-percent-for-everyone paradise, but an extremely selective universe in which only the most secure candidates were accepted. Within a month of the new rules, most new applicants would be turned down, longstanding credit limits would be lowered, and existing customers who exhibited even a modest pattern of delinquency would have their accounts canceled on the spot. One does not have to try too hard to imagine how this would play out on social media, in the press, or in November’s midterm elections.

With the spring semester getting under way, David Henderson offers a refresher course.  Put simply, whether Donald Trump is proposing it, or Elizabeth Warren is proposing it, interest rate ceilings comprise "A Progressive Plan That Aids Loan Sharks."  Other entrepreneurs in the poverty industry, such as payday loan and check cashing shops, pawn shops, and the sort of durable goods dealer who will hold your cash without paying interest until you've brought enough in to buy that recliner, will also get to wet their beaks.

If you think late fees are predatory now, wait until they're capped.

YOUR INTEGRITY OR YOUR LIFE'S WORK.

Ever since the second coming of a Trump presidency, higher education types have protested that the administration is conditioning its financial support on obeisance to that administration's policy goals.  Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long understood what Reason's Jack Nicastro put bluntly.  "Federal Funding for Universities Comes With Strings. Now Trump Is Pulling Them."  His focus is on the appropriability of patent royalties: yes, on occasion federally sponsored research comes up with commercially successful things.  His concluding paragraph, however, notes the broader implications of Our President's actions.

Getting the government involved in subsidizing higher education was always a Faustian bargain. The Bayh-Dole Act may have supported the tenfold increase in university patents in the two decades following its passage, but it did so at the expense of attaching government strings to academic research. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is now tugging on them to cow academia into compliance with its political agenda.

As if the other government strings didn't have the same effect.  The post's title comes from a Rikki Schlott essay, "How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts," which ran in The (Not Detroit) Free Press midway through the Jarrett regency, during which the foundations and the national endowments shared a common view of what was True and Beautiful.  Choreographer Lincoln Jones got the equivalent of a "recant or be excommunicated" missive from Pope Linus the people who write the checks.

“Fundraising felt impossible,” he added. “The requirement on grants comes down to this: If you don’t agree with this very particular and recently adopted approach to social justice, we won’t fund your art. Behind the scenes, so many people in the arts world told me just to say the words.”

“Every time I spoke to funders, the first conversation was about diversity. It just felt like, okay, this is how you get funding now. Honestly, it felt like somebody was holding a gun to my head and saying, ‘Your integrity or your life’s work.’”

That bargain—pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy or stick to your mission and risk your career—is one now faced by many in the world of American fine arts.

I mean, when the director of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Obama presidency, Rocco Landesman, recognizes there's a problem, there's probably a problem.

Landesman, 75, who has produced multiple Tony-winning shows including Angels in America and The Producers, said he worries about what is happening to the world where he has dedicated his entire life and career.

“We’re taking first-rate artists and making them into third-rate political activists,” he said.

“Art is supposed to unsettle us; art challenges what we feel about ourselves,” he continued. “But most of the art today affirms commonly held views of our society. You either fit in or you perish.”

The same thing might be happening to decorated laboratory scientists in universities you might have heard of, according to Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner.

There is nothing unlikeable about any of the scientists whose stories Blonigan and Liu tell. They are justly proud of what they do, and of their devotion to science. As someone who spent a multi-decade research career in a never-ending scramble for funds and living with perpetual uncertainty, I feel their pain.

Nevertheless, they are in the grips of a prideful delusion: that they are valued as scientists, that the funding, privilege, and prestige they enjoy have been conferred on them so that they might advance science, and that what they do is valued by their universities as science. They are blind to the reality that they are galley slaves, chained to the oars, valued not for the science they do nor for their good intentions, but for the revenue streams they generate.

Doubt me on this? Here’s a thought experiment. Decide to dedicate your career to an intellectually promising line of inquiry that doesn’t cost much money to pursue, or even better, that can be funded without grants. What do you suppose will happen to your academic career? Here’s my hypothesis: you will soon have no academic career.

And where is nemesis in all this? Pull away the mask, and her identity is revealed. Nemesis is the mighty river of federal research funding, roughly $100 billion that streams into universities nationwide every year.

Note further, dear reader, that any institution of higher (cough!) learning that wants to participate in federally funded research or performance or guaranteed student loans must comply with, you guessed it, government guidelines.  Cynical Me suggests that the guidelines, pre-Trump, enforced agreements among the universities that the universities could never reach among themselves.

THOSE URBAN-RURAL POLITICAL DIVIDES.

Downstate Illinois would just as soon have nothing to do with Chicago.  Inland and mountain Oregon and Washington resent the political aesthetic of Portland and Seattle.  There might be Minnesotans asking Paul Bunyan to chop the Cities off.

Now consider remarks one Representative Daniel Sickles made in Congress.  “Secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South. There is no sympathy now between the city and the State of New York ... nor has there been for years.”  Yes, that's the same Daniel Sickles, political general, whose impetuous behavior on 2 July at Gettysburg almost lost the battle, but for the First Minnesota plugging the gap.

