THE WORST POSSIBLE REASON FOR BUILDING A HIGH SPEED TRAIN LINE.

A Canadian functionary called Rashid Timbilla is troubled that the Ottawa to Toronto corridor is less adequately served by rail than the Washington to New York corridor, or something.

High-speed rail could change the way we live by making us wealthier, more prosperous and more reflective of the advanced world today.

It is for these reasons that our governments should remember the times when we mobilized to build bigger, greater and awe-inspiring projects not only to fix a problem, but to show that we could.

That's standard issue Exhortation in support of some Grand Public Purpose.  It might be a train line: let the record show that Canadian Pacific was a private project.  It might be a vaccine.  Maybe it's a moon shot.  Maybe it's a plutonium bomb.  But public mobilization simply "to show that we could?"  Where are the Canadian libertarians to pounce on this?

As far as the rail corridor he considers, let's see what diesel trains good for 125 mph on existing tracks, with five frequencies a day, can do, first.  I post the five frequencies, as on the eve of Amtrak, Canadian National were making do with three on that line, a through car or two being added to or dropped from a Montreal service at Brockville.  In those days, there were four frequencies between Toronto and Windsor, and the CNR station at Windsor did not have a direct connection to the Grand Trunk Western on the Detroit side. 

THERE ARE SOLDIERS IN D.C. AND NO FUNCTIONING COMMANDER IN CHIEF.

"The real violation of political norms is going to be spectacular." Read and understand; via Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds, as part of a longer set of links.

TODAY IN STUFF WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE WORRIED ABOUT.

Streetsblog's Angie Schmitt frets about the angry countenance of pickup trucks.

Why have pickup trucks morphed into such huge, angry, and dangerous presences? Traffic safety experts, commentators on U.S. automotive culture, and social scientists have suggested a range of forces behind truck bloat.

Some of it is the aesthetic preferences of urban weenies, which is probably provoking militancy from Normals.  Some of it, though, dear reader, is the unintended consequence of feel-good regulations.

The U.S.’s perverse regulatory and tax environment contributes to this arms race. Ford’s heavy-duty F-250, for example, benefits from its regulatory status as a commercial vehicle, unlike the slightly smaller F-150. The same goes for other heavy-duty models like the Ram 2500 and Silverado 2500HD, which aren’t classified as passenger vehicles, but as work machines, and are thus exempt from EPA fuel economy reporting regulations.

Did anybody seriously think that effectively banning station wagons, which is what the fuel economy standards did, would not induce substitutions that might have surprised the na​ïve? And that such substitutions might be more common when motor fuel is cheaper?  That, though, is the mundane logic of the price theory seminar, and it doesn't lend itself to deplorable-shaming.

To [car historian Dan] Albert, the booming appeal of bigger and more brutish trucks reflects “a crisis of masculinity,” he says. “Nothing could be more emasculating than driving a minivan. So you want the vehicle that’s going to maintain your performative masculinity.”

The fact that supersized pickup trucks were often deployed as political props (and weapons) during the Trump era did not escape the notice of scholars like Cara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech. In a widely shared 2018 journal article, Daggett coined the term “petro-masculinity” to describe flamboyant expressions of fossil fuel use by men (and some women as well, but mostly men) as a reaction against social progress. To these drivers, “the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family,” she wrote.

Petro-masculinity helps explain not only these vehicles’ confrontational styling, but the often equally belligerent way in which they are operated.

Put another way, some expressions of authenticity are more desirable than others? Sad.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,095.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 744,272 infections and 13,262 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,221,863 infections and 23,357 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.

The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting nearly five four million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.

That's despite Sweden doing at least as well as most of more lockdown-obsessed western Europe, despite ignoring scary advice that their relatively moderate mitigations would be deadly.

Although public health officials aren't necessarily economists, they ought be sensitive to the notion of tradeoffs.

Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations.

Sweden and Florida followed these principles when they rejected lockdowns and trusted their citizens to take sensible precautions. That trust has been vindicated.

The governor, however, gets away with an interview in which the Illinois death toll doesn't even come up.  "I think I’m genuinely considered to be the most progressive governor in the Midwest, if not in the country right now."  Let that be an indictment of so-called progressives.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,070.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.

As of 8 March, 10,017

As of 1 March, 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 9,623.

As of 1 February, 9,662.

