THE WAUKESHA CHRISTMAS PARADE MASSACRE, EVERY JULY.

I'm going to stay away from any conversation about whether accused reckless driver Darrell Brooks was wrongly released.  There's plenty of discussion about the merits of detaining people during an ongoing plague elsewhere.  I also hesitate to weigh in on the state of mind of Mr Brooks that afternoon, or of who might have failed him, or failed to detain him or institutionalize him long ago.  There are plenty of others weighing in, or perhaps speculating.

Rather, I want to start with a detail that came out in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review of his record.

A decade ago, during a traffic stop, a Milwaukee police officer jumped inside Brooks’ car, fearing he was about to be run over. The officer had pulled him over for not wearing a seat belt. As Brooks began to drive away while the officer was talking to him, the officer got inside the car and wrestled for control of the steering wheel.

Eventually, the officer was able to stop the car and removed the keys. Brooks ran away from the car, court records say, and he was arrested hiding in a children's playhouse in the same block. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in that case.

At the time, that story was just another story about reckless driving on Milwaukee's stroads, something that radio talkers and the like have paid a lot of attention to over the years.  (Mr Brooks's out of the car behavior is not what I'd expect of somebody acting with malice; in Waukesha he ditched his car, then claimed to be a homeless man waiting for his Uber (?!) and got a local to make him a sandwich, as well as being in a place to be arrested, again peacefully.)

THE FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY.

Thirty years ago, a sardonic quip went something like "Soviet Communism is the longest way from capitalism to capitalism."  Not that there were capitalist institutions during the Romanoff period, and that got in the way of a proper civil society emerging once the Evil Empire shut down.

The second time is the farce, something like "The Biden presidency is the longest way from Donald Trump to Donald Trump."  Not necessarily in the election, but "Remain in Mexico" is making a comeback.  That could be a consequence of court orders.

The so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy was initially suspended under Biden just hours after he took office in January. It was formally ended at the beginning of June by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

However, in August, Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled the administration must reinstate the policy, which requires asylum seekers along the southern US border to remain in Mexico until they can have their case be heard.

The Biden administration attempted to end the program again last month, while acknowledging the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.”

On the other hand, when the hits come with a frequency that would shame Milwaukee Brewers batters with runners in scoring position, perhaps something is happening.

The coot discovered, for instance, that oil holdings on federal lands are assets.

The Biden administration on Friday recommended an overhaul of the nation's oil and gas leasing program to limit areas available for energy development and raise costs for oil and gas companies to drill on public land and water.

The long-awaited report by the Interior Department stops short of recommending an end to oil and gas leasing on public lands, as many environmental groups have urged. But officials said the report would lead to a more responsible leasing process that provides a better return to U.S. taxpayers.

The pause in leasing came to an end long before the fifteen days to slow the spread did.

The report completes a review ordered in January by President Joe Biden, who directed a pause in federal oil and gas lease sales in his first days in office, citing worries about climate change.

The moratorium drew sharp criticism from congressional Republicans and the oil industry, even as many environmentalists and Democrats said Biden should make the leasing pause permanent.

The new report seeks a middle ground that would continue the multibillion-dollar leasing program while reforming it to end what many officials consider overly favorable terms for the industry.

The report recommends hiking federal royalty rates for oil and gas drilling, which have not been raised for 100 years. The federal rate of 12.5% that developers must pay to drill on public lands is significantly lower than many states and private landowners charge for drilling leases on state or private lands.

The report also said the government should consider raising bond payments that energy companies must set aside for future cleanup before they drill new wells. Bond rates have not been increased in decades, the report said.

Let's save for another day the lessons governments could learn about properly pricing other assets they own, such as highways, airways, and bandwidth.

ANOTHER CONTESTED THANKSGIVING.

That's a tradition almost as old as Thanksgiving, certainly as old as this weblog.

I'll repeat my message.

I give thanks for your readership and your comments.

Spare a few moments thanks for the young people in harm's way around the world, for the people in emergency services who deserve to sit down to the turkey without the alarm ringing, for the people in transportation, tourism, and entertainment passing on their family gatherings to enhance yours.