MIGHT THE ROOM BE FILLING WITH EMPTY SHELLS?

That's a parable from four years ago.

[I]magine a room full of whole peanuts, with kids let loose to eat the peanuts while they're required to leave the shells in the room as they eat. Early on, it's easy to find the whole peanuts, but as the room fills up with shells, it's harder to find them.  Locating exhaustible resources is like that, and we even have a Hotelling principle for the pricing of exhaustible resources that ought manifest itself if peak oil is indeed at hand.

Peak oil might not be upon us just yet, and yet, notes Paul Krugman, Our President's Venezuelan oil play might be failing its market test.  "None of the oil executives were willing to make specific commitments to invest in Venezuela, although some of them talked about possible increases in Venezuelan production."

A WELL-DESERVED RETIREMENT.

Yen Ching to close after 4 decades in DeKalb.  The family business serves good food, and some years ago they moved from downtown near the railroad crossing to near the university.

After being in DeKalb for nearly 44 years, Yen Ching has decided to close its doors.

The restaurant is owned by husband and wife John Yin and Marilyn Yin. Their only other staff member is Marilyn’s sister, Caroline Zinger. John serves as the sole chef, while Marilyn manages the restaurant’s finances and paperwork.

Yen Ching is an Asian restaurant in DeKalb that offers authentic Chinese cuisine with items such as sweet sour chicken, egg drop soup and crab rangoons.

John Yin began working in his family’s restaurant at the age of 10, which made it second nature for him to manage an entire kitchen on his own. Although there have been other employees over the years, none ever proved to be a complete fit.

“We’ve had employees, but over the years we realized the easy way is to do it yourself,” Marilyn Yin said.

Even when things get hectic, as it often does at an eatery with a strong local following, the ladies manage to stay cheerful.  This year, the owners will be offering lunch Tuesday through Sunday and dinner each day.  The regulars, which include long-time DeKalb residents from all walks of life, wish them well.

YOUR RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.

Eight years ago, we called attention to National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke, noting how one Donald J. Trump's version of the Cult of the Presidency was reason for Democrat Keepers of the Cult to rethink the role of a strong central government.

There might be a general principle at work, and its emergence is encouraging.

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

There's more in that vein at the article. By all means, read and understand.

I cannot guarantee the reliability of links to National Review from eight years ago, it's hard enough to guarantee those week to week.

That "right to keep and bear arms" as a safety valve appears to have been discovered, recently, by people who until last week were probably all about banning assault weapons and all the rest.

Lmao the right reported me for... supporting the Second Amendment?

Learned my rhetoric from you, pookie! 😘 https://t.co/zUuIoElEmN pic.twitter.com/IovDU2q5ni

— Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ (@estherzelda0514) January 12, 2026

The Federal Constitution guaranteeing the right of revolution asserted in the Declaration of Independence is something acknowledged, more in sorrow than in anger, by libertarians, and it's embraced by patriot militia types as a license to hunt politicians.  I have not, as of this afternoon, learned of any such militias organizing to draw down on the antifa types.

YOUR HAMBURGER COMES WITH A SIDE OF MISOGYNY.

Remember "patriarchy and meat?"

Perhaps the Huffington Post writer has spent time in the fever swamps of cultural studies, in which the commercial butchering of animals becomes an example of the absent referent.

I was struggling to find a way to explain why people eat animals and why it is so difficult to discuss the issue. I realized that it was because of what I call the structure of the absent referent: Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.

Never in the history of intellectual endeavour has so much effort been devoted by so many to so little. From that we get The Sexual Politics of Meat, which I skimmed one lazy afternoon years ago, to be unimpressed by its efforts to treat housewives preparing roasts for their husbands and deer hunting as manifestations of the same hierarchy of dominion, but the author saw fit to offer a sequel, The Pornography of Meat, and the late unlamented Lingua Franca suggested there would soon be a new library category, "patriarchy and meat." Sometimes the only thing to do is to snicker.

Carol Adams is still at it, and Town Hall's "Ranty Amy" Curtis is snickering.  "She's hitting all the Leftist talking points like she's collecting woke Pokémon."  Sounds like the professor is still working off the same lecture notes from thirty years ago.

WHY URBAN POLICY ADVOCATES FAIL.

Last fall, we noted an essay by Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin, who was not a fan of making motorists miserable, and might have recommended that advocates of a certain stripe lose the smug.

His colleague Alex Burns didn't get the memo.

The Trump Administration continues to dismantle federal climate policy, and Biden-era goals are drifting increasingly out of reach. As the federal government of the world’s second-biggest polluter abdicates responsibility, state and local governments must accelerate the decarbonization efforts. This is especially true for the transportation sector, the country’s biggest emissions source, as state and local governments are key decision makers on highway and transit spending.

Unfortunately, even states that have pledged to take climate seriously are failing to reduce transportation emissions at the rapid pace that is needed. At the root of this failure is an unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers and meaningfully depart from a car-dominated transport system. As progress on climate goals falters, it is time for state transportation leaders to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: climate goals are not feasible without a swift and methodical reallocation of road space away from cars.

"Unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers."  As if defenders of the status quo or advocates of the proposition that the private automobile confers freedom of movement don't already think of urban transit advocates as a convex combination of smug and depriving people of their freedoms.  Moreover, Mr Burns's essay does nothing to disabuse people who think of bicycle lanes and road diets as deliberately taking road space away from cars.  Those are Desirable Features and Governments Aren't Doing Enough.

Supporting policy actions have focused on improving multimodal transportation options and promoting denser, walkable, urban land use. Projects that significantly impact cost and convenience for car drivers have been largely off-limits.

Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see any mention of treating the roads and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly.  Those policies impose costs but might improve convenience.  Can't have that, the streets have to be narrowed.

THE PILLARS OF TRUMP.

Our President has been musing about buying or annexing or occupying Greenland.  A polar map makes the island's strategic importance to North America clear.

Object Zero map retrieved from CDR Salamander.

During the Battle of the Atlantic and the Cold War, the ability of the Atlantic Alliance to keep track of naval activity in the Greenland - Iceland - United Kingdom gap was useful.  To the extent that being able to use the Northwest Passage for commercial shipping matters, keeping track of what's on those waters is easier with observers in Alaska, far northwestern Canada, and Greenland.  Note, further, that great circle trajectories of intercontinental missiles out of Persia or European Russia cross Denmark, making it a logical place to base anti-missile technologies that activate during the boost phase.

GOOD QUESTION.

Inside Higher Ed columnist Rachel Toor asks, "Can we in higher ed, the true 'life-long learners,' think hard about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit our mistakes without shame and then change and adapt to the world we all now live in?"

Perhaps the continued apologetics for all wokeness, all the time, have ceased to persuade.

Every scientist worth her NaCl knows a theory is right until it’s proved wrong. That’s why she keeps experimenting. But in higher education, we tend to treat our current crisis—declining enrollment, loss of public trust—as a “failure” of the market or demographics or even the political landscape. We rarely stop to ask if we are fundamentally wrong about the model we are using.

I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right.  That's not where she's going.

We confuse the aesthetic of academia—the gorgeous campus, the passionate faculty, the dorm-living young people that represents the small college liberal arts experience—with the institutions that serve the 70 percent of students who fall outside the traditional, fictional Wheeler ideal.

Watching this, I was reminded of a story my late uncle, Seymour Benzer, a geneticist at Caltech, once told me. He had been invited to Oxford to give a talk and was walking the quads with a colleague. They passed workers scraping soot off the ancient buildings. The witty Brit he was with turned to him and said, “We put that in bags and ship it to Yale for their buildings.”

It was an apt reminder that we’ve long mimicked the ancient Oxbridge model, importing not just the architecture, but the “soot”—the assumption that tradition itself confers value. That might work for elite institutions where students are buying social capital. But for the rest of higher ed? In today’s world, faculty who cling to their lectures and red pens don’t serve our current students.

We are busy scraping the soot off the past and applying it to the present, rather than admitting that the building itself might need a redesign.

Higher ed in the U.S. has been one of our country’s greatest achievements. But maybe we can think about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit it without shame, and then learn and grow and change? Some of us must out of sheer necessity if we want to keep our jobs.

It's not the institutions that are selling that social capital that confront shrinking enrollments and opt to close down.  The U.S. News guides continue to sell.  I doubt that Ms Toor is seriously suggesting not bothering with providing at least the rudiments of that social capital to matriculants who for a variety of reasons do not seek admission at the elite institutions.

JUST WIN.

The irregular Saturday-only bridge column has previously featured some of the strange bids the algorithms make.  So it is with this recent simulation.

Those red lines around two of my bids indicate the algorithm is interpreting each of those as something other than "I have length and strength in Diamonds" and "I have support for your initial suit" followed by "I'm stronger than Three No Trump."  My closing offer was Six No Trump, and after an opening ♥ Five, off we go.  Note that in real life, the closed hand is North, and that player sees three top tricks in Spades; three top tricks in Hearts, and with proper play, an opportunity to discard that low Spade; five top tricks in Diamonds, which is convenient given there is one top Club trick, and playing either side for the King is taking a long chance.  That's the joy of playing no-trump contracts: cash your immediate winners and establish the defense's remaining little cards, or run a Jack or a Ten in order to knock out a higher card against your honors, and go down.

This game, no problem.  Win the lead in hand with the ♥ Queen, cash the remaining high Hearts, low Diamond to the Jack, run the remaining Diamonds pitching Clubs, cash the ♣ Ace, then the ♠ Queen and back to the ♠ Ace and King, and donate a Club to charity.

WORK DONE, WORK STILL TO BE DONE.

The Candy Cane Lane neighborhood of West Allis is several blocks of tract houses from the American High that over the years has developed a tradition of blinging out the houses for the Festive Season.

