FRIDAY short TAKES.

Independence Day might herald the beginning of the end of summer, with sunsets perceptibly earlier at these latitudes, the signs advertising the Boone County Fair sprouting, and inventory being placed in stores to fill those increasingly detailed supply lists that now plague Back To School promotions.  People continue to write columns though, that are more suitable for a "Told You So" or perhaps a concurrence, rather than an extended post.

1.  Insanity is required.

2.  Ignore the usual graduation exhortations!  "At least, please don’t try to change the world in the way that such a challenge is typically understood."

3.  The administrative state is not omnipotent.  "If the [Centers for Disease Control] cannot be trusted to give Americans sound advice, it surely cannot be trusted to give them orders."

4.  Democrats don't like patriotic displays.

5.  Deconstruct this.  "We struggle to answer the question of what is right, because we have lost our grasp on the tools to determine what is true."

6.  "Do-nothing President" might be desirable.  "Every day that Biden’s most-covered comment is about chocolate-chip ice cream is another day that his most-covered comment is not about building support for any particular legislative proposal."

7.  Making the best of a bad situation?  "I remain rather bemused that universities, let alone elite ones, are hiring people without terminal degrees or a record of scholarly publication—or, indeed, having previously served as full-time academics—as tenured professors, it’s apparently a thing in non-academic departments."  How bad is the situation? "[North Carolina] now escapes the burden and liability of a tenured [Nikole] Hannah-Jones. Howard University gains a trophy appointment of a chaired professor whose notoriety as a fabulist will never go away."

8.  Don't drive like a Loonie.  "When I moved to the Twin Cities, and first encountered metro drivers, I wanted to keep some sort of document that proved I knew how to drive, too."

9.  "Contempt for patriotism is their default mode."

10.  Undermine them with mockery!  "For republican Americans to shield ourselves and restore our liberties, we must specify and explain that disrespect with regard to every part of the oligarchy. Unlike Trump, we must assert and explain the falsehood of claims to superior knowledge and morality, and build on these explanations by organizing and supporting popular acts of collective disobedience."

11.  The world the Anointed made?  "Urban Progressive Privilege means never having to feel awkward about the devastation your policies inevitably lead to."

12.  The case for separating school and state? "An effort by Roman Catholics to obtain a share of state educational spending for the network of parochial schools they were developing, in reaction to the overt Protestantism of public schools, served as the impetus for these measures."

13.  Model Cities, anything but!  "What finally killed Greenwood wasn’t an angry racist mob, it was the federally-funded interstate highway system. Coupled with urban renewal, highways built through North Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood in the late 1960s did what the Klan and white racists couldn’t do: demolish the and depopulate the place."

14.  Weaponized government failure.  "Somewhere along the line, the urban Democrat machine politicians realized that running cities badly enough would chase off the middle class and leave them with a thin crust of wealthy people over a large mass of the poor."  See also, "Then came the one-two punch of the Great Society agendas of upper-middle class, white liberals and the pernicious social and cultural legacy of Sixties—abortion on demand, promiscuity, rejection of religious faith, single-parent family, drug use, and crime and violence as revolutionary acts. That neutron bomb was dropped on the black community but without compensatory resources of the white suburbanite."

15.  The limits of expertise.  "Governments of all stripes pass many well-intended rules that thwart the achievement of our full economic potential."  (Strikeout added by the Superintendent.)

16.  "National service" is coerced cheap labor for inefficient use of resources.  "That’s the euphemism for conscripting them to work on projects the politicians like."  The idea gets some support from so-called national greatness conservatives, which means be alert for claims of "bipartisan support" for the latest incarnation of the subbotnik.

17.  Faith traditions don't always come with testaments or scrolls.  "Any philosophy that says 'and it’s invalid to disagree with us. And if you express an opinion/idea/analysis contrary to ours you are a hater who hates' is a totalitarian philosophy." Or, you might be arguing with somebody who doesn't understand his side of the case very well.

18.  The conflict of interest that is state-sponsored (or establishment foundation sponsored) research.  "The corporate university has turned former professional sceptics and intellectual rabble rousers into automata and shills for the funding classes. The research-publishing-funding cycle drives all academic behaviour now."

19.  Abraham Lincoln spoke of kings, he could also be speaking of Platonic guardians.  "You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden."

20.  Betsy McCaughey: "Let's get real. HR 1 is a corrupt scheme to make cheating widespread."  I hope to weigh such claims in a future longer post.

21.  South Park, Barstool? "So yeah, Republicans, if being the 'Barstool Party' means celebrating individual achievement, the private sector, and telling the leftist culture Stasi where to put it, then let’s give a big 'Hell yeah!' to that."

22.  "Which party, if either, will grow up first?"  Maybe, with "college sophomore" appearing to be the default setting of "politically active" types of whatever stripe (yes, even those ancient faculty activists), that's asking too much.  "Democrats have been allowing players with adolescent mindsets to determine their policies, and Republicans have been embracing a leader with adolescent behavior control problems. It's time for the parties to grow up and pay attention to the signals and cues voters are sending them in the political marketplace."

NO. NEXT QUESTION?

Is it time to banish fireworks, once and for all?  Your dyspeptic leftist is generally somebody who is so, so, concerned that somebody might be having fun.  That means no grilling out, either.  "This Fourth of July, skip the fireworks and campfires – instead, catch a laser light show, make s’mores in the microwave and celebrate by keeping summer skies smoke-free for as long as possible."

