SHOW US YOUR YOBBISHNESS. The Rate Your Students crowd have moved house to College Misery, where the anonymous whinges continue. Every so often, however, something useful emerges, such as this meditation on the prole cap.

As we all know, straight to the front is how to wear a ******* ball cap. It’s sober, serious, respectable (maybe even indoors) and classic. It shields your eyes and face from the sun. It has a purpose and an historical precedent. Anything other than this, and you are on my **** list, which is written in nearly indelible ink:

Slightly to the side is irreverent and irritating.

90-degrees crooked deserves a HUGE smack, and basically tells the world that you’re a half-witted jerkoff.

100% backwards calls for banishment to a brutal penal colony where you--the utter *******--will serve a life sentence of hard labor and daily torture. It not only looks stupid and abjectly *********, but doesn’t even allow you to burn rubber in your 1980’s Mustang without having to lean forward in your seat.

Add to this some apical tilt of the cap as it lists to port or starboard, almost falling off of the wearer's head, and you've got a recipe for a thoroughly infuriating absurdity that is better off ceremoniously burned on the campus quad than worn on a human head.

Then there’s the brim itself. It used to be normally curved. Then it became extremely curved in the 90’s. Now it’s ******* FLAT, leaving the wearer looking even more stupid than ever. Leave on a couple of those round, silver stickers and you’ve got a recipe for a Grade A ********* who should probably just be expelled on sight. Maybe they use the flat brim as a shelf for their energy drinks.

Over the top, crabby, mean-spirited, quite possibly elitist and classist, anonymous, and yet oddly refreshing.

MARINATE IN THE SMUG. Charlie Sykes found a get-out-the-vote message from One Wisconsin Now.

GO ROLL YOUR OWN PENSION. I see an endorsement from Kids Prefer Cheese, and in scrolling around, discover that the state retirement age is an eligibility condition, not a mandate.

Waiting for the state's permission is not the only possible option. I don't want to work until I'm 67 either and have taken a series of steps to try and insure that I won't have to, whatever Uncle Sam may do to his official "retirement age".

The post also notes that a state action that takes effect gradually is one that people will be able to adapt to.

Third, is this action [the French raising the retirement age from trois-vingt to trois-vingt-deux] being phased in over time or does it just hit everyone at once? If I was 59.5 and planning to retire, I'd be seriously pissed. At age 44, Odile [a protesting French schoolteacher] still has a chance to make financial decisions that would allow retirement at 60 instead of 62 (or 65 instead of 67).

The increments to the Social Security retirement age take effect over time for precisely that reason.

CONSIDER THE OPPORTUNITY COSTS. National Public Radio fires analyst Juan Williams and the resulting hue and cry has included calls for Congress to end its annual subsidy to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The National Taxpayers Union issues one such call.

If Congress truly desires to restore fiscal responsibility and accountability to Washington, public broadcasting is a good place to start. This issue isn’t any more critical today than it was four months ago. It’s just more visible, more relevant, which we’re hoping paves the way for past-due Congressional action. We’re not concerned with the politics of it all. We’re looking out for taxpayers, and we believe defunding CPB is the right thing to do.

A service called Bullfax picks up what appears to be a Matthew Yglesias call for privatizing government radio and television, on the grounds that it can pass the market test.

Meanwhile, over at Reason Jesse Walker has an excellent piece about why the CPB never actually gets de-funded—conservatives just like to wield this threat in order to intimidate public broadcasters into changing their programming decisions.

Note that conservative politicians lacked principled opposition to the CPB during the Bush years when they were in a position to do something about it. After all, that coincided with their period of maximal influence over the system. Then, once Juan Williams got fired conservatives rediscovered their principled objections as part of one of their periodic fits of anti-anti-racist passion. At the end of the day, this repeating farce and the leverage it gives the right over NPR mostly strikes me as reason to favor moving toward privatization. NPR is a major 21st century media success story and I think that if given a reasonably scheduled phase-out of government support could certainly find a way to keep operating and then be free of political interference.

Such a call also makes political sense. The use of government funds to provide radio and television programming is censorship per se, whether the commentators are vetted by a Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, or Socialist advisory board.

There are likely to be defenders of government radio and television who will repeat arguments about how cheap the service is, and how winding it up will have no effect on the deficit.

Finally, the actual cost of public broadcasting is minuscule in comparison with other "public" activities. In fiscal 1995 the total federal operating budget for the CPB is $286 million, while $200 million yearly is allocated to military bands. The CPB’s $286 million is about one-fiftieth of 1 percent of the federal budget (the defense budget takes up 16.6 percent). The federal subsidy of CPB comes to less than one tax dollar per citizen; the subsidy for Japan’s public broadcasting system is 20 times as much.