Residents along the DeKalb street north of Cold Spring Shops headquarters are not shy about illuminating their houses.  Householders on the adjacent streets have not yet gotten in on the fun, nor is this neighborhood as walkable as the gridded streets of West Allis.

There is enough traffic, both on foot, as I did to take the above photograph and a few others, and driving through, that Candy Cane Lane residents now solicit donations for the Milwaukee Athletes Against Childhood Cancer.  In the 2025 Festive Season, which properly wrapped up by Three Kings, the neighborhood raised over two hundred thousand dollars for that fund.  Sadly, Leo Avina, the young man who designed the 2025 TMJ4 MACC Star ornament, another part of Festive Season fundraising, recently lost his battle with rhabdomyosarcoma at the age of six.  R. I. P.

The 2026 Candy Cane Lane displays will begin Friday, 27 November, and the MACC Star campaign goes on.  Childhood cancer researchers never lack for work.

THE SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT CONUNDRUM.

When does borrowing for countercyclical Keynesian economics begin to work against itself?

Among the 47 studies that find nonlinear threshold levels at which debt begins to adversely affect economic growth, mean and median threshold levels can be calculated. The mean threshold level is 74% of GDP, while the median threshold is 73%. If we remove estimates from developing country samples to focus on the threshold level for advanced economies, the mean and median threshold levels are marginally higher, at 75% and 76% respectively. These estimates are largely consistent with prior estimates for advanced countries.

That's the money quote from "The Impact of Public Debt on Economic Growth: What the Empirical Literature Tells Us," an ongoing Mercatus Center round-up-cum-meta-analysis of research on, to put it loosely, when tax, spend, and borrow becomes counter-productive.

Understanding the relationship between public debt and economic growth is of paramount importance to both economists and policymakers. High and rising debt levels raise concerns about fiscal sustainability, intergenerational equity, and potential constraints on future policy space. On the other hand, fiscal stimulus funded by debt is often used as a policy tool during economic downturns, particularly in liquidity traps where monetary policy may be constrained. The key policy question, therefore, is not whether public debt is inherently good or bad, but rather under what conditions it becomes harmful to long-run economic performance.

Put another way, those policy issues that make teaching macroeconomics a futile struggle between the positive economics of income-expenditure models and the normative economics of policy tradeoffs will not go away.  And once public debt, a stock, rises to about three-quarters of gross domestic product, a flow, the anticipated magic multipliers and all the other policy tools lose effectiveness.

The United States Treasury?  Currently borrowing, in total, more than the annual gross domestic product.  What cannot go on forever, won't.

THINK OF THE DEANLINGS' SELF-ESTEEM.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, inside not-so-higher education, Austin Sarat asks, "How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?"

Here I stand, I can do no other.

Years ago, I learned about administrative bloat in a humorous way.  The acting chairman of my department reported that the ratio of full-time-equivalent students to faculty had increased in the department, because the number of faculty members had decreased.  He then noted that the number of vice presidents had increased at the same time, and in a quantity sufficient to lower the ratio of students to vice presidents.

To some extent, the perception of administrative bloat varies by discipline and worldview.  It's more likely to be pointed out by critics of the radical vision that captivates postmodernists, culture-studies True Believers, social constructionists, deconstructionists, and careerist conscience-cowboys.

Professor Sarat holds a chair in political science at tiny but influential Amherst College, and the office inflation there is too much even for him.

Amherst College, where I teach, recently changed the designation of its senior administrators, who were formerly called “chiefs,” as in chief financial officer, to “vice presidents.” We now have 10 of them, as well as 15 other individuals who hold titles such as senior associate, associate or assistant vice president.

Not too long ago, in the time before they became chiefs, our VPs would have been called deans, directors or, in the case of our chief financial officer, treasurer. (Indeed, some retain a dean title along with their vice presidential one—the vice president of student affairs and dean of students, or the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.) I respect and value the work that they do, regardless of their title. I know them and am aware of their dedication to the college and the well-being of its students, faculty and staff.

But, for a small, liberal arts college that has long been proud to go its own way in many things, including in its idiosyncratic administrative titles, that’s a lot of vice presidents and associate and assistant VPs.

Higher education poobahs have long been allergic to naming any responsible person a "chief," as in their minds that term has troubling connotation of buffalo hide robes and feathered head-dresses.  The vice-presidentialization of higher education, as the professor has it, though?  The proliferation of titles might give the lie to all that cheerful talk about institutions being student-centered.

That trend is a sign of a shift in power from faculty to administrators, who are focused on protecting and managing their college’s brand. It is another sign of the growing administrative sector in American colleges and universities.

Titles matter.

For example, the title “dean of students” suggests a job that is student-facing, working closely with students to maximize their educational experience. The title of “vice president for student affairs” suggests something different, a role more institution-facing, dealing with policy, not people.

Businesses face market tests.  Institutions claiming to offer the higher learning, not so much.  That the proliferation of deanlets has been going on for almost a half century while the skills of the graduates diminish suggest nobody is asking, "Is this assistant-to-the-associate-vice-president for student affairs really necessary?"

DISPATCHES FROM THAT COLD CIVIL WAR.

