UNSUSTAINABLE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION.

Pajamas Media's Susan L. M. Goldberg, "We’ve Forgotten How to Understand Stay-at-Home Moms."  Her essay is a call for sisterly solidarity.  "Women, especially those who delay motherhood in favor of a career they return to almost immediately after giving birth, simply can’t comprehend what it means to stay at home with a young child all day, every day."

Read on, though, and you see the laws of conservation in political economy at work.  "Many women do spend at least part of the day at home with their children while they’re young. However, economic changes forced onto our culture by second-wave feminism and the “greed is good” era have made two working parents the rule, not the exception."

You could substitute "You go, grrl" for "greed is good" and you get the same thing, when you expand labor force participation.  "Thus, to hope that a family can 'get by' on one income with current levels of labor force participation by women is to hope that the laws of conservation in economics don't work."

And getting by, Ms Goldberg notes, involves outsourcing much of the dirty work, sometimes to cheap labor.

What’s worse, career culture has forced us to outsource the care and feeding of babies as young as six weeks old to women barely out of high school. These women earn minimum wage. In other words, we think changing diapers, making bottles, pumping breastmilk, feeding, clothing, playing with, educating and maintaining the general physical, mental and emotional health of a human being is worth approximately $7.25 per hour.

That's reality for a lot of people. Power couples with large incomes -- to the extent that they're not reconsidering whether it's worth it -- still have the means to farm out their spawn to Harvard Prep Day Care.

A KINDERGARTNER'S VIEW OF FREE SPEECH.

Columnist Kimberley Strassel gave a talk at Hillsdale College, "The Left’s War on Free Speech."  Her children got into a spat, in the way of children, and she attempted to make a teachable moment.  First the oldest, then the middle, explained what they understood free speech to be.

THE CAPTURE OF KARS.

When the Tsar's troops march in, Modest Mussorgsky writes a commemorative overture.

It's less dramatic when it's trains arriving in Uzbekistan to provide a southerly alternative to China's Silk Road Railroad.

The 849 km [527 mi] BTK [Baku, Azerbaijan - Tblisi, Georgia, Kars, Turkey] programme is central to plans to create a rail corridor from the Caspian Sea to Europe via Turkey. It involved upgrading infrastructure in Azerbaijan and Georgia, rehabilitating 153 km [95 mi] of unused 1 520mm [Soviet 5 foot] gauge line from Marabda to a break-of-gauge facility at Akhalkalaki, and building 110 km [68 mi] of 1 435 mm [standard] gauge line to Kars via a 4·4 km [2.7 mi] tunnel under the Georgia-Turkey border at Kartsakhi.

This completes the missing link between Georgia and Turkey, replacing a route through Armenia which has been out of use since the crossing between Turkey and Armenia was closed in 1993.

Yes, there is a break of gauge and a transloading on this line, which runs through former Tsarist lands, as is the case on the Silk Road Railroad.

Map retrieved from Railway Gazette International.

The closed line is to the south.

Although the railroad appears to be a way for Turkey and a number of the former Soviet republics to exchange cargo without dealing with Armenia, the connection is also a play for the China to Europe traffic.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the BTK railway had become a reality because of the friendship of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia. He said shipments from China would be able to reach Europe in 15 days using the BTK route, and the initial capacity of 6·5 million tonnes of freight and 1 million passengers per year was expected to increase to 17 million tonnes and 3 million passengers per year in 2034.

That's time-competitive with the Silk Road Railroad. I wonder if that new tunnel is tall enough for double-stacks, as much of this railroad is currently diesel hauled.

THE PACIFIC OCEAN IS NO PLACE TO PLAY.

Last week's feel-good story was the rescue of two women, supposedly missing at sea since sometime in May, turning up alive and well with their dogs along, somewhere off Japan.

One of the sailors, Jennifer Appel, joked years ago about things going wrong at sea.

Appel said she was reminded of a conversation about sailing she had with an acquaintance some 10 years ago.

“I was joking with someone,” she said. “And they said what happens when you go out to sea and you get broken? I said, ‘Oh, the Navy will come save me.’ ”

And these intrepid mariners have in fact been at sea since May.

The rescued women had departed May 3, intending to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti, [Joyce] Appel said, but her daughter’s phone was lost overboard the first day she was at sea, and she hadn’t been able to call since.