The Japanese have been doing a good job destroying their economy for going on 20 years: is their example one to emulate? I'd start worrying about the military bands if their repertoire shifted to Preussens Gloria or the Hoch und Deutschmeister Marsch, otherwise the expenditure strikes me as reasonable.

Radio and television infrastructure, which can be privatized, however, is using funds that could be used to provide other sorts of infrastructure, something that might be defensible either under constitutional provisions or by the precedent of building internal improvements. Compare and contrast $400 m a year for public broadcasting with $120 m a year to provide sleeping car service on Amtrak. I think I just found $280 m a year for other improvements in the Passenger Rail system, improvements that might reduce future government expenditure on highways that will be congested during construction season and after they open.

STEALING FROM THE CHILDREN. I sometimes think I'm living in the worst place in the world, judging by the pronouncements the candidates for elective office fling at each other. There are a number of tight elections in Illinois, and with control of the state legislature as well as of the Congress at stake, the intensity of advertising is high.

One candidate, not in my Congressional district, hired pensioners to criticize her opponent for proposing to raise the eligibility age for Social Security. Steve Chapman has some fun with her in a Chicago Tribune column.

Rep. Debbie Halvorson, D-Ill., has an ad in which one old person after another angrily scolds her Republican opponent, Adam Kinzinger, for proposing to raise the retirement age. Their thoughtful critiques include such lines as "Don't you dare!" and "Keep your hands off my Social Security!"

Her opponent proposes to gradually raise the eligibility age for young people, something that makes sense, while maintaining pensions for current pensioners, something that seems just. (Heck, Franklin Roosevelt's team set up Social Security in such a way that half the taxpayers would never collect any benefits, because by the time they were eligible, they would be dead. We'd have to move the retirement age past three score and ten to preserve that feature.)

The good news is we're all living longer. The bad news is we can't afford to retire with any semblance of comfort unless we work more years to provide the funds for our leisure years. A higher retirement age is unavoidable, unless we all volunteer to shuffle off to the graveyard ahead of schedule.

The normal retirement age is already scheduled to rise to 67 by 2022. Even if it were slowly bumped up to 70, future retirees would enjoy higher living standards than current ones. Eugene Steuerle, an analyst with the center-left Urban Institute, says this change would allow median lifetime benefits per person "to increase from about $250,000 for today's people in their 50s to $360,000 for their 10-year-old kids."

The story for Americans who are now retired or verging on retirement is even less scary, since the higher retirement age would not apply to them. The changes in Medicare would mean only that their benefits would not grow quite as rapidly as they would have otherwise.

Says Steuerle, "Purely from self-interest, the elderly should lobby for Social Security reform because no other budget revision so totally exempts them from sharing the pain of deficit reduction."

Maybe Halvorson, Kirk and other pandering politicians will run ads featuring unhappy fourth-graders saying, "Keep your hands off that Social Security check I'll collect when I get old" and "Don't mess with the Medicare benefits I'm going to need in 2070."

We do have the alternative of working more intensively and living more simply to accumulate those funds. That approach defies the logic of the backward-bending supply curve of labor. Betsy Newmark notes that in France, where the backward-bending supply curve is an article of faith, they'd have to add 20 years to the current retirement age to restore the social contract of the New Deal.

As the WSJ points out, the average life expectancy in France is 81.5 years now. So those protesting are angry that they will have to work a couple of more years to gain close to 20 years of government-paid benefits. When declining demographics are added to rising unemployment among the young, the funding picture for those benefits is increasingly stark.

The current proposal to raise the retirement age of trois-vingt to trois-vingt-deux has some calling for the tumbrils and guillotine.

The World Socialist Web Site urges workers to organize committees of action independent of the unions and the existing parties in order to fight for a general strike to bring down the Sarkozy government and replace it with a workers’ government.

That's an interesting suggestion for a country in which the costs of adding a worker mean a high rate of unemployment.

THE BURSTING OF THE SPORTS BUBBLE. Professional basketball is the perfect metaphor for cultural decay fostered by entertainment excess and conspicuous consumption. And it's losing money. Nonetheless, a CBS Sports article characterizes the upcoming season as "NBA's most successful season ever -- albeit, one awash in red ink." With payrolls cut by a third, and underperforming franchises closed.

We have much to look forward to.

STOP ENABLING FAILURE, YOU'LL GET LESS OF IT. A link line-up at 11-D includes the New York Times discovering renewed sociological interest in the culture of poverty (at Cold Spring Shops, otherwise known as the failure of K-12 to develop the habits of the middle class in all students.)

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The article catalogs a number of research projects, investigating different dimensions of the way people respond to income poverty. It's worth careful study.