According to Public Citizen chief propagandist Lisa Gilbert, "Our Democracy Crisis Persists."

“On January 6th five years ago, a sitting U.S. president incited violence against our nation in a shameless attempt to overturn a democratically-held election.This day must live forever in our memory, so that we continue to seek accountability for the perpetrators and work tirelessly to safeguard our democracy from future lawlessness.

”As we reflect on the solemn anniversary of the insurrection, we must grapple with the reality that the same president is back in office. And that his disdain for the rule of law and disregard of the U.S. Constitution are more brazen than ever, amplified by endless incendiary rhetoric and reckless actions. From the unwanted and unlawful military deployments of the national guard to U.S. cities to the indefensible and brazenly unlawful kidnapping of a foreign leader for the benefit of fossil fuel corporations, this president’s authoritarianism is a real and living threat to our democracy and it demands vigilance and resistance from us all.“

You'd think that Public Citizen types might grapple with the reality that the incendiary rhetoric and reckless actions of the Jarrett regency, motivated in part by the impulse to punish any dissent as a threat to democracy, or as guilt-by-association with that futile and stupid gesture, is what brought them more Trump, and that might inspire them to, oh, dial back their incendiary rhetoric.

Now we are engaged in a cold civil war, and the likelihood of that is nil.

On Wednesday, a radicalized woman decided to attempt to run over ICE agents in Minneapolis. What were they doing? Enforcing immigration law. And this woman learned the hard way that when you try to kill a federal law enforcement officer, they will respond with lethal force.

Instead of supporting federal law enforcement, Walz is threatening to mobilize the Minnesota National Guard to keep the federal government out of Minnesota.

Matt Margolis throws Lisa Gilbert's words right back in her face.

The radical left feels entitled to power. When they don't have it, they wage war to get it back. They don't see Trump supporters as fellow citizens with different views. They see them as enemies to be crushed. They don't see federal immigration enforcement as legitimate law enforcement. They see it as an occupying force to be repelled.

Walz's threat to deploy the National Guard against ICE agents is a dangerous escalation in the left’s war with America. It normalizes the idea that the Democratic Party can use military force to nullify federal laws they don't like. That's not how our system works. That's how countries fall apart.

The radical left keeps telling us who they are. They're at war with the United States. Not with Trump. Not with Republicans. With the country itself. Because to them, America is only legitimate when they control it. Everything else is enemy territory.

I don't see any restraint, anywhere. "In an age of rage, the loudest and angriest voice is king."

DICK WOLF CANNOT CONCEAL WHAT PROGRESSIVISM HAS DONE TO CHICAGO.

Yes, that's revisiting an old theme, "I've suggested previously that the Dick Wolf Chicago-based procedurals are NBC's way of acknowledging that the Tragic Vision has some purchase."  Consider what transpired in last night's Chicago Fire.  The show might be available for your streaming pleasure, should you have bought the right kind of subscription.

The plot, though, is the better part of an hour calling attention to the wreckage Brandon Johnson and J. B. Pritzker have made of Illinois.  All those new taxes?  Not enough to spare Firehouse 51, as Engine 51 (in firefighter speak, "engine" refers to the pumper that puts water on the fire) is on the list of rigs to be idled.  But, the One Chicago procedurals being "How far can the cast get away with fishing off the company pier without triggering a sexual harassment investigation?,"  recent widower Dom Pascal, battalion chief at 51, gets the word about the downsizing from Annette Davis, the mayor's chief of staff, who is doing the fishing.  But she comes off as the kind of girlboss that the chief might be better off getting as far away from as practicable.  Maybe a state not run by progressives.

The episode ends with arson investigator, Captain Tom Van Meter, still in a medically induced coma, and Kelly Severeide with an assist from the police still trying to figure out who set a fire with the intent of taking out a high school principal.  During their investigation they encounter a canonical AWFUL with a red-diaper daughter who has already learned enough about the First Amendment to not rat out who the anonymous members of a Facebook group wishing ill on the principal are.  Fortunately, tech support is able to identify possible suspects to be rounded up next week.  Whether Pascal and Davis will go their separate ways is another matter.  The soap opera is the prime directive, remember?

Reap what you sow, Chicago, whether in real life or on the small screen.

PALACE INTRIGUE IN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.

Is anybody surprised?  Yesterday's round-up of the process that is the league's most important product included

There are seven head coaching vacancies as we publish.  The Ravens are not known for willy-nilly swapping out head coaches, unlike some other teams you might have heard of.  And Mr Harbaugh being available at the relatively young age of 64 is prompting speculation about additional teams making moves.

Sure enough, there is an eighth vacancy now.  "Dolphins fire Mike McDaniel after 4 seasons as coach."

DRIVERS PAY TO BE DISTRACTED?

From Motor Trend, via Insta Pundit, "4 Everyday Car Features That Turned Out to Be Too Smart for Their Own Good."  Doing so sells.  "Automakers keep adding bells and whistles to new vehicles, but they may have gone too far with some once-simple components."

Until it doesn't.