As of 25 January, 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

Today, a technical post on strengthening the drive line on a 50 year old Atlas diesel locomotive.  The basic bones of the model are good, but the gear tower has weaknesses in it, and the factory mounting of the trucks makes for a lot of weight transfer on start-up.  If you want to see this phenomenon in real life, find a trolley museum that has one of the Great War era Chicago L cars, and watch one get under way.

It's the one on the right I'm working on.  I put the one at the left through its paces a few weeks ago, after it had been extensively reworked.  Each of these will be good for about nine cars, thus there's the potential for a pretty good freight train once the work is done.  I've already fixed up the drive train, now it's time to put a Pittman motor, which means splines of different lengths, into the chassis.  The Atlas splines are pieces of engineering plastic.  Give me some solid brass.

The science-project Unimat is not the most precise machine tool in the world, with too much play in the slides to use it for your basic firearm components or a fuel pump on a rocket.  On the other hand, it can only take a little bit of metal off on a pass, which means that if you stop and check after each pass of the cutting tool, you'll have a serviceable spline.

Once those are done, the splines get drilled out in order that the entire drive line is bolted together.  There's enough free play in that universal joint at right and in the Atlas gear tower itself that a little flexing, particularly on my generous radius curves, is not harmful.

Next up, the onboard power control module for this unit.  You did see two batteries in that B unit battery car last December, didn't you?

THE PLANS OF LEFTIST POLITICIANS DEPEND ON MOST OF THE PEOPLE BELIEVING CHILDISH NOTIONS.

Of course they do.  You have to be pretty old to have an adult memory of stagflation and malaise.

If you listen to the Beltway crowd, the country is about to enjoy rising prosperity, thanks to all the federal “stimulus” spending. Biden is about to shower the nation in $1.9 trillion in new federal outlays and there will probably be more to come. Aggregate demand, to employ the Keynesian lingo, will rise, and that means that production and employment will rise. Happy days are here again!

You also have to be pretty old to have an adult memory of how many ways things got better once the painful transition out of it ended.

A SLIDING SCALE OF UKASES.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva)'s corona tyranny has not protected Illinoisans, but the way he responds to that reality is to pretend that freedom is on the way.

Pritzker said the state would expand COVID-19 vaccine eligibility starting April 12 to all Illinois residents 16 and older, outside of Chicago.

The governor also announced a “bridge phase” between the state’s current Phase 4 and a full reopening of the state in Phase 5. The bridge phase will open up capacity limits at businesses, sporting events, theaters and more.

The state will advance to the bridge plan once 70% of Illinois residents aged 65 and older have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and the state doesn’t see a reversal in the current trends for COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. As of Thursday morning, Pritzker said the state stood at 58% of those 65-and-older having received at least one shot.

In the bridge phase, restaurants can increase indoor capacity to 30% and outdoor dining capacity to 50%; health and fitness centers, offices, personal care businesses, museums, spectator events, theaters and performing arts, and zoos can increase to 60% capacity.

The bridge phase will last 28 days, Pritzker said, which is two coronavirus incubation cycles, for monitoring.

Other Illinois officials are also envisioning a day when the tyranny ends. But they don't envision an end to the political conditions that made tyranny possible.  It takes an opposition party to do that. Twelve months, 76 executive orders, and zero input by legislators.

Since the plan was created and publicized, rules, metrics and guidance have changed quickly and regularly, and the goal posts for returning to normalcy keep moving. But one thing has remained constant over the last year: Governor Pritzker still insists on unilaterally controlling every aspect of the COVID-19 response, and he refuses to allow for input from the legislative branch. The governor has issued 76 executive orders over the last year, and during that same time period, legislators have been offered exactly zero opportunities to weigh in on COVID-19 policy decisions.

The authors of the Illinois Constitution were clear in their intent when they created three co-equal branches of government. The legislative branch is responsible for writing and approving the laws, the executive branch is responsible for enacting the laws, and the judicial branch is responsible for interpreting the laws. Each branch is considered equal in its power- or at least it is supposed to. Our laws allow the governor to issue executive orders during emergencies. Those orders have a 30-day shelf life. The authors of the Constitution never intended for one individual to assume almost full control over the running of the state for months and months, and they never intended for the executive branch to become the policy-making branch.

So far, the state’s COVID-19 response efforts under JB Pritzker and his administration have been marked with controversy. We’ve seen inconsistent standards for different regions, an unemployment benefit system that remains broken, and a very rocky start to the vaccination program. Our continued calls for increased transparency and legislative involvement fall on deaf ears, and now we are told that the metrics required for full opening will change yet again, with the unveiling of a new phase, a “4.5” phase, before our state can enter Phase 5.