Then the women lost their engine in bad weather in late May, but believed they could still reach Tahiti using their sails.

But there's something, er, fishy, about that 'phone going in the drink.

Parts of their story have been called into question, including the tropical storm the two say they encountered on their first night at sea in May. National Weather Service records show no organized storms in the region in early May.

When asked if the two had the radio beacon aboard, the women told the AP on Friday they had a number of other communications devices, but they didn't mention the [I'm Sunk Near Here device].

Apparently Mrs Appel never told her daughter to be careful about picking up sailors in bars.

Key elements of the women's account are contradicted by authorities, weather reports and the basic geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and her sailing companion, Tasha Fuiava, remember the ordeal accurately or could have avoided disaster.

The Hawaii residents reported that their sailing equipment and engine failed and said they were close to giving up when the U.S. Navy rescued them last week, thousands of miles off course. They were taken to Japan, where they didn't immediately respond to an email and call seeking comment Monday.

The Navy said they do not investigate incidents like this and they were only there to render assistance. The Coast Guard said its review of the case is ongoing, but that there is no criminal investigation at this time.

The two women met in late 2016, and within a week of knowing each other decided to take the trip together. Fuiava had never sailed a day in her life. They planned to take 18 days to get to Tahiti, then travel the South Pacific and return to Hawaii in October.

On their first day at sea, May 3, the two U.S. women described running into a fearsome storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph (97 kph) winds and 30-foot (9-meter) seas for three days, but meteorologists say there was no severe weather anywhere along their route during that time.

Let's be grateful they didn't go to Davy Jones, and wait for the television dramatization that is likely to follow.

Sometimes, south seas adventures don't end so well.

MUGGED BY REALITY.

Two court intellectuals for the Democrats offer their perspectives on the 2016 presidential results, and their efforts provide material for Book Reviews N^o. 23 and N^o. 24.

IMPROVING THE SOUTH SHORE.

Will the proposed double-tracking of the South Shore Line lead to neighborhoods going upscale on the east side of Gary?  "As area residents on Wednesday passed through the Marshall Gardner Center for the Arts in the Miller neighborhood, they expressed generally positive views of the South Shore Line's plans to double-track its railroad between Gary and Michigan City, and to improve stations along the route."  There's a little bit of transit-oriented gentrification near the current Miller station, as well as a plan to turn the flip-back trains at a new coach yard, rather than on the center siding at Gary.

The rail infrastructure would include two realigned South Shore tracks, gauntlet tracks for passing freight trains, two storage tracks and two new bridges east of the station. The storage tracks would be used for trains that will start the morning commute at Miller. Currently those trains begin service at Metro Center, where they're stored between rush hours.

Unfortunately, current Federal Railroad Administration regulations obviate cuts and adds.  The protocols are only slightly less complicated than those governing rendezvous and docking of Project Apollo command and lunar modules, and defeat the purpose of electric multiple unit cars (refresher rant here, if you wish).  Thus we're not likely to see a Sunset Express dropping cars at Miller to cover the Duneland stations, and cutting unnecessary cars at Shops, the way things worked in the era of the orange arks.

But one holdover from the era of orange arks remains.  I had hoped to catch a presentation of the Rail Rangers interpreting the social history of the South Shore on Saturday.  But their show might have been preempted by football specials.

I was aware that University of Southern California fans chartered special trains for their clashes at Notre Dame.  Former Northern Illinois University coach Dave Doeren made it through a rough patch at North Carolina State and brought a ranked team into South Bend, with enough followers to charter a Passenger Extra departing ten minutes ahead of the scheduled train, and there were plenty of fans aboard the scheduled train as well.

I hope there were enough of these virtue-signalling busses to get all the fans to the shadow of Touchdown Jesus in the two hours between arrival and kickoff.  The regular train ran a few minutes late account passenger loadings and adjustments to track use with scheduled maintenance and preparation for the double tracking under way.

The Rail Rangers hope to be offering programming most Saturdays through the end of this year and into January.  But be guided by this advice.  "Please check this page on the morning of your planned departure if you are riding just to experience our onboard program."

DARE TO BE STUPID.