The article has already inspired a number of reactions. Here's The Atlantic Monthly's Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor. I don't say this to minimize culture, to the contrary, I say it to point how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master.

Mr Coates has the tragic vision, when it comes to developing those middle class habits.

The streets are like any other world--we all assume an armor, a garment to suit that world. And indeed, in every world, some people wear the armor better than others, and thus reap considerable social reward. In the main, it's been easy for me to discard the armor of West Baltimore, because I wore it so poorly. I was never, as they say, truly built for the streets. And still, even I struggled to take it off. But I know others who were masters. (My own brother, for instance.) Inducing them, and those in between, to change class, to trade their plate for robes, to trade the broad-sword for a spell-book, is the real work.

At Minding the Campus, veteran sociologist Jonathan B. Imber sees The Forty-Year Failure of American Sociology, suggesting that a discipline's taboos enabled the culture of the streets, by making the very work of inducing that class change more difficult.

The sin of [Edward] Banfield and [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan was to criticize not only the role of government but more importantly the loss of values it destroyed. It was not about anything intrinsic to any group by virtue of its race or ethnicity. The loss of motivation to emulate middle-class values was at the heart of a debate about the validity of those values. The progressive vocabulary included routine declarations of the need for radical change, which was, looking back now, more a challenge to those values than it was an endorsement of expanded government.

That radical change, in Professor Imber's view, includes the emergence of a dominant paradigm of subverting the dominant paradigm, never mind the effect that paradigm has on public policies that wreck the lives of real people.

In retrospect, once the vilification of Edward Banfield and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had succeeded, the specter of political correctness would seemingly forever enforce silence among the job-holders of academe, content with going with the flow by avoiding controversy whenever possible and by not challenging the pieties of Great Society notions. Forty years along, the breast-beating of the sociologist, Douglas Massey (quoted in Cohen's article), is what should be described as a day late and a dollar short when he concludes: "We've finally reached the stage where people aren't afraid of being politically incorrect."

Massey's statement is unbelievably ironic insofar as sociology has consistently been the dungeon of politically correct thought. The other social sciences are beset with incidents of such thought, but a younger generation of social scientists promises to break the lockstep long led unofficially by sociology's relentless criticisms of "conservative" ideas. The sensitivity to appearing to be in "support" of, much less in the camp of, any idea or any group considered conservative is by far one of the most galvanizing reflexes of solidarity among my generation of sociologists. Their inhibitions and anxieties about being even remotely associated with "the other side" is one of the more entertaining features of academic bird-watching. It would be fascinating to learn from Massey how he thinks "we've finally reached the stage" he apparently now applauds. The most obvious answer remains precisely the resistance to the irrelevant imperialism that much of sociology and its elite supporters have promoted during the past forty years.

Although Thomas Sowell is not reacting to the Times article, his National Review essay makes the same point.

Yet today, attempts to get black or Hispanic youngsters to speak the language of the society around them are decried by multiculturalists. And any attempt to get them to behave according to the cultural norms of the larger society is denounced as “cultural imperialism,” if not racism.

The multicultural dogma is that we are to “celebrate” all cultures, not change them. In other words, people who lag educationally or economically are to keep on doing what they have been doing — but somehow have better results in the future than those they had in the past. And, if they don’t have better results in the future, it is society’s fault.

His policy prescription: change, don't celebrate, cultures that foster underachievement.

Stop enabling failure, you'll get less of it.

DERIVATIVE SCHOLARSHIP? The 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize for economics goes to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides. King Banaian wonders if we haven't recognized that work before.

I thought "what was it George Stigler was awarded for?" Of course, Stigler received his award almost 30 years ago, but the story is quite similar.

Perhaps so, but Diamond's work on equilibrium price distributions and Mortensen's work on labor market matching provided sufficient extensions of Stigler's insight to make it into leading journals. Would Nobel committees use awards to make a statement about the wider world?

The goal, I think, was to say something about current high unemployment in the U.S. and Europe, perhaps to suggest that it's quite natural and a result of search. But we live in a world where search costs are falling, not rising. Labor mismatch problems can involve information, but not necessarily.

Still, as I said Friday, the pattern of lingering unemployment after recessions is not new. I just doubt it's a search issue.

Arnold Kling is also unpersuaded by search or matching arguments, although the parable he offers of an extremely fine division of labor suggests it might be, particularly as this recession appears to have given managers the opportunity to combine several job descriptions in one job, and hoping to find a person with those skill sets desperate enough to take it.

SINCE YOU BROUGHT IT UP. Two Northern Star writers debate sobriety at football games.

Another homecoming has come and gone. The broken beer bottles have been cleaned up and the fans have sobered up. Unfortunately, I find the fact that there were so many bottles to clean up disgusting.

Yes, the tailgating area did look like the aftermath of a left-wing protest. The discarded cans and bottles merit further discussion.