As local legislators, we are elected to serve as the voice of roughly 216,000 Illinoisans. Our constituents’ opinions are valid and important, yet their voices are being silenced because we are being silenced. We know our districts, and have a deep understanding of our communities’ unique characteristics. Yet our role has been marginalized as we are kept on the sideline for critical decisions that have decimated our business community and sent over one million Illinoisans to the unemployment line.

That editorial is from members of the legislative Republican caucus, and it's going to be on them to propose a more polished libertarian-populist message.  Now is the time to tie Democrats to softness on crime (that's a claim of long standing), softness on communism (ditto), and to the corona tyranny which failed to slow the spread but spread mortality from other causes, and economic distress.  First, get that majority.  then take the necessary steps to further limit the emergency authority of governors. "In the last year we’ve been locked in our homes, had our economy shut down, been forced to wear masks and watched as COVID-positive patients were brought into nursing homes. All because one man decreed it from St. Paul.” Or Springfield.

Alternatively, legislative Republicans in Illinois could encourage their colleagues in county government to show some independence.  Washington County, Wisconsin, executive Josh Schoemann shows the way.

"While the needs of public health, at the onset of a novel virus, took on additional weight and attention; so now, as the vaccine and mitigation strategies force the virus to recede, we must recalibrate to fully restore balance with economic, mental, spiritual, and social health needs that have been exacerbated by COVID-19," he said in the release.

He said the health department would continue to support the community by providing testing and access to the vaccine.

The county fair, church festivals, and beer gardens are on for the summer.

SOMEBODY TELL THESE INDULGED CHILDREN TO CHECK THEIR PRIVILEGE.

It's basketball tournament time, and still women's history month, and the heirs to Rosa Luxemburg have to have an inequality to carp about.

The teams had barely landed in Texas when complaints of inequity between the women’s and men’s tournaments roared over social media posts noting the women’s weight training facilities in San Antonio were severely lacking compared to what the men have in Indianapolis.

It wasn't limited to the symbolism of sanitized yoga mats, either.

“We are all grateful to be here and it took a lot of effort for them to put this all together,” UConn freshman All-American Paige Bueckers said on an AP Twitter chat Thursday night. “It’s more of a principle thing. It’s not just a weight room that’s a problem. It’s the inequality of the weight rooms that’s the problem. There’s another tweet going around with the swag bag. It’s not just the weight room. It’s the inequalities and the better stuff the men get.”

That's rich: here are people who have had the opportunity to practice and play, while rehearsals for musical ensembles are on hold, and laboratories probably limited to Zoom sessions; here are people who have nutrition coaches while their classmates often make use of food pantries; here, although the women's programs are less notorious for this than the men, are eligibility studies areas of concentration.  And they gripe about the CONTENTS OF THE SWAG BAG!  No doubt, dear reader, when I tune in one of the women's bracket games, I'll see players wearing warmup jackets with EQUALITY embroidered on them.  That, too, is rich, here we have participants in a CHAMPIONSHIP TOURNAMENT that teams have to QUALIFY FOR endorsing something that is completely at odds with what CHAMPIONSHIP or WINNING are about.

Maybe, just maybe, the people managing women's basketball, whether at the team, conference, association, or professional level, ought come up with a better value proposition than "look how unfair this all is."  That pitch has probably won over all the professional feminists and alphabet people that are there to be won over.  It's unlikely to entice any new eyeballs onto the screen or into the stands.

The tagline at Northern Illinois University this year was #bethechange.  I'm tempted, if there's still that sort of woke virtue signalling when the new season starts, to respond with #keepthechange.

A CORONA CURTAIN COMES DOWN.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center being destroyed by jihadis, the United States, and much of the developed world, experienced a lot of security theater.  We didn't yet know that there were security Karens, but for some time thereafter, it was risky to be observed taking pictures of trains.  The ferroequinologist community circulated legal advice for photographers to read, understand, and have along to show to overweening public officials or civilians attempting to posture.

It got so bad for a while that Railway collected reader stories under the heading "Iron Curtain Britain."

These days, it isn't taking pictures of trains that scares people.