Live your life, own a lib.

SENILITY IS NO EXCUSE.

A Distinguished Visitor went to McHenry County Community College and attempted to be funny.  "Think what it will mean to McHenry’s entrepreneurial agricultural program if we can get products more easily to Chicago. Think about how much easier life will be when it’s quicker to drive on Randall Road. (Laughter.)"

It. Won't.  Happen.  Whatever time flatlanders lose to construction delays they will never get back, either because of the induced demand, or because of the maltimed traffic lights, something that is unlikely ever to be corrected given all the traffic in and out of the strip malls.  But the schoolkids will get new electric school buses to be confined to.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY.

After that run of gloomy content, how about a shared moment of good cheer.

Mike DeSisti photograph retrieved from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

I'll leave the sports sociology for another day.  Primarily white audiences watching predominantly black players?  Why can't the women's professional teams figure out how to pitch their entertainment to a broader audience?

For now, the Milwaukee Bucks, who last won a title in 1971, are playing the Phoenix Suns, who lost the Lew Alcindor coin flip, for the National Basketball Association title.  That's at least a little play value for Cold Spring Shops.

THE GREENIES WOULD CALL IT CONSERVATION. THE REALITY IS IT'S DEPRIVATION.

A doomsday environmentalist called C. J. Polychroniou tells us not to worry, and to be happy.  "We have the technical know-how as well as the available economic resources to make the transition to a clean energy future. Now it must be done."

Sorry, no.

In order to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, Americans will have to cut their energy use by more than 90 percent and families of four should live in housing no larger than 640 square feet. That's at least according to a team of European researchers led by University of Leeds sustainability researcher Jefim Vogel. In their new study, "Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use," in Global Environmental Change, they calculate that public transportation should account for most travel. Travel should, in any case, be limited to between 3,000 to 10,000 miles per person annually.

I suppose I could sell indulgences for the commuting I'm no longer doing, but read on, dear reader, and discover that a return to medieval living standards might be our salvation.

Vogel and his colleagues are undaunted by the fact that there are absolutely no examples of low-energy societies providing decent living standards—as defined by the researchers themselves—for their citizens. So they proceed to jigger the various provisioning factors until they find that what is really needed is a "more fundamental transformation of the political-economic regime." That fundamental transformation includes free government-provided high-quality public services in areas such as health, education, and public transport.

"We also found that a fairer income distribution is crucial for achieving decent living standards at low energy use," said co-author Daniel O'Neill, from Leeds' School of Earth and Environment. "To reduce existing income disparities, governments could raise minimum wages, provide a Universal Basic Income, and introduce a maximum income level. We also need much higher taxes on high incomes, and lower taxes on low incomes."

Rush Limbaugh always argued that environmentalism was a stalking horse for communism, didn't he? More seriously, where, though, will the production come from for the governments to tax and allocate?  The study isn't about those Polychronioutic green jobs, it's more about stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

Two things that humanity for sure doesn't need according to the study are economic growth or the continued extraction of natural resources such as oil, coal, gas, or minerals. Vogel concluded: "In short, we need to abandon economic growth in affluent countries, scale back resource extraction, and prioritize public services, basic infrastructures and fair income distributions everywhere." He added, "In my view, the most promising and integral vision for the required transformation is the idea of degrowth—it is an idea whose time has come."

The researchers' assertion that "large reductions in energy use are required" is actually a non sequitur because it is not energy use per se that is contributing to man-made global warming, but the emissions of carbon dioxide associated with the burning of fossil fuels. In fact, when they set their 27-gigajoule per capita threshold, they specifically ruled out "speculative" technological progress. However, transitioning to no-carbon energy sources such as nuclear, wind, and solar power would solve the problem without forcing humanity to go on the ridiculously strict energy diet they call for.

Perhaps it's churlish of me to point out that open markets provide ways to value and compensate people for converting "speculative" technologies into the state of the art.

Founder of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus was correct when he argued, "The utopian dreams of those who wish to radically reorganize the world to stop climate change are not a plausible global future." The far better course for addressing the problem of climate change (and many others) is for humanity to aim for a high-energy planet. Instead of energy abstinence and degrowth, ecomodernists call for a "massive expansion of energy systems, primarily carried out in the rapidly urbanizing global South, in combination with the rapid acceleration of clean energy innovation."

Developing a high-energy planet will spur economic growth and innovation, helping to provide for all of the human needs that concern Vogel and his colleagues. Instead of trying to force Americans to live on the amount of energy currently available to Bolivians, the goal should be to enable people in energy-starved poor countries to gain access to energy supplies currently enjoyed by average Americans.

Perhaps it's all moot anyway, as the financial markets will get you before the environmentalist doomsayers do.

Sometime this summer, that pretty big problem will be acknowledged, and the nation will see that we are not in a recovery at all, but rather a permanent contraction that will be labeled “a depression.”

Actually, it will not be a “depression,” either, exactly, which implies a cyclical dip, even a big one, because the cycle itself is broken — and to understand that, you must delve into the nature of the long emergency: the energy resource and capital scarcity quandary facing techno-industrial societies. The direct implication of this broken cycle will be even more social distress, which is being aggravated by the racial provocations ginned up by the Woke “Joe Biden” regime, and which will blow up in its face if there is another summer of riots, burning, and looting.