I started this post five years ago, when Hope and Change were still the Orders of the Day, and even then, argued William H. Young for the National Association of Scholars, trendy postmodernism in higher education might have been eating the seed corn.  "Postmodern multicultural higher and public education has produced younger generations with limited capabilities and prospects for taxable income to sustain such obligations." His focus was on the political economy of a welfare state that failed to generate future economic growth -- there being limits on what factor augmenting technical change can get you when the population growth rate is no longer predictably constant. And privilege-shaming mathematicians isn't likely to end well.  Perhaps we could have anticipated somebody like Donald Trump emerging.  Mr Young was working on a series about the connections between the rot in education and the decline of living standards.  "Next week’s article will examine the worsening plight of the middle class," he promised.

TRADE UNITES, POLITICS DIVIDES.

We're going to sever a railway link.  And Latvia is going to pay for it.

Not so fast: the Lithuanians only hurt themselves.

State railway Lietuvos Gelezinkeliai expects to start work shortly on reinstating the 19 km cross-border railway from Mazeikiai to Renge in Latvia, Managing Director Mantas Bartuska announced on October 18.

Earlier this month the European Commission fined LG €27·9m for dismantling the line in 2008, on the grounds that this had hindered competition in the freight market by limiting the ability of other potential operators to serve Orlen’s refinery. It was also ordered to ‘bring the infringement to an end’, which Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager suggested during a recent visit to Lithuania could best be solved by reinstating the line.

It appears as if the Lithuanian railroad didn't want to short-haul itself on shipments of refined product to ports at Ventsplis and Riga in Latvia.  The article doesn't mention any Lithuanian ports, which would provide the most effective way for the railroad to keep the line haul to itself, although there are lots of possibilities for railroads and shipping lines to tweak rates such that long-distance rates are equal from origin to destination no matter the routing, the port, or the modal split.

Asked about the possibility of Latvian operator LDz Cargo, the port of Riga and Orlen lodging claims for compensation, Bartuska told local media that these could not be ruled out, although he did not think there were substantial grounds. LG was already in negotiation with Orlen in an effort to avoid litigation, and expected to speak to the Latvians soon.

LDz spokesman Maris Ozols said the railway was still assessing the potential loss caused by the breaching of the line. While it did not rule out seeking compensation from LG, its priority was to get the link reopened as soon as possible, he insisted.

Somewhere Cornelius Vanderbilt and Thomas Scott are sharing a cigar and a smile.

A BACH WITH A GRAMMY.

That's retired Northern Illinois University composer Jan Bach, who has a drinking song and a steel pan toccata to his credit.

Jan Bach of DeKalb shares more than his last name with classical music composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Jan Bach, 79, also is a composer, writing music professionally for more than 40 years.

Through his years with the U.S. Army Band, Bach played for both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, and at Kennedy’s funeral. One of his operas was performed by the New York City Opera, his tuba quintet was performed at Carnegie Hall, he was nominated six times for the Pulitzer Prize in music, and a CD with one of his pieces, “Oompah Suite,” won the Roger Bobo Award for excellence in recording.

Yes, "Oompah Suite" sounds more like something Peter Schickele might have turned up, or perhaps a medley for the Freistadt Alte Kameraden Band.  And yet a good teacher can summarize, succinctly, the criteria by which a musical composition might have a lasting effect on listeners.

I think that good music tells a story. A good piece has highlights, climaxes and a satisfying ending. Good music will last over time because it is clear and has a story to tell. It also has variations in dynamics, tempo and texture, which most pop music doesn't have. I try to include those parameters in my writing.

Yes, and if it's anything like writing prose, there's a risk of overdoing the variations ("a fog of elegant variation") that will also ultimately discourage listeners.

MARKET TESTS HAVE STEEP GRADING CURVES.

But being a professor of education means you can deny reality with a straight face.

[University of Illinois's Rochelle] Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans."

Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white.

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks, further wondering why math professors get more research grants than “social studies or English” professors.

I'm not sure by what magic being good at maths, and using maths to write winning grant proposals, turns into unearned privilege.  Fifty years ago, the complaint against the mathematicians was complicity in the military-industrial complex, which is to say, using one's skills to batten off a corrupt order, but these days, holding a scarce skill and profiting by it becomes privilege.  Egad.

Further, she also worries that evaluations of math skills can perpetuate discrimination against minorities, especially if they do worse than their white counterparts.

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned,” she says, adding that there are so many minorities who “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

Good grief. And so soon after Hollywood released a movie honoring the previously hidden talents of a few talented women that got the numbers right for the early space program.