No sober person wants to deal with the aftermath of a liquored-up fan base, but the fact of the matter is that most of the average college football fan's emotion on game day is fueled by that delicious Keystone Light. How else can the students keep up their voices for four quarters? I dare you to try that without some dizzy water in your veins.

Dizzy water? The modal discarded can held some kind of light beer, otherwise known to Wisconsin expats as water.

One of the writers knows something of life beyond the Cheddar Curtain.

Call me a prude, Andrew, but where I come from, north of the Illinois border, people will at least put their trash near the receptacle if it is full. The mess left behind for workers to clean up was not located in a respectable gathering area, but instead apparently dropped wherever people let go. When I went for a walk Sunday morning (yes, the a.m.), the remnants of the previous afternoon's activities were littered across Parking Lot K and the open field next to Huskie Stadium.

Perhaps that explains one of the screensaver announcements in the computer labs, the one that suggests students not treat the lab like it was their room ...

OVERNIGHT, EVERY NIGHT. That was the Denver Zephyr slogan, and it offered a more business-friendly schedule with a late afternoon departure and a 10 am arrival, apparently tolerable in an era when sending a visiting consultant or other high official was a costly and rare event. The California Zephyr had a more touristy schedule with an early evening departure from Denver and a midafternoon arrival in Chicago. Amtrak's version is marginally slower than the private railroad's version.

The ride that began in Emeryville on July 3 and transited the Rockies on July 4 winds up on a rainy day. Morning comes with the noise of the train crossing a river. Looks like the Missouri, open the door, there's an Omaha paper outside, must be Iowa outside the window. Shower, breakfast time, stop Creston 7:44 (close to time); Osceola 8:25 (still at breakfast, skimpy notes, still on time), pick up provisions to provide fresh fruit to all coach passengers. Again the carrier's efforts to compensate for mechanical failures in the Sightseer Lounges is commendable, but a lounge service for coach passengers that doesn't have life-expired air conditioning would be preferable.

There's been a lot of rain. This park west of Ottumwa is underwater.


Rising waters did force detours of the Zephyr onto the Union Pacific through DeKalb a few times late in July and early in August. Ottumwa 10:15:43 - 10:26:43, rains affecting our timekeeping; Mt. Pleasant 11:28:10 - 11:33:43; lunchtime; dining car is down to the hamburger and one or two other entrees and out of childrens' meals; Burlington about 12:20; rain lets up on the Illinois side, held west of the Galesburg station 12:56; last smoke stop Galesburg, arrive 12:59:38.


The Burlington 4-6-4 and a few cars are Galesburg's railroad museum, which (along with a swap meet) are the rail interest at Galesburg Railroad Days. Leave Galesburg 1:03:43.

The hill on the horizon is the tailings pile from the Cherry Mine, site of one of Illinois's most deadly mine fires. In those days, mine illumination was a candle or a lantern at the seam face, and transportation used 0-2-2-0 hayburners. One account of the fire reported a load of hay for the mules on fire, initially so small a fire that Anybody could have put it out, but Everybody thought Somebody Else was going to put it out, and Nobody put it out, and 259 miners died.


Princeton 1:53:32 - 1:53:59; stop Montgomery 2:49, Five by with 147 - 202 - one bag, nine Superliners (same 4 sleepers, 3 coaches, diner, lounge as my Six), moving again 2:52, Naperville 3:08:10 - 3:10:13; unimpeded run into Chicago Union Station, arrive on track 30 3:45:56. Metra is running the holiday schedule, the next train back to Elburn is the 4:40 all-stopper, but because everybody is treating July 5 as a holiday, there's no parking meter enforcement at Elburn and my 10 day parking permit is good for eleven days. Now to work on the train projects that came home with me.

THE E-T-T-S MOMENT AT AMC. James Lileks sees it in Mad Men.

It’s a thoughtful disquisition on the days before the counterculture began its transformation of the post-war order, and also a soap with exquisite production values.Consider the disquisition.Drink, smoke, look good in a Brooks Brother suit with a skinny tie or a chic dress, trade repartee, listen to Brubeck on the stereophonic record player. Be one of those people the hippies killed off. Be swank. Be sharp.

This was the appeal of Mad Men when it premiered — unapologetic daytime substance abuse, old-line patriarchal values with a splash of va-va-voom sexiness, Joanie’s hips ringing back and forth like the toll of the Liberty Bell. The rough beast of Betty Friedan was still slouching towards New Rochelle to be born. Kennedy was alive.

But Pennsylvania Station came down and first President Kennedy, then Senator Kennedy, were murdered, and The America that Worked^(TM) had to be deconstructed for its sins, rather than have its redeeming features extended, which was the original civil rights vision.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Maureen Dowd is uncomfortable, Commentary's Jennifer Rubin is enjoying it.