That's the perpetually dyspeptic James "Long Emergency" Kunstler, and the part of the argument that might bear more careful study is that the price of crude oil at which extraction by fracking is a paying proposition is pretty close to the price of crude oil at which businesses start retrenching and those long air trips become pricey.  We'll see.

Decide for yourself, dear reader, would you rather the deprivation be managed or emergent?

THAT WAS A LAME EXCUSE FORTY YEARS AGO.

Detroit mayor Coleman Young probably first made a schtick out of "All My Troubles Reflect Your Racism."  Not that it helped: the productive people kept leaving, and the city ultimately ran out of taxes to collect and excuses to make.  Not that Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot learned the right lesson, her schtick is "Most of My Troubles Reflect Your Racism and Sexism."  She's even worse-tempered than Coleman Young was, but she has the black card to play, the woman card to play, and the lesbian card to play, and apparently that should get her a free pass.  "Lightfoot said her critics are motivated to speak out because they 'don’t like to see a woman assume power.'"  It's not your plumbing, lady, it's your incompetence.  Or, as Legal Insurrection's Mary Chastain puts it,  "Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP."  It's simple, really.  "This is just how incompetent people behave. They don’t do the job and when people notice, they blame other people, call them racist, etc…." Losing skippers blame the crew, the wind, the race committee.  Losing scholars blame the referees, the intellectual biases of their discipline, the tenure committee.  Losing politicians might benefit by an affirmative action asterisk.  Not that 104 of the mayor's constituents, 19 now deceased, had a happy Independence Day weekend.  Chicago continues to become the New Detroit.

NOW WE HAVE TO PAY TO DRINK LIBERAL TEARS?

First, Inside Higher Ed discontinued open commenting, apparently because it was too much work to root out the trolling that sometimes got on.  Now, it appears as though they're moving toward a paywall.  I wonder how much interest there really is in whines like Megan A. Carney's "Nothing Normal About Getting Tenure This Year."  Somebody tell this kid to check her privilege, stat!

Moreover, those of us in this generation of newly tenured scholars are stepping into an environment where the stakes for defending the democratic university and the institution of tenure itself are arguably higher than ever.

While the process of tenure has always been tethered to various forms of marginality falling along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability, the pandemic has intensified those exclusionary dynamics. The recent prolonged controversy about granting tenure to highly acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones attests to an overall lack of transparency behind such decisions and is inciting more fear about how research can be subjected to political scrutiny, pressure by trustees and donors, and other forces that inadvertently challenge the very principles of tenure and academic freedom.

Now that you have tenure, Professor Carney, perhaps rather than calling for a continuation of Gramsci's march, you ought consider being a proper steward of your university, and restoring it to a state of good repair.  That's not, apparently, received wisdom at the soon-to-be-paywalled house organ for All Woke All the Time.

It wasn’t a surprise that the gendered division of reproductive labor still present in many American households became even more entrenched or that the productivity of women in the academy took a nosedive as they fulfilled caregiving obligations. Feeling squeezed from all directions, I and other academic mothers I know fought for what little, if any, personal time we had to process our rage through writing. Many universities encouraged -- or in some cases, required -- faculty to submit COVID-19 statements along with their dossiers to explain how the pandemic had impacted their productivity as well as gave them the option of extending their tenure clocks. But often notably absent was systematic attention to how racism, sexism, trans/homophobia, ableism and other forms of discrimination and bias had shaped trajectories to tenure and promotion decisions.

That was followed by a summer of historic organizing and protest around Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police. With antiracist activism and calls for abolition entering the mainstream, my discipline of anthropology, along with many others, began experiencing a long-overdue reckoning. In a June 2020 statement against police violence and anti-Black racism, the Association for Black Anthropologists urged members “of the discipline to start at ‘home,’ to accept the ways that anthropology has been and continues to be implicated in the project of white supremacy (both in its implicit and explicit manifestations), and to lay out a clear path for moving forward.”

In response, some of us in my department at the University of Arizona -- including faculty, students and staff -- formed a committee in midsummer to address structural racism within our discipline and institution. We then proceeded to develop antiracist curriculum, overhaul syllabi and scrutinize practices around student recruitment, admission and faculty hiring and promotion.

Wow. Ex-wife from hell, crying with her mouth full, somehow finds the time to ... contribute to the continued self-immolation of anthropology, and participate in yet more committee work that will almost surely be hailed by the Arizona administration as making the place more inclusive and less academically serious than it already is.

WE DON'T NEED A PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE TO CELEBRATE THE FOURTH.

But if a guy who played president in a movie reprises his speech in a beer commercial, why, let's go for it.

For the first time in 25 years, Bill Pullman is back with a new speech to celebrate Independence Day. Watch now and #GoFourthAmerica.

Join us in supporting vaccine access everywhere in partnership with @directrelief pic.twitter.com/yt6CmU9kSP

— Budweiser (@budweiserusa) June 30, 2021

Red State's Brandon Morse likes what he sees.

Budweiser is actually telling people to get out there and celebrate the 4th in style. You’ll notice there wasn’t any mask-wearing in the commercial either.

Good on Budweiser for this commercial. Not only did they knock it out of the park by utilizing the Whitemore speech, but they also shrugged off the hysteria that we’re all still going to die tomorrow.

Go fourth, America.

Indeed.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Proclaim liberty, establish dominion over bad ideas, and establish independence of foolishness, across the land and among all the inhabitants thereof.