Back in July or August, I was walking along Alvarado Street minding my own business. Suddenly, someone with a Monterey city government worker logo on his shirt came up to me and told me I had to wear a mask. I asked him to show me in the regulations where it said that. The sign above admits of no exceptions but the regulatory document is pages long. A local lawyer friend only a few days earlier had explained to me that one wasn’t legally required to wear a mask if one were exercising. I was on my daily quick walk.

So he pulled out the regulations to show me that there wasn’t such an exception. I walked over to look over his shoulder so I could show him the exception. He told me he was uncomfortable with my being so close without a mask. That’s fair, I thought, so I donned my mask. Neither Bill (his name) nor I could find the exception that my lawyer friend had told me about. For that reason, I wore my mask for the rest of my walk.

But when I got back to my office and got on line, I did find a 6-foot exception but not the exercise exception. I printed out the regs and started carrying them with me on my daily walk.

Sooner or later, the official restrictions will expire. But the temptation for assorted busybodies to continue to enforce the corona curtain will continue.

By all means, respect the wishes of any business owner on the matter of mask wearing, but where the opportunity presents itself to take your business elsewhere, take it.

GOOD RIDDANCE.

Critical race theory is intellectually empty, but it still behooves people who know that to say that.

Rational, average people fear for their livelihoods and even their physical safety. Check out what transpired in Loudoun County, Virginia where teachers looked to “cancel” parents who disagreed with their schools’ critical race theory-based policies.

Nevertheless, as the absurdity level of critical race theory keeps going up and up, the regular folk are becoming braver, especially as sane progressives join them. If you encounter a situation like that in Loudoun County, fight it. Stand up and speak out. Don’t back down. Find allies. You’re on the right side. The more the critical race theorists are exposed, the quicker they’ll fade away.

If you're in a feisty mood, accuse the wokesters of pushing a libel on the human race.  "By repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."  I didn't make up that "deny coherent beliefs" formulation out of whole cloth, you know.

Then ask the critical studies types why they went from denouncing arguments against group differences in intellectual capabilities to reifying them.  "It used to be demeaning and even racist to suggest, for example, that black and other minority children cannot behave in class, nor do as well as white (and Asian, but that’s for another time) students academically."

Read and understand.

THE LEGACY OF PENN CENTRAL.

The federal government created Amtrak and Conrail to hold the northeastern railroads together in the aftermath of Penn Central going bankrupt and taking almost all the carriers of the Official Region down with them.

It therefore makes sense that among the 50th anniversary commemorative paint jobs being applied to Amtrak diesels will be a nod to the improvised Amtrak blue and pointless arrow applied to an otherwise basic black Penn Central diesel.

There's a pleasantly large level of ferroequinologist tidbits in that video, which is unusual for a government agency that really ought to be bringing proper food service back to the overnight trains.

RESTORE OUR FREEDOM.

National Review's Chip Roy gets to the heart of the matter.  "By now, it should be obvious that [the continuing corona tyranny] isn’t about science and safety, but compliance and control, and it won’t stop unless we the people make it stop."  The time to make it stop is now.

Americans have had enough. No more extensions of the “two weeks to slow the spread.” It is time for the American people to demand the return of their lives, their livelihoods, and their liberties, and start saying no to those who wish to maintain control. And that begins by turning away from fear, planting our feet, and giving a firm and unflinching “no.”

I'm giving my Trump shot the two weeks the boffins suggest to let it take full effect. Then it's time for some road trips, advice about not travelling or not.

A LONG OVERDUE COLLAPSE OF THE TECHNOCRATIC VISION?

Seventeen years ago, I was pessimistic about emergence getting a foothold in politics.

The technocratic vision ... is it indeed passing from the scene, or will there be new generations of politicians and academicians to restore it? And yes, there is a generational dimension to it. Grover Norquist may have made Andrew Sullivan angry by calling the current crop of elders "anti-American" and made too obvious a reference to the maxim, "where there is death, there is hope." Mr. Norquist erred, however, in pinning the blame on the G.I. era cohort. The real Destructive Generation comprises those individuals who remembered World War II and Korea, but who were too young to be called up for those wars, and too old for Vietnam, and who decided on the basis of the New Deal and the World War that Something Had To Be Done. And yes, that Destructive Generation has for too long called the shots in the universities, the international institutions, and the mainstream press.

And, apparently, that Destructive Generation lasted long enough to still be in Positions of Authority when the Wuhan coronavirus got loose.  Michael Lind sees in their continued hold over the levers of power a clash of two models of governance.