The tough girls have not only given a clear alternative to the whiny victimhood of Dowd and her fellow gender-grievance-mongers; they have redefined political feminism. You can gain power, win the respect and affection of fellow citizens, and be pro-free market, pro-guns, and pro-life (the unholy trinity of the left).

(Via InstaPundit)

THE BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES. University Diaries extends the conversation.

In the Guardian, a philosophy professor distinguishes between training and higher education.

Instruction leaves a person trained and better informed – but otherwise unaltered. To stand at the threshold of an education, by contrast, is to stand poised before the possibility of an achieved formation and temper of mind which widens perspectives and matures the power of critical judgment. It is this that we commend when we commend education for itself. To be educated is to stand in a critical and creative relationship to ideas, crucially through contact with teachers, who exemplify in their words and demeanour the life of the mind.

If a university has a soul it is to be found here, in the engagement of teachers with their students, in the critical transmission of ideas, including ideas about human nature, that their students have to struggle with and grasp, a struggle that shapes their souls. But this education is becoming more fugitive and teachers less available through a terrible absence of mind, as the ideas that inform the policy and practice of universities slowly eat into their soul.

At University Diaries, the fact that education is not for everybody is a reality.

Not everyone wants it. It sounds weird, intrusive, unpleasant. Plenty of people want to go to football games and learn accounting, and professors aren’t proselytizers.

Some administrators see in the absence of interest in education a business opportunity.

The dean at Anonymous Community, a veteran of a proprietary college, reacting to Stanley Fish reacting to SUNY Albany's self-inflicted restructuring of the humanities, has the best response.

You can’t water down the bottles [an Eighties metaphor for concealing the disappearance of content] forever without fundamentally changing what’s inside them. Albany decided to toss some bottles to save the rest. It’s a debatable choice, but certainly a defensible one, and it offers at least the appeal of abandoning a strategy that has failed for forty years. It also offers the appeal of maintaining quality control -- and yes, jobs -- in the departments that remain.

That's an echo of an observation the Great Northern Railroad's Ralph Budd once made on the passenger train. It was the window through which the world viewed the railroad, and it should either be kept clean, or covered with a dark shade.

On the Great Northern, the choice of the window to cover reflected the cost of providing the service. Thus half of the Twin Ports trains came off, and the Red River, and the Dakotan, but the Winnipeg Limited and the Western Star lasted right up to Amtrak day. According to Doctor Cleveland, that approach doesn't work so well in higher education.

So, when you hear people talking about how the American university needs to be "transformed" and how outdated models need to be swept away, or how universities should be run "more like a business," remember that this is what is being proposed: a shift to the lowest-cost instruction available, and an emphasis on "productivity" in terms of easily measurable units, such as credit hours and credentials, rather than on difficult-to-quantify questions like student learning. Teaching students to speak another language is expensive. Certifying that they sat through a language class can be very cheap indeed.The operation of the free market, which will supposedly make universities innovative and forward-thinking, actually produces more old fashioned big lectures, in which a single faculty member can be paid to teach several hundred students at once. That format is enormously inefficient in terms of student learning; big lectures are clearly less effective than small-group teaching in every field, but when the lecturer is teaching history or economics schools can call the results good enough. This is about economics, rather than teaching economics.

A freer, more economically "rational" market does not produce higher-quality goods in this example, or lower prices. Rather, it leads to lower-quality instruction for increasing prices, with a few flashy deluxe items, such a spring semester in Milano for monolinguists, which exact a hefty price premium for the shopping experience. Welcome to the 21st century.

Economic analysis of those business decisions suggests the cost- and service-cutting will be a mistake, particularly at institutions in the middle of the prestige pecking order. The downsizing mania in business led to the extinction of institutional memory at major firms, a cost saving measure that worked right up to the day something happened that those eager young downsizers had no prior experience with. In the university, the value of the U.S. News rankings will increase, as people will flee to more highly rated institutions. Whether that strategy produces additional value is a matter for another day.

THE CASE FOR PRIVATE RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS. Betsy's Page remarks on Our President calling for a $250 Social Security supplement in a year when the benefit formula calculates no cost of living adjustment.

What's the use of having rules for determining when seniors get a COLA increase if politicians will just keep advocating handing out checks anyway?

Mutual funds and annuities have formulas for distributing earnings that cannot be amended without a shareholder vote. It's possible for dissident shareholders to solicit proxies to change those formulas, and I suppose it's possible for people to campaign for the board of directors with the promise of changing the formula. The incumbent management, however, cannot unilaterally distribute extra benefits.

PLAYING FOR LEASTER. The Packers have not been playing well, nor have division or conference rivals.