1.  Wokeness asks too much.  "The backlash against critical race theory may seem sudden, but it built up over decades."

2.  The scam that is Seeming Enlightened.  “‘Doing the work’ means hiring diversity specialists to call their children white supremacists in a prep school class they can put on their transcript to help their chances of getting into Harvard. It has absolutely nothing to do with asking those who could actually make a difference with regard to true inequality to sacrifice anything of themselves.”

3.  Another deanlet misses the point?  "For staff who find themselves exhausted by constant face-to-face contact, navigating the pre-pandemic academic bias toward in-person work was incredibly challenging."  Work is what we do between meetings, not that the administrative drones in charge of Inside Higher Ed care.

4.  Finding those missing trade-tested betterments.  "[I]f the first question out of the audience is 'What are we going to do when we bring down the price of health care?' we're onto something."

5.  That aggregation problem in democracy, again.  "When people see the government as less legitimate, they are less likely to go along."  Legitimacy is less of a problem among your neighbors.  "To increase faith in our democracy we must make local decision-making more accessible and meaningful to everyday people. This means lowering decision-making authority to the neighborhood level."

6.  It hasn't gone well.  "America's cities are feeling the effects of a yearslong experiment in what would happen if nearly everyone celebrated a movement based on the idea that police are racist goons, excused rioting and explained away spiraling crime, and made it clear to cops that if they make a mistake, they will, at the very least, become instantly infamous."

7.  Abusive coaches and support staff will come back to bite you.  "But, see, this stuff doesn’t go away. Not with a kick, not with a shrug, not with a cover-up."

8.  The limitations on democracy, plus Frank Knight's tragic vision.  "Man is naturally a partisan and a gangster."  What's that bit about "at once worms and gods?"

9.  Root causes.  "Fatherlessness is one of the most debilitating domestic issues confronting our country."

10.  Bet on emergence.  "Rewarding excellence with income produces benefits for society at large, while government-imposed income leveling is a recipe for mediocrity and possibly repression."

11.  How badly is that hopey-changey stuff working out?  "While there are many big issues that the Democrats have been very wrong about for many years, they’ve been really, really wrong about almost everything since the beginning of the Obama era."

12.  So smart they got tangled in their epistemic closure!  "The Democratic intelligentsia must appear to accept Black radicalism even while their base rejects it and they know that there are electoral advantages to distancing themselves from it."

13.  Close the windows, and pretend the train is moving.  "The solution to every academic failure is to lower the standards."

14.  Political economy is too serious a subject to be left to the English department.  "The humanities have suffered both from suicide and murder."  You were warned!

15.  The state is that grand fiction that roads are free.  "Drivers used to pay for roads. Washington is killing that idea."  Strictly speaking, they never paid their way, but once upon a time Our Political Masters paid lip service to the idea.

16.  Ranked choice voting looks better in theory than it does in practice?  "Nothing enhances confidence in government like an admission that it can’t count."  Jeff Jacoby quips, "In essence, ranked-choice voting gives repeated mulligans to voters who back a loser, while penalizing voters who support just the candidate they prefer and refuse to rank candidates they know they don’t want."  In support of his point, we could note that Lori Lightfoot became Chicago's joke of a mayor by receiving "second choice" mentions from several of the more establishmentarian (meaning being bought off by one of the more traditional grifters) candidates, for all the good that has done.  I've found some serious analysis of implementing ranked choice to return to another day.

17.  Don't rile up the Normals.  "Deliberately alienating Middle America could not arrive at a worse time."

18.  A different sort of welfare queen rises in Minnesota.  "Forty years after Ronald Reagan, the old lefty saw 'the real welfare queens are the CEOs' is finally true."

19.  "Irredeemable" is the gravamen of the argument.  "Indeed, the whole point of the structural racism argument is to undermine a notion of a basically benign system that happened to have slavery as an original sin from which we only slowly recovered."  Reality is socially conservative, and you deconstruct it at your peril.

20.  It's the feminists' fault.  "Whereas 50 years ago it took only one income earner for a family to enjoy a reasonable middle-class living, now it takes two."  Somebody should write a book about that.

21.  We could cast our net more widely.  "We’ve got to move on past talking about the bad behavior of below-average men."

THE ETERNAL FASCINATION OF BASEBALL.

Wednesday afternoon, the Milwaukee Brewers brought up left-hander Aaron Ashby to face the Chicago Cubs.  It was not an auspicious major league debut.  The sports parallels came early.  "wow the @Cubs took the opening kick off today back for a TD."  That is, it was the kind of game where the manager asks the catcher, "How's his stuff?" and the catcher says, "I don't know, haven't caught any of it yet."  Two thirds of an inning, seven runs, four earned, do the math, that's in the record books as an earned run average of 54.00 and no decision.

The relief pitchers scattered a few hits and allowed no runs of any kind over the remaining 8 1/3 innings.  Meanwhile the Bats registered a run in their half of the first, six more in the second, eight more in the fourth, delivering the dagger, and another in the sixth.  "The packers have scored and converted the 2pt conversion. Packers now lead the bears 14-7."

The story Mr Ashby gets to tell about his major league debut is thus "It was not the best outing, but the guys told me they had this."

FIND YOURSELF A CIRCUS AND GO TO IT.

If you can.  "The disappearance of the circus from American life leaves us lonelier."

Absolutely.