Mission creep sometimes comes from a good place, such as an automaker’s desire to improve upon a long-standing piece of equipment. But more often than not, it’s driven by the twin forces of marketing and design, which are more concerned with convincing customers to hand over their dollars than the actual human impact of altering how we use our vehicles. These bells and whistles can get in the way of getting the job done, and at their most extreme, they actually reduce our safety on the road.

Take multiple-function tailgates.  Please?  "All of the above has served to transform tailgates from simple, reliable mechanisms to complex and heavy equipment that can be a hassle to lift back into position, a puzzle to fold together properly, and a magnet for moisture, dirt, and grime to gum up and eventually corrode its internal works."  Or what author Benjamin Hunting calls "Play Station" steering wheels.  There are buttons on mine that I almost never use, and my car is a relatively simple crossover.  Then, there are heads-up displays, which might be useful on a fighter jet, but in their contemporary incarnation contribute to driver distraction.  Finally, there are key fobs.  I'm not sure, on some cars, why anybody even bothers with a key, you push a button to unlock the door — on some models, all you do is stand near the door — set the fob in the center console (near your cup 'phone, don't get me started), and push a button to start the car.

And yes, all these things start on the high-end models as extra-value accessories that probably lead to more shop time down the road, and cascade to all classes of that make over time.  It's hard, though, to complain about manufacturers offering consumers gadgets that the consumers seem willing to buy, at least until they stop.  Remember push-button automatic transmissions?  These days, the selector lever where the transmission hump used to be is at least a nod to the classic four-on-the-floor.

A LONG-LIVED, ILLIQUID, USEFUL ASSET.

A man's home might be his castle, but financing the acquisition thereof is a problem, particularly if he does not command knights and archers to secure it.

A new idea is making the rounds in Washington: the 50-year mortgage. It is being promoted as a way to make homeownership affordable again by stretching payments over a longer horizon, lowering the monthly obligation.

But like most economic policy shortcuts, and in particular most shortcuts where housing policy is concerned, it treats symptoms and not causes, while making the underlying disease worse.

The logic of the proposal is straightforward: if prices are high and interest rates have climbed, extend the repayment period so people can still “afford” the same house. The problem, however, is that affordability isn’t just a matter of the monthly payment.

True though that might be, the financing of houses has long been leveraged, with various methods in play to stretch out those repayment periods to make those monthly obligations less burdensome.  And the political economy of lending has always been about getting those prime-age workers housed at an early age, the better to be able to give their kiddos some stability.

That showdown between Henry Potter and George Bailey took place sometime in the middle 1920s, when a residential mortgage was fifty percent down, and five years to pay mostly interest, with the balance due as a balloon payment at the end of those five years.

As late as the 1920’s, someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house in the U.S. would most likelyl get a short-term balloon mortgage. Typical terms: 50 percent down, and five years to pay off the other 50 percent. At the end of the five years, it was common to re-finance into another five-year loan.

Then came the Great Depression. Many banks failed, and surviving banks didn’t want to refinance these balloon mortgages. Banks foreclosed. Between 1931 and 1935, a quarter mllion people lost their homes each year.

The evolution of mortgage contracts on detached houses in thickly-settled areas started with similar contracts on agricultural land.  Economists David A. Price and John R. Walter of the Richmond Fed  provide an Economic Brief, "It's a Wonderful Loan: A Short History of Building and Loan Associations," detailing that history, and showing how Frank Capra's movie accurately showed the workings of a local building and loan association.  That essay began,  "Prior to the advent of modern home mortgage markets in the United States, markets in which mortgage-backed securities and government-sponsored enterprises now play significant roles, prospective homebuyers had to rely on other mechanisms of home finance."  Heather Hennerich of the St. Louis Fed provides additional briefing on the way building and loan associations worked.  Where commercial banks of the era could only offer five year mortgages, building and loan associations could extend credit for up to eleven years.

Dear reader, do you notice how institutional changes emerge in response to difficulties with existing institutional arrangements?  Five years is too short a time to pay off a large mortgage?  Extend the term to eleven years at the building and loan, or to fifteen years, or thirty, or fifty, and make the mortgage self-amortizing to get rid of those nasty balloon payments.  Those made an unpleasant return during the heyday of variable rate mortgages.  A house is an illiquid asset, and foreclosing on one in a depressed area isn't going to get the principal back?  Create a portfolio of mortgages, and let the portfolio manager worry about the foreclosures.

AFTER FURTHER REVIEW.

Football: episodic violence interrupted by committee meetings.  It used to be that only the players would have those meetings, now the officials inject themselves into the delays.  It should not come as any surprise that a sport that has trouble defining what a "catch" is and yet in all earnestness can speak of "completing the process of the catch" can bog down in process worship worthy of a faculty meeting.

Consider, first, how the simple act of winning a game might not be sufficient to break a tie and get the team winning the game into the playoffs.  That came up Saturday and Sunday when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the [North] Carolina Panthers in their final game, on Saturday.  That gave both of those teams an identical, sub-0.500, record, but a third team in that division had a shot at the same record.  "Why the Saints and Falcons Will Decide Whether the Bucs or Panthers Win the NFC South."  Sports Illustrated offer a straightforward explanation.  Red State's Jerry Wilson sees the humor in the situation.