The same four-part early progressive template tends to be applied by today’s progressives to a host of unrelated issues: delegation of power to technocrats insulated from the public; top-down, comprehensive plans; invention or exaggeration of emergencies to justify radical reforms; and justification of censorship in terms of a state of emergency.

You have seen those four elements, dear reader, in "trust the science;" in Official Washington grousing about the lack of "a plan" (meaning one hashed out on the Sunday shows and implemented by Executive Order); in the continued fear-mongering about people going to the beach or throwing a Frisbee around; and in the scolding of "mask deniers" or "corona deniers."  By all means read the entire article for elaboration.  I highlight one passage. "[The comprehensive lockdowns] merely reflected the nonrational preference of technocratic progressive political culture for more stringent and comprehensive government policies, rather than more limited and selective ones that still would have protected those members of society who were in fact at the greatest risk—namely, people over 65, and those with preexisting conditions that depressed their immune systems."

The task, dear reader, is for the people who have been hard done by under the past year of technocratic excess, to say NO.

[S]ooner or later there will be another crisis, and the dominant culture of technocratic progressivism and its adherents will insist it can only be addressed by expert-led, top-down, centralized government allocation of resources or jobs. Once again, whatever the new problem happens to be, we will be told that it is an emergency, that democratically elected officials must defer to the policy views of unelected academics or career civil servants, and that disagreement and debate threaten the survival of America and the personal safety of us all.

It is time to call attention to all the current policy failures, whether those are the antipoverty initiatives or inclusive education that teaches nothing or the corona shutdown theater.

Five years ago, I was pessimistic about a popular push-back against technocratic excess organizing within the Republican coalition.

That sounds like a formula for a Republican Party reduced to irrelevance, particularly at the national level, changing demographics or not.  There's much to appeal to the remaining yeomanry, whether as farmers, small business owners, practitioners of the skilled trades, but not much toward fostering the preservation, let alone the continued evolution, of the yeomanry.  Perhaps it's wishful thinking by Democrats.  But the future for Democrats also looks a lot like business as usual.

On the other hand, primarily Democrat lockdowns have slammed the yeomanry, and primarily Democratic pandering to the woke sentiments of the gentry in their high-rise condos or college towns is rendering the cities where the primarily Democrat dependent base lives uninhabitable.

It's going to take somebody to offer a different vision, though, and that's where I'm skeptical about Republicans or Libertarians getting a message together.

Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.  Institutional evolution is about mutation, selection, and adaptation.  The best thing for some of the institutions might be that they go away.  I'll give Mr Lind the final word.  "And though it’s impossible to know exactly how it will end, one thing is clear: In 2016, the old political system is crumbling, and a new American political order is being born."

What that is going to look like by 2022 or 2024 still isn't clear.

THE ILLINOIS PRIMARY WAS A YEAR AGO.

A new set of ukases took effect once the polls closed, but by month's end, their ineffectiveness at protecting people was becoming clear.  National Review's Jim Geraghty takes stock of that year of failure.  "The hard lessons of this pandemic were discernible very early on." It is now time for a reckoning.  "It’s starting to become safe to come out. Which means we’re due — overdue, really — for those extremely consequential decisions."  Let us call the roll: the public health establishment, dictatorial governors, the lying mandarins of Pekin.

A FRACTURE IN TECHNOCRACY.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson reports an intriguing development in Texas.

Often referred to by advocates as simply “the I-45 project” for the mega-highway upon which much of the construction would be focused, the massive effort would expand and re-route roughly 25 miles of the Space City’s aging downtown and northside freeways, displacing 1,000 disproportionately Black, Brown, and low-income households, along with a swath of businesses that employ almost 25,000 Houstonians.

[The Texas department of transportation] argues that the expansion is necessary to reduce congestion in the fast-growing region, despite decades of evidence that adding lane miles has the opposite effect.  Some advocates for the proposal have also claimed that the new highway design would be greener than what the city has now because it would bury some sections of the most high-polluting roads — but opponents have pointed that the state DOT wouldn’t be responsible for paying to actually put anything on those highway caps, and the COVID-battered city government probably won’t be able to afford it, either.

That's a lot going on, but if one part of government recognizes that funding from Washington is simply a fiction by which Houstonians get to sit in traffic at the expense of somebody else, and another part of government recognizes the dirty little secret of urban renewal, that might be a good thing.  "Mobility justice and environmental advocates, meanwhile, have almost uniformly decried the I-45 project as a boondoggle that recalls some of the most racist transportation projects of the urban renewal era, not to mention a massive step backwards for climate change."  You know a project is unpopular, if a critic characterizes it as one that would "make Robert Moses blush."