What drew audiences of 7,000 to 10,000 beneath the big top day after day in whistle-stop after whistle-stop, however, was the prospect of seeing seemingly impossible things: human beings cavorting upon the backs and heads-in-the mouths of animals from storybooks, performing feats of daring on swings and slender wires 100 feet or more aloft that the Wallenda family would apotheosize. It was a nonstop array of death-defying activity punctuated by such 20th century astonishments as automobiles soaring into loop-the-loops and elephants performing ballet choreographed by Balanchine, the gone-mute clowns cavorting all the while.

In the United States, these amazing feats helped make the circus into a political and social institution that reflected sky’s-the-limit thinking. The circus’s development paralleled the nation’s own growth. Yes it was a diversion, but one that also became a portable manifestation of the American Dream.

We will be judged by the monuments we've destroyed.

By the time television became ubiquitous in the 1950s, the writing was on the wall. The Feld family, who purchased the Combined Shows from Ringling heirs in 1967, made a go of it for another half-century, but in May of 2017, the show — its elephants dropped two years before as a result of mounting pressure from animal rights activists — was closed for good. It left behind a few small regional shows, currently covid-shuttered Cirque du Soleil and such vestiges as the television show “America’s Got Talent,” as a reminder of what once dominated popular entertainment.

Some might dismiss the passing of the circus as the demise of an outmoded pastime, but to dismiss an enterprise that for more than a century held an entire nation spellbound is a shortsighted example of ahistoric thinking. One cultural critic deems the long success of the circus to be a result of its ability to wrap up the “American Experience,” including most everything that we find entertaining — exoticism, supreme athleticism and life-or-death drama — in the space of an afternoon. And, adds Kenneth Feld, successor to his father Irvin as latter day circus man, all the impossible feats witnessed in the circus are real — a reminder of the institution’s ability not only to entertain but inspire.

Certainly, the loss of the circus makes us a more lonely people. Cultural historian Ernest Albrecht laments the fact that technological advancement has resulted in the increasing delivery of entertainment directly into homes (and phones), where diversion often becomes a solitary act.

The good news is, the itinerant circus is still with us, if you know where to look.

In the miniature world, the Karlson Brothers Circus presently will be announcing show dates for later in 2021.

ANTI-RACISM IS A TOOL OF THE BOSSES.

Perhaps Reason's Robby Soave deserves a Friday short Take for his

Alarm about critical race theory—a previously obscure field of study pioneered by far-left legal scholars and sociologists—has suddenly gripped the political right. This development has forced the right's adversaries on Team Blue to defend a theory that very few people on either side of this increasingly silly debate could accurately define if challenged to do so.

He captures the positive elements of the theory adequately enough.

Critical race theory is the idea that structural racism is embedded in many U.S. institutions. Slavery was the reality when the country was founded, and segregation endured for a century following the Civil War. It would thus be naive to assume that supposedly race-neutral policies are actually race-neutral—there's nothing neutral about America and race. Working from this assumption, adherents of critical race theory tend toward a kind of progressive activism that views post-Enlightenment classical liberalism and its notions of equal opportunity, the prioritization of individual rights over group rights, and colorblindness with hostility.

It's in that normative twist we see in the final sentence where things start to go wrong.  "It is thus not entirely unfair for conservatives to use [critical theory] as shorthand for the sorts of things to which they object." For instance, "Punctuality and whiteness have nothing to do with each other. People who strongly cling to the idea that there is such a thing as whiteness, and that it has to do with punctuality, objectivity, and hard-work, are actually promoting harmful and inaccurate racial stereotypes."

INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS ARE EVIDENCE OF GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

They're slowly catching on in Wales.  The deputy minister for climate change, Lee Waters, gets it.  “We need a shift away from spending money on projects that encourage more people to drive, and spend more money on maintaining our roads and investing in real alternatives that give people a meaningful choice.”  It's likely the case that they've built more stuff than they can maintain, but if they have to bundle reality with climate virtue-signalling, fine.  Apparently, odd public offices are a thing in Wales, but if the holders' portfolios don't preclude saying sensible stuff, I can deal.

Sophie Howe, the future generations commissioner for Wales, said it was an important decision. “This is a huge step in the right direction for the healthier, resilient and more equal Wales,” she said.

“Wales has for too long been prioritising cars over people. I’m hopeful that this new decision signals more of the radical action that will be taken by the Welsh government’s new climate change ministry.

“An overreliance on the car has led to increased noise, poorer air quality, time wasted in traffic and an unacceptable burden on communities living near our most congested roads, often in areas where fewer people drive a car.”

The titular head of the self-styled Party of Science^(TM) in the United States, however, hasn't yet got the memo.

But if you look back across our history, from the Transcontinental Railroad to the creation of the Internet, you can see the truth in that idea, about coming together.  Because America — America has always been propelled into the future by landmark national investments — investments that only the government has the capacity to make; only the government, working together, could make.

Today happens to mark — coincidental — but today is the 60th [65th] anniversary of one of those significant investments to change the nation.  Sixty-five years ago today, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill that created the Interstate Highway System.  Sixty-five years ago today. That was the last infrastructure investment of the size and scope of what — the agreement I’m about to talk about today.

The transcriptionist calls attention to the small brain-fart, but not to the larger one, which is that the resources devoted to early public works, whether the National Road or the various canals or the land-grant railroads, might have been prematurely and inefficiently allocated, and that it took subsequent private investment to put the Pacific Railroad in a state of good repair, and future analysts, including researchers in the office of the Commissioner for Future Generations, might rank the decision not to make the Interstate Highways toll roads a blunder right up there with the War on Poverty and the corona tyranny.