Want to lower the salaries of math jocks?  Practice solving lots of integrals.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO ACROSS STATE LINES.

Many of the firearms used in Chicago's ongoing carnage come from Chicago area stores.

The Tribune reported on the study, a collaboration among the mayor’s office, Chicago police and University of Chicago Crime Lab, in advance of its official release.

The report found that “roughly two out of every five of Chicago’s crime guns come into the city from Illinois source dealers, making Illinois the single largest source state for Chicago’s illegal guns.”

The report also found that nearly one-fourth of guns recovered at crime scenes over a recent four-year period came from just 10 Chicago-area businesses.

Since Chicago does not have gun stores operating within city limits, the revelation that guns used in crimes here have come from outside the city is not new. But [Chicago police superintendent Eddie] Johnson said the new data are evidence the state can do more to regulate gun shops from surrounding areas.

“Details in this report clearly highlight the need for additional legislative action to help stymie the illegal flow of guns in Chicago,” Johnson said.

Apparently, contra Chuck Todd, it's not smuggling from Indiana.  But there's probably more at work than more stringent statewide constraints on firearm sales.

Johnson argues that the legislation is part of a broader attempt to put together “a comprehensive solution” to the gun crime problem. He pointed to New York and California as states that have stronger regulations on guns and whose cities don’t have the same levels of gun crime as seen in Chicago.

That sounds like opportunities for additional research.

REPAIR UNDER TRAFFIC?

Among the items in a recent Railway Gazette round-up, this.

Liverpool Lime Street station fully reopened on October 23 after Network Rail completed a 23-day project which included replacing 2 000 m of track, lengthening platforms and adding two platforms. Further work next year will enable an extra three trains per hour in and out of the station to be operated from 2019.

That says "fully reopened": perhaps the operators maintained as much of the schedule as feasible, with some trains cancelled, and possibly some diverted, as was the case with the summer rehabilitation of track in New York's Pennsylvania Station.

Lime Street is at the west end of the London to Liverpool corridor, and there is an extensive regional service out of it.  I wonder if "three trains per hour" means something other than creative pathing of the current trains, in which some platform tracks will be occupied by two or more sets of diesel rail cars, with the outermost set arriving first, turning quickly, and leaving to release the next set.

INCONVENIENCE SHIPPERS IN THE NAME OF PRODUCTIVITY?

I tend to cringe whenever I read corporate-speak that attempts to sugar-coat an abuse as an improvement.  The latest illustration, this gem from CSX, deciding to limit how much they link thirteen great states to the Nation.  "CSX told customers the changes were being made 'to improve service, efficiency, and better align product demand.'"  It sounds a little like having to destroy the village in order to save it, but perhaps investors will be happy.

CSX spokesman Rob Doolittle says the changes are part of a review of intermodal operations as the railroad implements Precision Scheduled Railroading.

“We are working to identify opportunities where we can improve service to our intermodal customers by leveraging other parts of our scheduled network to provide faster and more efficient service,” Doolittle says. “In some cases, this may mean using scheduled merchandise trains to support some intermodal customers’ requirements, and reducing the intermediate handling of intermodal traffic when possible, creating more reliable service and faster transit times.”

On one hand, your trailer might get to you a little faster, as it will move on the next train out. On the other hand, as we noted previously, your drayage expenditures might have just increased.

The railroad will curtail service between the Southeastern terminals and smaller markets in the Northeast, including Cleveland, Buffalo, and Syracuse, N.Y., as well as Montreal.

The changes are related to scaling back container sorting at the Northwest Ohio Intermodal Terminal. The unique terminal in North Baltimore, Ohio, is a key to the hub-and-spoke strategy CSX has used to serve lower-volume intermodal markets. But its days as a sorting hub are numbered, sources have told Trains News Wire.

Game on, with Norfolk Southern and the regional railroads possibly soliciting for the traffic.

NO TRADE, NO TRANSPORTATION.

Union Pacific haul a lot of containers and automobiles, and that commerce is eased by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I think that the impact of the U.S. pulling out of NAFTA would be disastrous,” [Union Pacific] Chief Executive Officer Lance Fritz told Reuters. ”The conversation we need to be having is how do we enhance the NAFTA trading bloc’s capability of competing globally and specifically America’s ability to compete globally.

“We are in a death match for jobs and growth against lots and lots of competitors around the globe, and we are positioned to win,” he added.