IT IS NEITHER CRITICAL NOR THEORY.

It is a faith tradition, and Samantha Harris shows the way to undermine it.

The bottom line is that our future as a free society depends on fighting back against the pall of orthodoxy that has descended over our educational institutions. But we must resist the temptation to fight back with the traditional tools of our ideological opponents — censorship and repression — and instead stay true to the freedoms we are fighting for.

That institutions of higher education can be accused of harboring orthodoxies illustrates just what sort of craven, cringing careerists are in charge these days.

The battle against these identity-based ideologies needs to be waged in the marketplace of ideas, not through censorship. Proponents of [Critical Race Theory], critical feminist theory, postcolonial theory, etc. have every right to argue for the validity of their positions, just as we have the right to argue for the validity of ours. We must recognize their rights even as we try to convince the world of the dangers of their arguments.

That does not mean, however, that they have the right to indoctrinate our children, or to create a hostile environment in which students or teachers are continually treated as “less than” on the basis of skin color. When these things happen — and they are happening — then we must fight back hard not only in the court of public opinion, but in courts of law as well.

Most people know that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. But it also protects freedom of conscience — that is, the right to hold our personal thoughts and beliefs free from government intrusion

These are two separate arguments, aren't they?  I doubt, to engage the last paragraph, that anyone is arguing in defense of holding a white-supremacist view on the basis of freedom of conscience.  I suspect, though, that the proponents of empirically empty critical theories would rather hide behind the Critique of Pure Tolerance or any other useful appeal to their sole authority to speak, than to defend the evidence they offer in support of their assertions of systemic racism, let alone be required to contemplate what sort of evidence might move them to revise their priors.  Anyone who refuses to engage that sort of a question ought be viewed, presumptively, as engaging in indoctrination, and ignored, mocked, or disrespected accordingly.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,070.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 712,527 infections and 13,146 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,210,113 infections and 23,216 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.

The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over four million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.

For the record, your Superintendent is due for a second Trump shot this week.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,017.

As of 1 March, 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 9,623.

As of 1 February, 9,662.

As of 25 January, 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

SUNDAY IS PI(E) DAY.

It's going to look something like this.

Something to keep busy with during the tournament selection show.  Maybe there will be a basketball post-mortem, full of all sorts of underachievement being documented, next week.

JOHN MICA'S CONCEPT DOESN'T RIDE THE RAILS?

I'm referring to a Florida congressman who thought Amtrak was spending too much money on food service and once waved a half-eaten McBurger at a passing train.  In part we have the joke of first class catering on overnight trains these days because of those efforts.

Did you know, though, dear reader, that McDonald's did operate a snack car?  In Germany?  "It sounded like a great idea—until it wasn't."  Some of what went wrong might be attributable to German crew districts, but apparently I'm not alone, or perhaps it's my Prussian coming out, in wanting proper food service in the diner.

McDonald's reputation for cheapness made it a hard sell to German travelers, especially the wealthy, by then accustomed to better meals on other routes. And despite the perception of fast food being cheap to produce, service proved anything but inexpensive for the DB and McDonald's to provide.

Power consumption was said to be twice that of a standard DB dining car, at 90 kilowatts, and logistically, the operation proved unusually demanding. Resupplying was reportedly done via restaurants along the route, complicating inventory management, and if one of the five kitchen crew showed up late to their shift—say, after the train had left—they effectively hadn't shown up at all. Assuming kitchen staff didn't transfer between trains at a predetermined meeting point, their shifts would end with them across the country from where their day started, requiring McDonald's to either pay for accommodation or a return trip.

The cars started running in 1992, which was during the heady early days of airline deregulation in an expanded Europe, and that didn't help building a clientele.

IS THERE SYSTEMIC RACISM AT THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE?

Bonchie of Red State posted an entertaining video of Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) putting presidential appointee Vanita Gupta in a difficult place.

A sample:

Gupta never even sees it coming. Cotton expertly leads her into the trap, getting her on record that every single human being is racist, no exceptions. After that, with the precision of a well-trained surgeon, he hits her with the question that every person pushing critical race theory should be asked – so who, exactly, are you racist against?

Enjoy, and use it as an example, dear reader, should you be subjected to woke indoctrination.