The ficus, however, has to balance pressure from the rent-seekers of the construction lobby against pressure from the make-stuff-free poverty lobby.

You all know why that matters.  One in five miles of highway and roads in America are in poor condition.  One in five miles.  Some states it’s worse where the weather is tougher.  Five perc- — 50 years — 50 [40] percent of our bridges are over 50 years old.  More than 1,000 bridges here in Wisconsin are rated as structurally deficient by engineers.  One thousand just in Wisconsin.

And I’m not — that doesn’t make Wisconsin better or worse; it’s — all across the nation is this way.  The bridges — the 10 most traveled bridges in America need repair, and some need to be completely rebuilt.  More than 600 — more than 600 here in the state of Wisconsin — bridges have weight limits to prevent trucks from crossing.  That means long detours for farmers heading to market.

The transcriber again catches the small brain farts whilst eliding the possibility that the private toll bridges of the early colonial era might have generated the revenue to keep the bridges in a state of good repair, as well as the possibility that the federal subsidies for road and bridge building might incentivize the acquisition of larger trucks.  Perhaps the best thing for the national government to do is to go away, and let the local road commissioners and private enterprises maintain the section roads.

The brain farts continue.

But this is a drain on our economy, as well.  Typical American — typical American — and it varies slightly from state to state — but the typical American pays a hidden tax of more than $1,000 a year in wasted time — wasted time and fuel due to traffic congestion.

Now, in the more the rural areas, the less the congestion.  But it creates other difficulties.

You all know that feeling: losing time, sitting in traffic, or being rerouted because the bridge isn’t wide enough or the road is poorly maintained.

But if you lose time sitting in traffic while the bridge or road is being widened, you never get it back once the project is completed, because people adjust their habits until they're indifferent between sitting in traffic on the improved road or sitting in traffic on their existing route.

Curiously, we haven't heard anything from the transit lobby or the climate change worrywarts about how making the roads less unpleasant to use contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, or how this emphasis on automotive infrastructure might constitute a regressive transfer.

The roads are productive assets and perhaps the environmentalist wing of the self-styled party of science might be able to find common cause with libertarian-minded transportation advocates.

EIGHT YEARS LATER, YOU STILL CAN'T GET THROUGH INDIANAPOLIS.

Aaron Renn first asked this question in 2013.  "If You Can Repeatedly Close a Freeway For Months At a Time, Do You Really Need It At All?"  The "carmageddon" some nervous types feared then never materialized, so he offered some suggestions.

Removing the only through interstate connection in downtown Indianapolis might seem, as it were, a bridge too far. But not only do I believe it may actually be feasible, it’s a potential game changer for downtown.

There is plenty of precedent for routing through traffic around the I-465 beltway. In fact, I-74 and the future I-69 do just this. For I-65, an I-465 routing is a similar distance to the downtown one. In fact, not that long ago that route was signed as an official alternate route one could choose (and still may be as far as I know). Similarly, because I-70 runs southwest out of downtown and the origin point of I-465 is shifted to the north of downtown, it’s not much of a detour for through traffic on I-70 either.

Earlier this spring, through traffic had to use the 465 beltway as there was yet another (or was it still the same?) closure of one of the interstates through downtown. Seems like there's always part of the interstate out of commission for construction there.  Might even be opportunities to restore central city neighborhoods to a state of good repair, putting right an error from years ago.  "But when the forecasted traffic apocalypse fails to materialize yet again this fall, I hope people will at least consider why the state has to keep spending millions upon millions of dollars to maintain forever a freeway that may not even be needed."

STOP CRYING WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

Originally I wanted to tag Inside Higher Ed designated race lady Wendi Williams with the Dumbest Short Take of a couple weeks ago for "The pandemic has laid bare the syndemics of racism, disease, sexism, economic indifference and a general disregard for our humanity that is deeply ingrained in our society." As if that is somehow worse than destroying, in a year, the past thirty years of increased prosperity in the third world.  As if that destruction didn't have knock-on effects, in making it more difficult for those countries to produce their own vaccines, or to buy from the countries that have.

HUMILITY BRINGS RESTRAINT.

On occasion, we've viewed posts by Steven Horwitz, such as this recent observation on the inevitability of majoritarian tyranny and this joint effort with Art Carden on the follies of the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm.  Word reaches Cold Spring Shops that Professor Horwitz has crossed the final summit.

Steve was a liberal. He was a liberal who believed in the human‐​affirming values entailed by liberalism, values that are not primarily political, but personal. Being a liberal means, on some level, that you love people. Steve loved people, and that love was returned.

But people are messy. We’re constrained by circumstance. We’re manipulated by our environment. But if you’re a liberal, you know that’s true of everyone, even those who pretend to have the moral and epistemological authority to rise above it and rule us. Those people pretend they are better, but they’re usually worse.

Steve saw through that. He saw through the pretensions of power and authority to the basic fact that we’re all trying to do the best with what we have.

He studied economics at George Mason with Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux.  "Steve is a former student of mine; he excelled in a graduate course in Industrial Organization that I taught. I forget which year exactly; it was either 1987 or 1988. But I can tell you exactly where in the classroom Steve sat and engaged so creatively with the material."  RIP.

PEOPLE CALL LIGHT RAIL PROJECTS BOONDOGGLES.