Mr Fritz is willing to deal with Our President on corporate taxation, however.

“What we really care about is the growth impact that a sensible corporate tax structure would have on the United States,” he said. “That is very meaningful to us as a company as we compete for shipping that business.”

Union Pacific’s CEO said the railroad would like to see corporate tax rates decline, but wants meaningful, long-term reform instead of a quick fix.

“Don’t make it something that can expire in five years or 10 years,” he said.

Big Boy 4014 is likely to be back in steam before any relatively permanent change to the tax code is at hand.

GO NORTH WESTERN.

The latest franchise operator of trains on Britain's West Coast Main Line is a joint venture of three overseas companies.

The trains will run, however, under the brand London Northwestern.

The new West Midlands franchise is scheduled to start on December 10, succeeding the current franchise held by Govia which operates under the London Midland brand.

The incoming franchisee said the London Northwestern name was ‘a reverential nod’ to the pre-1923 London & North Western Railway, ‘formerly the largest railway in Britain and the predecessor of the current West Coast Main Line.’

Services operating around Birmingham are to use the West Midlands Combined Authority’s West Midlands Railway branding, with a view to facilitating the possible future devolution of responsibility for these services from the national Department for Transport to the authority.

West Midlands Trains Ltd said the two brands would have a shared management board, while being ‘closely aligned to their specific regional and route requirements.’

London Midland refers to the post-1924 Grouping company, London Midland and Scottish, the 'ell of a mess, which is not an inapt description of the corporate arrangements and cooperations with regional Passenger Rail authorities.

DOES THE GREAT LEADER MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME?

The Turkmenistan equivalent to Oelwein, Iowa on the old Chicago Great Western is Bereket, where a new engine house and shops has opened.  Looks like it has a bigger footprint than Oelwein.

William Deramus never had a cult of personality like this.

Unattributed Railway Gazette International photograph.

But do the dispatchers issue track warrants over the signature of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov?

YOU SAY YOU WANT A DEVOLUTION?

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme, and if an unusual presidency tarnishes the appeal of the Cult of the Presidency, that's a good thing.

You'd expect Scott Rasmussen to pick up on such a thing.

President Trump has been rolling back regulations rather than giving more power to bureaucrats.

If the political class worldview was correct, the economy should be tanking. But it's not. In fact, consumer confidence is at a 13-year high; people are feeling better about their personal finances and businesses keep generating more jobs.

This is good news for America, but not for the political class. It's further proof that they're not as important as they think they are. For many in official Washington, highlighting the irrelevance of their work is President Trump's unforgivable sin.

That's only tangentially about the presidency, yes, but the Importance of the Presidency is in Appointing the Proper Credentialed Experts to Protect the Public Interest.

Reason's J. D. Tuccille sees in the Poisonous Washington Partisanship reason to, oh, claim the Powers that are Properly Reserved to the several States.

If Americans are divided and factionalized along lines of ideology, lifestyle, culture, and geography, then we could devolve political decision-making down to the state, local, and (best of all) individual level.

If I remember right, that was called "federalism" when the Constitution was first adopted for a diverse country in which people disagreed on a variety of issues and didn't relish the prospect of a lot of one-size-fits-all policy-making. The solution then was to let people disagree and generally govern themselves without dominating one another. It was an imperfect system, for sure, but it averted a lot of conflict.

Some version of that decentralized approach to politics would seem to be in order now, so that people don't have to live subject to rules they dislike cooked up by people they detest.

And Joel Kotkin, a City Journal regular, suggests that the states continue to be little experimental laboratories.

Now comes Tom Dispatch's John Feffer, contemplating a fourth great shattering.

What’s the point of making the necessary compromises to function in a diverse nation-state when you can effectively secede from society and hang with your homies in a virtual community?

Given the polarizing impact of economic and technological globalization, it’s no surprise that the politics of the middle has either disappeared or, because of a weak left, drifted further to the right. Donald Trump is the supreme expression of this stunning loss of faith in centrist politicians as well as such pillars of the institutional center as the mainstream media.

Perhaps, or perhaps smaller platoons with greater internal harmony can coexist with other small platoons with different public priorities.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

A lot of stuff, these days, is cheaper to toss and replace, rather than troubleshoot and repair.  That's not necessarily civilization improving.