No one in the NFC is better than 4-2 and only the New York Giants have a winning streak longer than two games.

In the North, the Bears had a chance to put three games between them and the Packers (including the tiebreaker) and they lost at home to the Seattle Seahawks, 23-20.

The Packers are a bruised and battered team and if they don't get healthy, both in the training room and on offense, it won't matter much what the rest of the NFC is doing.

Ten games to go.

A FEEBLE SUCCESSOR TO THE DOMELINER. The idea for the dome car occurred to an Electro-Motive Division vice president who observed Colorado's Glenwood Canyon from the cab of a freight diesel, and who sketched some ideas later put into metal as the General Motors Train of Tomorrow. Burlington had the first revenue service dome coaches, and its Twin Zephyrs and California Zephyr might have been the most famous trains with multiple dome cars.

Amtrak's contemporary California Zephyr uses the Burlington and Rio Grande routing east of Salt Lake City, and its schedule still provides for daylight transit of the mountain ranges, if the trains are on time.

It's Independence Day, and the ride that began in Emeryville on July 3 has included a pleasant night's sleep, with sunrise and a quick shower somewhere in the neighborhood of Castle Gate, Utah. The diner has made a call for breakfast. First station stop of the day is Helper, Utah, 7:32 - 7:34, during breakfast. Green River, Utah, close to time at 8:51:31 - 8:51:58. Independence Day is a good day to be rafting, here on a placid part of the Colorado River near Utaline.


The Sightseer cars that replaced the dome cars offer some operating efficiencies, however, at the expense of the opportunity to look ahead and behind the train, and when the air conditioning fails, it can get unpleasant under that expense of glass. The air conditioning did fail at 10:36.

Arrive Grand Junction 11:03:51, chance to stretch, the old station building is receiving a new roof but has a for sale sign on it; there's a convenience store in an adjacent building for passengers to stock up on snacks and beverages.



Leave Grand Junction 11:18:34; stop in the freight yard 11:23 to inspect circuit breakers in Sightseer Lounge, no luck, leave 11:34.

Before it gets too hot in the car, here's a look at the Colorado River through one of the ridges west of Glenwood Springs.


Nearer to Glenwood Springs, the Rio Grande built along the north bank of the river, and the Colorado Midland built along the south bank. The Midland is long gone, but traces of the grading remain.


Glenwood Springs 1:13 - 1:29, major festivities in progress downtown. Lunchtime. The dining car is beginning to report stockouts of some food items. Pass Dotsero 2:05.


River rafters are enjoying this piece of the upper Colorado River. It's also time to work on my broken parts.


The gadget is a Joint Active Systems product that progressively stretches tight muscles and other connective tissue. That arm still has a long way to go. At the end of July, the therapist tried a technique from ASTYM that has me moving a lot better, with the ability to bang out text more quickly, and I'm able to achieve flexion up to the limits of the gadget.

Take siding at Range 2:25; Five by 2:36, on the move again 2:37.

A number of the rafters treat the train as an opportunity to render a two-cheek salute, here are two somewhere along the Dotsero Cutoff.


Pass Orestod 3:16, now running on the old Denver and Salt Lake. The railroad uses a number of increasingly tight canyons with increasingly difficult rafting conditions to attain the Continental Divide.



Granby 4:40 - 4:41; Winter Park 5:06 - 5:11 (smoke those cigarettes quickly); transit Moffat Tunnel 5:24 - 5:33.

Before the Moffat Tunnel was opened, the Denver and Salt Lake crossed the Rockies on a series of grades, switchbacks, and horseshoe curves called the Giants' Ladder. Scars from that excavation remain on the side of the mountain. Thanks to the National Park Service guides who remained in the Sightseer Lounge despite the rising temperatures to provide narration and take questions.


There's foul weather moving in on the eastern slope, which will provide rain to augment Denver's water supply. The transition from mountain to plains coming into Denver is as abrupt as anything in railroading.


It's raining heavily in Denver. The train reverses into the Denver station, passing this bus garage with a sightseeing trolley in the style of a Milwaukee Electric deck roof interurban.


The new Coors Field is right next to the Denver station. (Help me out: the original Elitch Gardens was destroyed for some other sports complex?)


Arrive Denver 7:09:00, set back onto sleeper 32058 with Denver passengers 7:14; conductor gives OK to unload passengers 7:17. Take on passengers plus delivery of pizza for coach passengers. Amtrak's arrangements to provide complimentary food to coach passengers when the lounge car fails are commendable. Lounge cars that aren't worn out are probably more cost-effective.

Six now has the three sleepers from Emeryville on the head end, and the Denver sleeper behind the three coaches. There's something reassuring about a train with more sleepers than coaches, even allowing for the crew space in the lead sleeper.