In addition to the multiple-unit commuter trains serving Denver Union Station, there are connecting light rail lines using more conventional upgrades of the Milwaukee three-truck train that literally bends the corner around.  The O Scale convention that recently took place used a Hyatt conference hotel in Aurora that is about a half-mile walk, admittedly through stroad hell, from a light rail   Senior citizen car-fare, $1.50.  What's not to like?

That's what appears to be a standard configuration of two three-truck cars heading south.  A car heading north will come along to deliver passengers to the Peoria Street station, to connect with the commuter rail line for downtown or for the airport.  There were a few Rockies fans getting on those trains.  Judge for yourself whether they went in with high hopes and went out with long faces.

Down on Colfax Boulevard, we see our more politically palatable uses of tax money on display.

Even when the traffic engineers make the effort to time the traffic lights properly, there's always somebody screws it up.  The idea is, first the turn arrow controlling a left from Colfax onto the beltway clears, then the green allowing traffic on Colfax to go under the beltway clears, and if all goes well, traffic leaving the beltway gets a clear path to turn left onto Colfax.  But (with the baseball traffic?) the accumulator lanes under the beltway are full, and somebody gets impatient and pulls forward hoping to nudge everybody up in the accumulator lane, and when that doesn't happen, tempers flare.

It's clear, isn't it, dear reader, that even with the turn signal clutter and the parking charges downtown or at the airport, that light rail connecting to the commuter trains is just too inconvenient and wasteful to be of any use?

THE ALLIGATOR TRIED TO WARN YOU.

The cartoon Tasmanian Devil has a counterpart in real life.

You'd think somebody in wildlife biology would know that.

The 45-square-mile Maria Island was once a safe space for the pocket-sized little penguin species. The corner blip of land was free of the menaces the birds face elsewhere and proved a safe home for the creatures, which grow to be just two pounds. Just a decade ago, some 3,000 breeding pairs of little penguins thrived there, the Guardian reported.

Then, in response to an outbreak of a deadly facial tumor disease among Tasmanian devils, 28 of the marsupials were released on the island between 2012 and 2013. Since then, the face tumor disease’s spread has slowed and the devils’ ranks have grown to approximately 100.

But all of that comes at the expense of the little penguins, as there are no longer any on the island.

“Losing 3,000 pairs of penguins from an island that is a national park that should be a refuge for this species basically is a major blow,” Dr. Eric Woehler of BirdLife Tasmania told the Guardian.

By attempting to save the devils, humans not only destroyed the island’s little penguin population but also caused fearful geese to live in trees.

As far as I know, no Australian crocodiles turned themselves into valises to hide. "'Every time humans have deliberately or accidentally introduced mammals to oceanic islands, there’s always been the same outcome … a catastrophic impact on one or more bird species,' said Woehler." It's the same principle as humans working too hard to manage the affairs of other humans, sooner or later reality gets a vote.

MICHAEL HIRST'S SELECTIVE COMPRESSION.

The final episodes of History Channel's Vikings finally made their way to ... the History Channel ... after having been available on various pay-per-view services since the Yuletide.  Thus, it's not really a spoiler to note that the same Floki who built boats for Ragnar Lothbrok to raid the east coast of England turns up somewhere southeast of where the Atlantic Ocean becomes the Bay of Fundy?

It’s worth hazarding a guess, then, that the Vinland beach Ubbe and Floki sat upon in the closing moments of the show’s finale was somewhere on the south-west coast of Nova Scotia. It’s likely they watched the sun set on the western horizon, with the coast of Maine hidden somewhere far beyond it. The flora, fauna and local tribes all match this location, too.

Read that essay in full for a comparison of the historical record with the story.  "Perhaps Vinland isn’t a place, but a state of mind."  Particularly at the History Channel, where an episode of "Ancient Aliens" suggested that Odin was a spacefarer, his ravens were drones, and Thor's hammer was some kind of kinetic energy weapon.  As if people who lived near an ocean couldn't develop any seafaring skills on their own.  But I digress.

All throughout the series the Vikings’ thirst for war and conquest is cloaked in the language of fate, destiny, glory, and the Gods. In a telling sequence half-way through the final ten episodes, these justifications are stripped away to reveal the dark, very mortal truth that lies behind them. Ivar, Hvitserk, and King Harald reunite in a calm and peaceful Kattegat. All three are burnt-out, frazzled, and dissatisfied. There’s a real sense that “the age of the Vikings is gone” and that this is “the twilight of the Gods”.

Harald and Ivar admit that there is no pleasure in being a King, despite it being a title both men have dreamed of and longed for, and for which they’ve lied, cheated, betrayed, and killed. In the final analysis, we can see – and finally they can see, however indirectly – that the great cycle in which the Vikings are trapped has been perpetuated not by the Gods – those great scapegoats in the sky – but by bored and angry men seeking in bloodshed distractions from a cold and brutish world whose quotient of misery has only ever been increased by their actions. It is especially sad to see Ivar churned back into this mill given the growth he experienced throughout this season, not only in being a caring, surrogate father to the Rus heir Igor, but in becoming an actual father after his body asserted itself just long enough to plant his seed in Princess Katia’s belly.

Yes, the wanting is almost always more pleasurable than the having. Perhaps I should apply that thinking to episodes 5-8 of this series, which all ran on History Channel Saturday afternoon when I was otherwise occupied.  I still don't see the point of the Kremlin intrigue, which was the same whether in Kiev or Novogorod or if it migrated to Moscow or if we waited seven centuries for the conquest of what became Petrograd from the descendants of the Vikings.  The gripe I saw elsewhere about too much "Game of Thrones" applies.