Manufacturers would prefer to sell you their latest models rather than repair your old electronics, so they work to make fixing their products too expensive or too impractical. It’s a global problem because the marketplace for technology is global, and people everywhere are affected. With so many people throwing out so much broken stuff, it should come as no surprise that e-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream, with tens of millions of tons discarded annually around the world.

Tossing things out instead of fixing them has far-reaching consequences—for consumers, for the economy, and for the environment. Indeed, a future in which nothing ever gets repaired isn’t bright for anyone except the people trying to sell you new products. And many of us are not prepared to accept that future without a fight.

It's going to take a fight, and perhaps legislation, because manufacturers are taking liberties with the concept of ownership.  We're not talking about proprietary electronics in a smart 'phone (calls for a careful touch with a soldering pencil) or a command control module in a locomotive (I know people who are proficient with that).  We're talking about farm tractors.

Even John Deere deploys digital locks to make sure that only its own technicians can fix anything software-related on its agricultural machines.

When asked why it was standing in the way of farmers who want to fix their own tractors, the company replied that farmers didn’t really own their tractors. According to John Deere [PDF], farmers have only “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle,” and farmers (or their mechanics) aren’t allowed to fiddle with the software to effect a repair.

Naturally, that position upset a lot of farmers, who assumed that when they plopped down $75,000 or more for a new tractor, they were buying the whole thing. They felt they should be able to fix their tractors on their own terms. And it turns out that the farmers were right.

Authorities in the U.S. Copyright Office—who presumably have a deeper knowledge of U.S. copyright law than John Deere does—have generally sided with consumers when it comes to repair. In 2015, copyright officials told John Deere that owners do have the right to repair their own tractors and other equipment.

Thus we have a world in which right-to-repair laws are a thing.  And farm tractors come with an End Users License Agreement.  (Via Insta Pundit.)

TIME FOR THE WINTER TRAIN MOVEMENTS.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train will operate only on the former Milwaukee Road line between Chicago and the Twin Cities this year.

On Saturday, 2 December, the train will call at Gurnee, Sturtevant, and Milwaukee.

This year, the Sunday evening, 3 December stops will include Oconomowoc.

With the coming of the Thanksgiving holidays, and the collegiate rush for something other than dorm food or ramen, Amtrak will again lay on extra trains for and from Ann Arbor, Bloomington - Normal, and Quincy on Wednesday, 22 November, and Sunday, 26 November.

Amtrak will also be requiring reservations on the Hiawatha service, 21 through 27 November.

FIRST GENERATE FEWER RENTS.

Former Secretary of Labor and long time public intellectual Robert Reich offers a modest proposal.  "What if the anti-establishment wings of both parties came together in a pro-democracy coalition to get big money out of politics?"

Here's the challenge: the anti-establishment wing that argues with, but generally votes for, Democrats, comes off as a vanguard, with the credentialed angry graduates on Occupy steering committees, or perhaps they're the colleagues of Mr Reich himself, managing industrial policy or trade relations, all of which smells of Governance by Wise Experts that generates rents.

It's also an attempt by the front row kids to hang onto their power.

One of the best formulations of this division comes from photographer Chris Arnade, who has spent years documenting the lives of America’s forgotten classes. In his characterization, America is split between the “Front Row Kids,” who did well in school, moved to managerial or financial or political jobs and see themselves as the natural rulers of their fellow citizens, and the “Back Row Kids,” who placed less emphasis on school and who resent the pretensions and bossiness of the Front Row Kids.

That's Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds, and he's focusing, narrowly, on the invisibling of graduates of law schools not called Harvard, Yale, or Columbia on the High Bench.

But the anti-establishment wing that currently argues with, but generally votes for, Republicans, has little use for vanguardists, because it's just more posturing by the front row kids.

They hold us in contempt, but the thing is, now the student body is paying attention, and we hold the chess club, the student council, the cheerleaders, and all the other little stereotyped suck-ups in contempt right back. And there are a lot more of us.

The establishment has learned nothing. It’s members keep thinking that if they can be just a little more insulting, just a little more condescending, we’ll finally learn our place – which they contend is at their feet, forking over our lunch money.

That's Kurt Schlichter, cautioning the Bipartisan Establishment not to wish for some Deep State procedural maneuver to ease Our President out of office.

Somehow I don't see that cohort making common cause with Occupy or the Resistance.