Should the Buccaneers beat the Panthers on January 3 and the Falcons beat the Saints on January 4, Tampa Bay, Carolina, and Atlanta will all finish the season at a robust 8-9. (Slight tinge of sarcasm there.) The Panthers would then win the division because they beat the Falcons twice and the Buccaneers once during the regular season, thus having the best record against the other two teams. However, if Tampa Bay and New Orleans both win, the Buccaneers win the division because they have a better record against common opponents than the Panthers. Glad we could clear that up for you, although I am now in dire need of an aspirin.

The league has contemplated contingencies more convoluted than a three-way tie for the lead, or for teams qualifying as a wild-card (meaning you start on the road and probably don't have a home playoff game) and after reading through those, something stronger than aspirin might be in order.

COME UP WITH A BETTER VALUE PROPOSITION.

Passenger Rail advocate Theo Anderson thinks he's being provocative.  "You Really Expect Me to Drive to Louisville?"

I was on a Chicago L train recently, staring at a picture of a glass of bourbon, when I blurted out: “That’s crazy.”

An ad for Louisville, running along the top of the railcar, provoked the outburst. The tag line said “Short Drive. Tall Pours.”

It makes sense to pitch Louisville as a getaway destination for Chicagoans. It’s a fine city. It has an “urban bourbon trail” that the city’s tourism website calls it a “curated collection of local bars and restaurants,” with “some of the city’s largest collections of Bourbon and in most cases even Bourbon-infused cuisine.”

That’s great. But it’s crazy to call the nearly 300-mile, five-hour car trip to Louisville a “short drive.” It’s even crazier that you can’t take a train from Chicago to Louisville. There’s barely even service from Chicago to Indianapolis. You can take an Amtrak train twice a week and arrive downtown in the middle of the night.

To be fair, Indiana is the main source of this insanity. The state’s governor cut the $3 million annual subsidy for Amtrak’s Hoosier State line in 2019, which killed the only usable train service between Indianapolis and Chicago. But even that train ran just three days a week.

Sadly, Indianapolis has never been serious about offering passenger-train service, despite being right in the heart of the most railroad-dense region in the nation and 200 miles from Chicago—with a major research university, Purdue, halfway between.

In a related post, he makes the argument that there's no "convenience" in being able to drive from Chicago to Indianapolis, let alone to continue to Louisville.

Cars are superior to trains and transit, so the theory goes, because they offer freedom. But a couple of times a year, when the bus doesn’t work out, I actually drive the Chicago-Indy route. It’s then, when I’m behind the wheel, that the madness and absurdity of this idea becomes horribly clear.

You can set your own schedule, sure. But cars subvert freedom in so many ways. The loan payments and the cost of gas, repairs, and insurance, for starters. And then the endless stresses of the road. The stretch of Interstate 65 that connects Indianapolis and Chicago ranks 58th of the 100 “most loathed” highways in the U.S. The whole route is jammed with semi trucks. And northern Indiana is especially prone to wind gusts. Lanes are often closed for repairs and construction for long stretches. And that’s the least of it, in some ways. Because getting to I-65 means navigating the stop-and-go traffic on the highways that wrap around Chicago.

When you’re stuck in Chicago traffic or, even worse, going 75+ mph in a narrow construction zone, pinned between concrete barriers on one side and a semi on the other, you have to wonder: If we can’t make trains work here, can we make them work anywhere?

I confess that whenever my travels take me anywhere that involves Indianapolis, it's easier from DeKalb to proceed by way of Interstate 39 south from Rochelle and via Interstate 74 southeast from Bloomington.  That gripe he makes about the semis on Interstate 65 (my bypass routing gets its share as well, there are a lot of fleet operators who don't mind going a few more miles around to avoid the tollways) could be material for a separate stock-taking post, about the railroads leaving the retail intermodal money on the table.

All the same, I'm not sure Passenger Rail advocates make a case for more trains by appealing to their own experience.  Over the Festive Season, the latest issue of Trains hit the Cold Spring Shops mailbox, with an article about the busiest Amtrak stop in Iowa.  That would be Osceola, which is a convenient, by Iowa standards, drive from Ames (Iowa State University) and Des Moines (the state capital).  Chicago and North Western gave up on Ames sometime after 1960, while the Rock Island Line was finished west of the Quad Cities early in the 1970s.  That article noted one friend of Amtrak who admitted to prefer the one slow, not reliable, California Zephyr, for Chicago trips rather than endure the fatigue of driving and the traffic jams and parking charges.  Another noted that a coffee shop in the station would make more sense — there currently is none — with a few more trains on the route.  Yes, up to Amtrak day, there was the overnight Denver Zephyr and a long-distance day train, the former Nebraska Zephyr for and from Lincoln, and frequency and connectivity matter.