And yes, if your assessment of risks allows you to travel and to gather with friends or relatives, do so.  There are no guarantees of another opportunity next year.

LET'S GET STEAMED UP.

We've been waiting, and there is good news out of Cumberland, Maryland.  "The world’s largest operating compound Mallet steam locomotive is back on the main line."  After a few test runs, possibly during the long weekend, the Polar Express trains of December 17, 18, and 19 will have neither eight tiny reindeer nor a Pere Marquette Berkshire on the point.

It's possible to reach Cumberland and the Western Maryland Scenic by train, and perhaps it's time to consider another such excursion for the summer.

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS.

On the eve of the Thanksgiving season, a global short take.

Inequality has declined in many ways. But when thinking about inequality, it is essential to remember that humanity was once almost universally poor, hungry, and miserable. In a state of widespread deprivation, any progress can create inequality. But equality of misery isn’t desirable, making [vice president Kamala] Harris’s claim about a rise in global inequality highly misleading.

Yes, and many of the gains of the past thirty years have been squandered thanks to the corona tyranny.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

Apparently, if you want to read up on supper clubs, there are several books that deal with the subject.

I might have to educate myself.  These days "supper club" calls to mind Friday fish fry, and weekend prime rib, and a relish tray (meaning celery slices and the likes) and no reservations, so chill at the bar and enjoy some brandy old fashioneds until your name is called.  But then there's this.  "Supper clubs went through phases, like the novelty restaurants of the '60s: Dutch's Sukiyaki House on Milwaukee's south side; the futuristic Hartwig's Gobbler Supper Club and Motel in Johnson Creek; the Pyramid outside Beaver Dam, shaped like an actual pyramid that rose from the surrounding farm fields."  That sukiyaki house by the airport was a favorite with my parents, who went so far as to buy an electric frying pan to make their own version of sukiyaki at home.  Later they, and then their children, figured out stir frying.  But a supper club in the Japanese fashion?  Might have to get the book just for that.

It gets better.

Supper club owners through the decades were characters in their own right, including bootleggers and makers of moonshine during Prohibition and gambling scofflaws. [Author Ron] Faiola documents scrapes, a bombing and other rough (and even lethal) stuff.

And there were the one-of-a-kind club owners, like Paul "Frenchy" La Pointe of Frenchy's on the east side. "He was kind of a Runyonesque character," Faiola said.

La Pointe, who operated a speakeasy downtown in Prohibition, hired the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Short to perform at his midcentury supper club; a song, "Frenchy's Boogie," was written for La Pointe, Faiola said. Later, the club served exotic-game dinners.

That's what I recall about Frenchy's, the exotica on the menu, something Lombardi era Packers also remarked upon.  Didn't strike me as belonging to the same category as Clifford's Supper Club, still in business with the same neon sign they had when your Superintendent was in grade school, along Forest Home Avenue in Hales Corners.  In addition, the first establishment the author could find that called itself a "supper club" was in London.  The article notes it wanted somebody with good bartending skills.  No mention of fish fries (well, fish and chips) or prime rib in the article.  Perhaps in the book.

THE SILLIEST OBSERVATION OF THE DAY.

A lot of people in Chicago question the judgement of Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy.  But those two are at least making an effort to guide a football team.  Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dahleen Glanton, on the other hand, is off somewhere in Wolkenkuckucksheim.  "Rittenhouse verdict was message to white youth: If you believe Black lives matter, your life means nothing."  No, seriously.

“Don’t get involved with social justice reform. Don’t protest senseless police killings. Just sit back and enjoy your white privilege. If you take to the streets with the Black Lives Matter crowd, you might end up dead. And we’re going to do everything possible to make sure your killer walks free.”

In other words, young white people, if you believe that Black lives matter, your life means nothing.

There is no evidence the jury knowingly became accomplices in making sure this message came through loud and clear. Though overwhelmingly white, the jurors appeared to do their due diligence by listening to testimony and deliberating about 26 hours before reaching a not guilty verdict.