Thus we conclude with more palace intrigue in Kattegat (itself, also, a state of mind?), with Ivar and Hvitserk having one more go at the English, and Ubbe and the seekers somewhere near the Oak Island Money Pit, and, thankfully, not a Templar to be seen.  At the end, the contemporary sensibilities intrude, again.

Entering this battle we are fairly certain King Harald doesn’t plan to return alive to Kattegat, and while Ivar’s death doesn’t come as a complete surprise, it’s narrative execution does. We see his leg and will give way several times during the battle, but it’s his final stand that’s a bit puzzling as he allows a young Saxon soldier free rein to kill him. “Don’t be afraid,” Ivar tells the man, but the complexity of this brief scene also includes Alfred who witnesses the event from mere yards away. Despite viewing the Vikings as savages, Alfred watches the tender scene as Hvitserk holds his dying brother in his arms. “Just leave me here with my brother for a moment,” he tells the now kneeling king, who is so moved by what he sees that he immediately crosses himself. As the camera zooms out to an aerial shot looking down on the three men and Alfred’s burning cross, we can’t help but view this as the Christian God and the Norse gods looking down on these brave soldiers.

However, the larger twist to come out of the Wessex battle occurs when Hvitserk talks to Ivar’s grave and tells him to “enjoy Valhalla, brother, while it still exists.” While leaving the old ways behind has clearly been a central theme of the episode, this statement acknowledges that even their religious beliefs may need to be re-examined. We get our first hint that something’s afoot with Hvitserk when we see him brought to Wessex on a cart after his wounds have clearly been carefully dressed by Alfred’s surgeons. The flash forward to his decision to embrace Christianity and leave the Norse gods behind fits nicely with his father’s curiosity of faith. And how perfect that Alfred tells Hvitserk that from now on he’ll be known as “Athelstan, our brother in Christ.” The call back to Ragnar’s relationship with his Christian friend just works.

Is there ambiguity in that conversion? Hvitserk, recall, had a fraught relationship with mushrooms.

On the Nova Scotian coast, one Viking gets a bad case of gold fever, and things could have gone quite wrong between the castaways and the locals.

Nevertheless, when Naad asks about gold, we know where this is headed, and Ubbe’s response to the murder of the young tribe member is sure and unambiguous. What’s left to ponder is how the leader Pekitaulet (Carmen Moore) will react to this violent act. There seems to be no question the punishment will be swift and severe, but the initial choice of the Blood Eagle contradicts Ubbe’s desire to move forward rather than look to the past. Had he carried out the punishment, its savage brutality and cruelty may have had the opposite effect Ubbe intends. Fortunately, he changes tact and slits Naad’s throat instead, calling on the “eye for an eye” system of justice. It’s a wise decision.

With Ubbe and Torvi at the helm, it seems likely that the two groups will not only peacefully coexist but actually thrive as they openly share their collective knowledge. Still, it’s wise that Pekitaulet explains her stance in no uncertain terms. “When we said you were welcome to this place, we did not mean you were welcome to possess it.” Even so it’s what happens next that shows the untapped potential inherent in this land. So moved by her words, Torvi hugs Pekitaulet with such emotion that it’s clear, not only do the two women understand each other, they’re in total agreement. It’s a truly beautiful moment.

Thus we conclude with two more intrusions of contemporary sensibilities: female chieftans Norse and Native, and a possible foreshadowing of a misunderstanding many moons into the future, when the inhabitants of Manhattan Island might have thought they were trading away trapping and fishing rights, and the Dutch might have thought they were buying real estate.  That Vinland state of mind again?

TODAY IN SUBVERSIVE THINKING.

Is the Britney Spears conservatorship a metaphor for Expert Overreach more generally?  The first commenter on a Tyler Cowen post at Marginal Revolution went there.

Many people rationalize and advocate that even perfect strangers should be allowed to control almost every aspect of even normal people's lives: everything from what their health insurance covers, to what school their children attend, to what benefits package they should seek at work, to what lightbulbs they use, to whether they wear masks, even what kind of bag they use for groceries. The list is endless. Such people seem to also want to maximize, rather than minimize, how much of normal people's incomes are controlled by these perfect strangers, called politicians and bureaucrats.

Deeper in the thread comes somebody suggesting "Tyler is trolling."

Reason's Ella Lubell doesn't quite go there, although she concludes with a line of argument that could go there: "But there are still thousands of people who could have control over their lives taken away from them by a court through the conservatorship system."

Consider the possible generalizations.  For the past year-plus, Our Credentialed Betters have been telling everyone to mask up, stay home, shut up, and have no fun and it's All. For. Your. Own. Good.  (No, it wasn't, and it is the Right of the People to ignore those experts.)

There is a vulgar interpretation of "behavioral economics" that interprets the research as "because people don't appear to behave like chalkboard rational agents there are social betterments possible by way of nudges."

Moreover, dear reader, you've surely heard the argument that "Social" "Security" exists because none of us has the self-discipline to set money away for old age and not blow it all on some indulgence, never mind that Congress has been kiting checks against the so-called trust fund for years.

Our Intellectual Betters would like you to imagine June Cleaver, or Father Knows Best.  Perhaps if you think about James Spears, or the latter-day incarnation of a chubby buck-toothed middle-schooler we all know as Hillary Clinton, we might be able to resist more actively.