That noted, I call for Passenger Rail advocates to come up with a better value proposition because "avoid the strain, take the train" was a losing argument sixty years ago.  Yes, that was an actual tagline.  Note when those trains serving Ames and Des Moines quit.  Our British cousins had a comparable slogan.  In those days, WGN Radio had a traffic helicopter or two (eventually aerial spotters of traffic jams proved to be expensive and hazardous to pilots) and a few of their rush-hour reports were sponsored by Chicago and North Western, operating their air-conditioned, Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners.  Their tagline: "Go North Western, it's the very best way to go."  One of the messages had a patter song about the joys of being stuck in traffic.  "Brake.  Accelerator.  Brake.  Accelerator.  Pound your fist upon the dashboard."  For all the good it did.  Your Northwest Side Grabowski could be listening to the WGN traffic reports, and, indeed, watch the Commuter Streamliners rush by while he was doing the brake-accelerator-pound sequence during rush hour on the Northwest Expressway.  And yet he, and all the other Northwest Side Grabowskis, would be right back in the traffic jam the next day, and the next.

SEVENTEEN RESOLUTIONS TEAM TRUMP WILL LIKELY BREAK.

Reason's Ryan Bourne offers "Seventeen Ways Politicians Can Make Things Cheaper, Starting With Food, Health Care, and Appliances."  I'll simply list them and suggest you read the article for the elaborations thereon.

1.  End Sugar Quotas.
2.  End Tariffs on Food.
3.  Expand Agricultural Immigration Visas.
4.  Expand the Scope of Independent Health Care Practices.
5.  Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines.
6.  Recognize Foreign Drug Approvals.
7.  Scrap the Tariffs.  (The extension beyond appliances is straightforward.)
8.  Relax Licensing Requirements for Repairmen.
9.  Release Land for Building.
10.  Upzone.
11.  More By-Right Permits.
12.  Approve More Pipelines, More Quickly.
13.  End Tariffs on Goods Needed for Electrical Grids.
14.  Repeal the Jones Act.
15.  End the 'Chicken Tax'.
16.  Allow Direct Sales of Motor Vehicles.
17. End or Ease Buy American Rules.

I find myself in the position of Omar Sharif's Dr. Zhivago, agreeing with most of that list, if for reasons that are subtle.  I am old enough to remember how European agencies approved a sedative called thalidomide rather quickly whilst staff in the Food and Drug Administration asked for more evidence of that drug causing birth defects when administered to pregnant women.  Apparently that formula has use as a cancer treatment.  I also fear that Mr Bourne is insufficiently familiar with soldering irons and wrenches.  "Easing burdensome licensing for routine HVAC tasks and relaxing it for basic plumbing, in favor of simple registration and insurance requirements, would increase competition, shorten wait times, and push down the cost of keeping the kit in your home running."  The stories I have heard over the years from skilled tradesmen about the do-it-yourself stuff they've sometimes had to fix!

That noted, Mr Bourne is correct in diagnosing many of our "affordability" crises as failed attempts to manage crisis that somehow spill over into continuing the crisis, and the intrusion of Our Political Masters.

A serious affordability agenda would take aim at child care, clothing, and dozens of other essentials. Even in the areas covered here, there's more that could be done. The guiding principle is clear: Trade liberalization and deregulation can unleash supply, expand consumer choice, and improve affordability—sometimes through lower prices, sometimes by making room for cheaper, lower-frills options. Even when prices don't drop much, greater efficiency boosts wages.

In the long run, what people care about is how far their money goes. This requires economic growth. But after an inflation shock has jacked up prices, consumers aren't in the mood to wait. Officials should respond by letting markets work, not by stumbling into price controls and costly subsidies.

And maybe next time, Washington could try not overstimulating the economy through reckless monetary and fiscal policy in the first place.

But, but, but, I can hear the advocates for Government that Does Something scolding all and sundry about how Something Had Gone Wrong and There Was A Problem and Those State Actions were Intended To Solve Problems.

Let's open the new year with another reminder that voters returned Donald Trump and a Republican majority to Washington, known faults and follies all, because the most recent attempts to have a Government Doing Something brought us fiscal incontinence and a debacle in Afghanistan and corona tyranny and dangerous cities and personnel policies where competence was second or third to identity or ideological conformity.

FOOTBALL IS A COLLISION SPORT.

A month ago, the Green Bay Packers were in a position to secure first place in the Black and Blue Division.  There are worse ways to lose a game in Denver than have a very good defensive back intercept a first-down pass intended as a knock-out score after the defense records a three-and-out to open the second half.  Later, as Denver rallied, Packer defender Micah Parsons suffered a season-ending injury.  The anterior cruciate ligament gets stronger only in geologic time, while player speed and mass increase in a generation.

As we posted our final Advent meditation for the Festive Season, we were anticipating a showdown between the Packers and Bears with that first place being held by the winner with two games to play.  But for some foolish penalties on the defense in what could have been the final Bear possession and yet another failure of the special teams to cover an on-side kick that everyone in the stadium knew was coming, the Packers might have had that division lead.