Sorry, no.  As far as I know, nobody in Kenosha took a shot at people carrying signs and singing songs outside the courthouse.  Call attention that way, you might even win some people over.  On the other hand, if there are people who understand "no justice, no peace" to mean "give us what we want or we'll have a temper tantrum," and that temper tantrum might include burning a neighborhood and looting stores, other people are going to fight back.  Pick your martyrs and your arguments more carefully, Ms Glanton.

CRITICAL STUDIES ARE NORMATIVE PER SE.

Let's open with a methodological point.

It's likely, dear reader, that while you are reading this, somewhere there is an economics class going on where the professor is explaining the distinction between "positive" and "normative" modes of analysis.  Shorter form: an intellectually coherent explanation of a phenomenon ought not be honored as a justification for that phenomenon.

Thus, in economics, we might start with the premise that people act in what they perceive to be their best interests, and as a consequence, people with more valuable skills get paid more.  But an ethical professor will counsel students that it is in no way proper to run around arguing that people should act in what they understand their best interests to be, or that people should be paid the value of their marginal products.  And we get a lot of mileage over figuring out whether we get better explanatory power out of pushing models based on those assumptions further into the anomalies, or whether relaxing some of those assumptions (endowment effects, hysteresis, sunk costs matter) is more useful.  But then the behavioral economists who like to work from those revised assumptions have a tendency to get normative too fast, to their discredit.

I offer that prologue by way of introducing a caution.  Note, in higher education, how changing the terminology by which we understand intellectual capability from categories like "educable mentally retarded" and "profoundly retarded" and "feeble-minded" to "intellectually challenged" or the catch-all "differently abled" might have taken some of the sting out of calling attention to a person's intellectual talents, and at the same time, it might have enabled the continued infusion of special education into what used to be higher education, in a way that isn't turning out well.

Now I turn to a recent Eugene Volokh column suggesting that Old Dominion's Allyn Walker wishing to distinguish "minor-attracted people" from "pedophiles" might be academic freedom in action.

Studying people who are attracted to minors is clearly protected by academic freedom principles, and is indeed important to figuring out ways to prevent them from acting on these impulses. It seems likely that there are many millions of people like that; whether we want to change their attraction (if that's even possible) or just to get them not to act on that attraction, we need to study them and to study what allows some of them to resist their impulses.

Many adults, after all, resist their sexual impulses; adults who might prefer having multiple sexual partners, or who fantasize about multiple sexual partners, nonetheless remain faithful to their spouses. Many adults who are deeply attracted to someone with whom they know they shouldn't be sexually involved resist such temptations. Many priests or monks or nuns who have normal sexual interests in others resist that attraction because they believe that abstinence from sex is part of their religious calling.

Perhaps this is possible for adults who are attracted to children (I certainly hope it is). Perhaps it's not. But only being open to seriously studying this, including in ways that morally condemn only people who act on their attraction and not those who merely feel the attraction, can help us figure that out.

Yes, although once Student Affairs gets involved, terminology that might be specific to the discourse practice of abnormal psychology or sociology becomes mandatory.  That's the same way the priors of critical race theory become the training points of the diversity office.  "First, you take the stigma away from the attitude, then to take the stigma away from acting on the attitude."

If that isn't enough for one day, have a look at this.

Mad-positive pedagogy works by addressing and countering the ableism and sanism that is rampant within university practices and systems. For instance, some universities have begun offering Mad Studies, which aims to question what society takes for granted about mental illness.

Trauma-informed pedagogy takes an intersectional approach at recognizing different types of traumas and stresses that range from pandemic-related trauma, historical trauma, individual, community, and other types of general stressors.

That's making quite the jump from positive (attempting to understand the consequences of teaching as if all students are normal) to normative (requiring the faculty to add more special-education to their skill set.)  Oh, and teach five classes of even more Distressed Material, and keep your research current, and don't bother asking for a pay raise.

The logic bomb will detonate.

A CORONA TWIST ON THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BAKE SALE?