Leave Denver 7:51 in a heavy rain; conductor announces that because of the holiday, no delays for freight train interference or track work are expected, but there is a possibility of weather-related delays.

Fort Morgan, Colorado, 9:05:40 - 9:07:14; despite the threat of rain, the town fireworks display is in progress. Mentally, it's 10 pm Central time, there's a bottle of wine to accompany another session with the gadget and time to call it a night.

(to be continued)

IT'S A COMMUTER TRAIN, NO MATTER WHO OPERATES IT. California officials hope to turn segment of Pacific Surfliner into commuter train.

With $25 million from a local tax measure, officials are looking to partner with the California Department of Transportation and Amtrak to retime two Pacific Surfliner trains so that they arrive in Santa Barbara to accommodate a typical workday.

According to local officials, the high cost of housing in Southern California has forced people to move north to Ventura County, where homes are more affordable, and then commute to jobs in Santa Barbara. More than 15,000 people are estimated to commute from Ventura County to Santa Barbara per day.

For the proposal to work, there has to be enough of a central business district in Santa Barbara to make the train service a useful option, and the expense of providing additional expressways into those hills has to be great.

Amtrak operates two Pacific Surfliner trains that arrive in Santa Barbara every day. Currently, one Surfliner train arrives in Santa Barbara at 10:12 a.m. and leaves Santa Barbara at 4:31 p.m. Such a time is felt to be impractical for people who have traditional 8-5 work schedules. Officials are looking at a two-year pilot program to measure whether the retimed trains would carry a significant amount [c.q.] of passengers.

The Superintendent conjectures that the passenger loadings would increase, substantially. It's frequently standing room only on the 6 am Hiawatha from Milwaukee and the 5.08 pm return from Chicago. These run as six-car trains (oh, for the stock to roll out eight or nine coaches plus a Super Dome with downstairs bar, or perhaps a buffeteria car, or a first-class car). The Capitol Corridor service in California appears to do a great deal of commuter business (the late afternoon departure I rode from Sacramento to Santa Clara had a lot of on-and-off business from Martinez onward). Advocates of the planned restoration of the Black Hawk base their traffic projections on commuting patterns.

Once upon a time, Amtrak ostensibly was not in the commuter train business. I'm pleased to see that deception dissolving.

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

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

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

At nytimes.com, Stanley Fish appropriately excoriates Philip's decision, and astutely analyzes many of the reasons for the situation in which humanities departments currently find themselves. Among them---the decline of core curricula, which Fish notes "has happened in part because progressive academics have argued that traditional disciplinary departments were relics from the past kept artificially alive by outmoded requirements."

Alas, Fish's proposed solution to the crisis in the humanities at public universities requires all but ignoring the conduct of the academy over the past generation. He writes, "The only thing that might fly --- and I'm hardly optimistic --- is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies --- legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others --- that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.

"And when I say 'explain,' I should add aggressively explain --- taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce."

Let's leave aside Fish's highly dubious, implied assumption that the crisis in the humanities can be blamed on "legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others." None of these groups have been primarily responsible for the hiring or curricular decisions of humanities departments over the past two generations.

Instead, consider Fish's demand that representatives of the academy engage ("aggressively" if necessary) politicians, trustees, alumni, and parents. That would be a reasonable response to the crisis in the humanities---except for the fact that over the past decade in particular, defenders of the academic status quo have gone out of their way to refuse to engage politicians, trustees, alumni, and parents. Indeed, from the MEALAC crisis at Columbia to the Group of 88 at Duke, we have consistently been presented with the argument that academic matters are the exclusive province of the academic majority, and that, in essence, academic freedom means the freedom of academics from outside criticism. Having chosen to wall off the academy from the outside world, the academic majority now has to face the consequences of its actions.

Professor Fish makes a few other points worthy of commentary.

For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting.

I believe Camille Paglia used the phrase "French rot." Prescient, she was.

And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)

Does the tax-payer go to church?

St. Isaac's Church, Yaroslavl, Russia, July 1997

Where did the convention of portraying saints with halos originate? In what way does ancient religious art influence contemporary art, including the transgressive stuff that gets juried and tenured these days?

But keeping something you value alive by artificial, and even coercive, means (and distribution requirements are a form of coercion) is better than allowing them to die, if only because you may now die (get fired) with them, a fate that some visionary faculty members may now be suffering. I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum — that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said — but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.

Doing push-ups or hitting the blocking sled on three or practicing scales or evaluating bordered Hessians or applying multiple coats of sanding sealer while working through the grades of sandpaper are a form of coercion too, but the best athletes or musicians or economic theorists or model railroaders respect their necessity. So let it be with the core curriculum.

LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM CHRIS CHRISTIE? Trains (behind paywall) reports that New Jersey governor Chris Christie might be reconsidering his decision to cancel the North River Tunnel to Nowhere, a decision Destination: Freedom supports while several of the New York commentariat oppose.

Trains also reports that Amtrak and the shades of Samuel Rea invite passengers to a birthday party. The basement of the Madison Square Garden is celebrating its centennial. The platforms and some of the stairways to track level are original Pennsylvania Station, and a few glass blocks and tile driveways remain, if you know where to look. Behind the sheetrock in the obstacle course that serves as waiting room and train concourse are a few of the latticed columns that supported the roof of the original trainshed. (A few years ago, one such column was an impromptu art gallery, with photographs of the original concourse posted on the sheetrock.)

Beginning at 9:15 a.m., the public is invited to enjoy rare photo imagery, artifacts, and other items commemorating the station’s history, including the role Amtrak plays in the history of passenger rail travel. Representatives from Amtrak and its other Penn Station partners, NJ Transit and Long Island Rail Road, will be on hand as well as author Lorraine Diehl (“The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station”).

Passengers are still able to board first-class trains to Washington or Boston, North Jersey Coast locals, limiteds (change at Jamaica) to the Hamptons, and they're now able to ride a few trains to destinations on the Lackawanna Electric, but there's no Chattanooga Choo-Choo at a quarter to four, and no 5 pm departure of the Broadway Limited, into Chicago in sixteen hours.

A HIGH-SPEED RAIL SYMPOSIUM. The New York Times invites five experts, some with their prejudices on display, to assess "Will We Ever Have High-Speed Trains?"

Economist Jan Brueckner notes the habit-persistence hurdles and density requirements.

While these conditions are satisfied in Japan, where the bullet train network runs through densely populated areas and is now operated at maximum capacity, it is doubtful that the new systems being considered in the U.S. can meet this test. For example, the proposed high-speed system linking Los Angeles and San Francisco will face numerous hurdles in attracting passengers.

First, people are used to flying or driving between these cities, and habits are hard to change. Moreover, car users, who now can use their vehicle to get around Los Angeles or the Bay Area upon arriving, would need to rent a car following an rail trip to have adequate mobility at their destination (especially if it's L.A.). Will current car users be willing to incur this extra cost and inconvenience, or will they simply shun the rail option?

In the Chicago area, many car users are switching to commuter rail for trips into the city, including family trips to a museum or sporting event, or to go shopping. So far, American Girl dolls don't have to buy tickets ...

Faster, more frequent conventional trains are already inducing the same substitutions in California. Air travelers already face the choice of renting a car, or in increasingly many cities, using rapid transit. More frequent, more dependable passenger trains that can meet or beat the air travel times have a lot of potential. That the air carriers seem bent on antagonizing with fees those passengers already antagonized by the security checks and the stockyards experience of loading and unloading through one ramp can't hurt.

Another economist, Keith Poole, suggests the potential for cooperation with the freight railroads.

Existing diesel and electric locomotives can easily reach speeds of 80 m.p.h. or more, which is more than sufficient if the train does not have to slow down for highway crossings.

For distances of 200 to 300 miles this would be very cost effective because most freeways between major cities are clogged with traffic. This would also be beneficial to the freight railroad, which would have exclusive use of the right-of-way at night when there would be no passenger trains.

Indeed, the freight railroad should run the trains. That is what they do. Unfortunately, this is a practical solution and not a “sexy” one, so it does not appeal to politicians. But it could and should be done.

The right infrastructure contracts with railroads could easily make 110 to 125 mph running on grade-separated existing railroad lines feasible. And, indeed, the freight railroad runs the trains already: on some of Chicago's Metra commuter lines the operating crews are freight railroad employees, and the freight railroad's dispatchers dispatch, or delay, Amtrak and commuter trains coast to coast. The passenger rail operating authorities hire a schedule slot from the freight railroad, and provide a reliable consist. It shouldn't be too hard to provide reliable consists with free rein to 110 or 125, as in the age of steam. It shouldn't be necessary to limit the freight trains to using the tracks at night, not with intermodal and autorack trains capable of the 70 or 80 mph the freight diesels top out at, not with judicious placement of a third track. The cost of providing trackage capable of Acela-type speeds buys only a few minutes saving in stop-to-stop times (compare today's Boston to New York schedules with timings of the early 1950s). The generalization to providing German or French type speeds is left to the reader as an exercise.

One Wisconsin Now makes its case for speeding up the trains on the Chicago to Madison route, one logical candidate for the incremental approach.

Although the video does feature some of the ultra-costly, 220 mph-fast European trains, it does make the case for providing better connectivity in the thickly settled parts of the Midwest.