Discriminatory pricing at campus bake sales used to be a way of calling attention to perceived inequalities of varying kinds, and if your tariff displeased the administrators, you'd have problems.  That the newest post on that theme is ten years old suggests there are other ways to engage in guerrilla theater, or perhaps that everybody is too tired to call attention.

But then, there's a student project at Michigan State.  "Recently, a MeAnna Durham set up a display at Michigan State University charging $10 for masks to White students, but giving them away for free to non-White students."

The message seems to have been lost on at least some students.

Matthew Bauerle, a graduate student, said he was confused about what the project was trying to prove.

“An explicit goal was to get people to say ‘what if it was reversed’ which the student said was the actual case in the USA. I don’t know of any place that explicitly gives out product to white people for free but price gouges minorities,” Bauerle told Campus Reform.

Bauerle also explained why the social experiment was not a good idea, and how it may have broken university guidelines.

“My opinion was that it was a disgusting project that explicitly violates University policy. Because masks are required for most indoor activities, it could be interpreted to be a white only fee for activities," he said. "The fact that this was a class project makes it worse because it was approved by a professor.”

And perhaps Student Affairs have filled the campus with enough programming that students treat anything that looks like the Diversity Hustlers are at work as just more background noise.

Ronin Hackworth, also a student, told Campus Reform, “There’s a weird fascination with race in universities and MSU is certainly no expectation to that.”

Hackworth added, “With the university the way it is, I’ve learned to just kind of roll my eyes and get on with my day.”

Michigan State officials have not responded to Campus Reform.

WE WON'T KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES OF TRASHING BOURGEOIS CONVENTIONS UNTIL WE EXPERIENCE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ABSENCE.

I'm returning to a familiar theme, but this time in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.  The Reader's Digest condensed version is "Underclass interacts with underclass: lives are made worse, or lives are ended."  Here's how that plays out for The American Conservative's Declan Leary.

The standard line from sympathetic but critical liberals like Atlantic columnist David French is that he never should have been there. This is true, actually. Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been there, because other people should have. The city’s police force should have been capable of maintaining peace on the streets. If that failed, the elected governor should have sent in the National Guard. As the last resort, private citizens should be capable of stepping up. When the maintenance of order demands the use of force, public spaces should be protected by men with guns, who know how to use them and how not to.

It transpires that there were other private citizens with guns in Kenosha that evening. That link goes to an article that Rachel Campos-Duffy's daughter Evita posted, and the social media engagement might be creating as much congestion as Thanksgiving traffic on the Dan Ryan.  The money quote: "Any able-bodied man over 16 years old had a moral obligation to defend Kenosha against vandals, looters, and arsonists attacking while police stood down."  Wisconsin governor Tony Evers (D - Public Instruction) comes in for some deserved stick in that article, but it's Mr Leary's points I want to address.

Kyle Rittenhouse is not that—though his actions and apparent instincts suggest he is the kind of man who, given better formative circumstances, would be. As it is, he’s a naive kid who fell in with some LARPers, who really were (in perhaps the one characterization Thomas Binger managed to get right) mostly just “wannabe soldiers acting tough.” In the Week, Samuel Goldman wrote about them at length, “marginal men to whom flames and bullets are more appealing than their chances for a quiet life … the lonely, damaged men our educational, economic, and political institutions seem to generate in large numbers.” Nobody who watches the videos of that night or has followed the progression of testimony in court can conclude in good faith that, along with these other would-be protectors, Kyle—who, for instance, made the initial, basic blunder of getting himself left alone in a hostile environment—knew what he was doing.

This points to another big-picture concern. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same system that left Kyle Rittenhouse feeling like he had to defend his streets with a rifle also failed to prepare him to do so very competently. When society collapses because the men are all too soft to maintain order, neither those men nor the sons they’ve raised can really be expected to put it back together again.

Let us leave for another day whether three shots, three targets down is "not very competently" defending yourself.  Let us experience the consequences of the absence of bourgeois convention.

The great tragedy of Kenosha is that, in a matter of days, civilization collapsed so fully that the only people willing to stand against chaos were teenagers and twenty-somethings who barely knew how to shoot, much less how to fight, and not at all how to establish or maintain control. That is the reason people died, and the reason Kyle Rittenhouse will spend the rest of his life with the weight of having killed them: the wholesale dereliction of basic duty by an ineffectual government, and the inability of the whole society to form men as capable as they are willing to step into the breach. Once the regime finally crawled out of its bunker, with whole sections of the city turned to ash, the best it could manage was to send some effeminate mediocrity to prosecute the youngest of the LARPers for killing a pedophile and another violent criminal in ham-fisted self-defense.

If Evita Duffy's reporting is correct, there were other armed adults protecting the business district, and it might be that in focusing on protecting their property rather than rushing to put out dumpster fires, they stayed out of the unfamiliar waters Kyle Rittenhouse found himself in.

The Samuel Golden essay Mr Leary refers to makes for instructive reading.

Even if he isn't guilty of murder and his open carrying of a rifle was legal, Rittenhouse's decision to enter a "war zone" was extremely stupid. It does not matter whether he believed he was helping to maintain order. Despite the American mythology of indomitable voluntarism, sometimes it's better just to stay home.

But the same is true of Rittenhouse's alleged victims. Initially characterized as harmless bystanders, it turned out that they included a homeless convicted child abuser who was treated for a suicide attempt on very day he died; a demonstrator with his own record of violent conduct; and a gun enthusiast and self-appointed (though also certified) paramedic loosely affiliated with something called the People's Revolution movement.

To put it bluntly, these are the profiles of people who find trouble without looking very hard.

To continue the bluntness, these people experienced the consequences of the absence of bourgeois convention.

Previous misdeeds aren't legally relevant, of course, but their biographies suggest Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreuz had more in common with Rittenhouse and each other than you might expect from the contingent circumstances of their encounter. To different degrees, these men share histories of family instability, domestic abuse, and run-ins with the law. From this perspective, the real story here may not be the ideological clash that fascinates commentators. Instead, it's a tragic encounter among lost "boys" (Rosenbaum, the oldest and most disturbed, was 36, Huber and Grosskreuz were in their 20s, and Rittenhouse was just 17) for whom political causes were likely a pretext for seeking excitement, camaraderie, and danger.

And sometimes, public officials get it right.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) drew much derision and some praise for suggesting there is something very wrong with a society that offers few prospects to the lonely, damaged men our educational, economic, and political institutions seem to generate in large numbers. The tragedy in Kenosha suggests he's right.

Justice is served, according to Rod Dreher.  Deconstruct those institutions at your peril.

ANOTHER MOSTLY PEACEFUL WEEKEND.

In Chicago,  14-year-old boy among 5 killed in weekend shootings in Chicago, 34 other people wounded, including 6 teens.

In Milwaukee,  Two people shot and killed on the northwest side of Milwaukee.  The Journal-Sentinel also helpfully notes,   "The driver suspected of plowing through the Waukesha holiday parade Sunday —  killing five people and injuring nearly 50 others — had an ongoing domestic violence case and was out of custody after prosecutors recommended an "inappropriately low" bail in the case, the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office said Monday."  "Inappropriately low" bail is the latest "mostly peaceful protests?"

Meanwhile, over half a million heavily armed people took to the North Woods in quest of deer. or at least that was their story.  I had to dig around in the search engines to find out what happened.  The top story is apparently an elk that was collateral damage, in Columbia County, where elk are protected.  "The [Department of Natural Resources] has not said if that person is from Wisconsin."  I did find a report of somebody carelessly cleaning a rifle indoors.

A 9-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound to his leg when a man's rifle was accidentally discharged during a cleaning, according to the Door County Sheriff's Office.

The sheriff's office reported that when a 45-year-old man mishandled his gun while cleaning it, a shot fired and struck the boy Sunday morning in the Town of Nasewaupee. The child was lying on the couch at the time.

The child was airlifted to a Green Bay hospital to be treated for his injuries.

I also found an editorial out of far northern Antigo suggesting that public officials aren't paying careful enough attention to the risks associated with hunting from tree stands.

The Wisconsin DNR doesn’t investigate how treestand accidents happen, and hospitals aren’t required to document the injuries and their outcomes. In contrast, the DNR is required to thoroughly investigate, and hospitals document, every shooting incident. Those data tell us that Wisconsin averaged 0.75 gunshot deaths annually during the past decade’s deer seasons.

Thus, if a hunter had been shot during the opening weekend, we would likely have heard about it.

COMMON SENSE FROM AN ILLINOIS DEMOCRAT.

Senator Dick Durbin writes, "Nuclear power once seemed like science fiction, but Illinoisans made it a reality. If we want to safeguard the planet for our children and grandchildren, there are few tools as powerful as nuclear."  Illinois utilities burn a lot of neutrons, and it's foolish to reduce the carbon footprint of the electric utilities country or worldwide without some nuclear plants.

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE IS A LOGIC BOMB.

I'm probably doing the subtleties of the arguments in Critique of Pure Tolerance some violence when I summarize it that way.  But if you're going to suggest that open inquiry and tolerance of opposing points of view is repressive, because it gives people doing things you dislike the opportunity to defend those things, even (or especially) if you view yourself as on the side of the angels, or whatever their secular equivalents are, and they are standing in your way, and you therefore have the obligation to suppress them and their arguments, sooner or later the suppressors are going to come for you.

I found a Bari Weiss essay in Commentary that gets to the heart of the matter.

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

And the point, argues Robert Pondiscio, is to dismantle the master's house.

Education Week’s Stephen Sawchuk observed, “Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism.” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, two founders of the CRT movement, write in their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, “Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

To put the matter as mildly as possible, it would be strange to think that a system of thought that questions the “very foundations of the liberal order” would be regarded as anything other than an existential threat to an education system built on that very order. It should be obvious that these foundational concepts are key to understanding why reasonable people might have reservations about introducing CRT to the classroom. But CRT’s skepticism of rational thought, liberalism, universal values, and objective knowledge was mentioned in less than 5 percent of CRT news articles. Eliding this is particularly egregious, since the failure to note any intellectual objection leaves readers free to assume that objections to CRT are rooted in racism, not rationality or a defense of Enlightenment views and values. One doesn’t need a study—eyes and ears will suffice—to acknowledge that this is precisely how the debate has played out. CRT is not “just teaching honest history,” it’s a revolutionary doctrine.

The logic bomb detonates. Is anybody surprised that denying coherent beliefs might generate incoherence, or counterrevolution?

ANOTHER DOOMSDAY ENVIRONMENTALIST REFUTED.

Look, it borders on cruelty to call attention to the failed predictions of doomsday environmentalists.  Every so often, though, something comes to light that offers a little play value in a winter of discontent.  To set the stage, consider a passage in one of the doomsday tomes of the late 1960s, I forget which one, which was contrasting the wastefulness of single-use metal cans in the developed countries with the great value a single metal can might have to a poor family somewhere in the developing world.  That might have been the same tome that raised the prospect of people in the rich countries mining their dumps to get at the metal in those long-ago-discarded, now rusty, cans.

Reality turned out somewhat differently.  First, there's a lot of recycling value in those cans, and the steel companies have been able to make better grade product out of scrap.  Second, in the developing world, those metal cans might be more valuable as scrimshaw than as an electric furnace charge.  "Crude and very funky, but very desirable models of some real classics. These are totally Third-World. Fabricated out of metal scraps and hand-painted, in outdoor workshops. Incredibly interesting that these find their way to our markets, and are even sanctioned and licensed by Volkswagen! We find them very interesting and desirable, and think they fit into any collection."

That's right, dear reader, the clutter in my mailbox from merchants and eleemosynary institutions seeking to separate me from my money is rising to Festive Season levels.

But if you're looking for something to do during those long winter nights, there are ways to scratch-build your own beer can models.  And learn a few things, such as you can field strip a nine volt transistor radio battery to get six AAA cells.

Let the record show that at least one of the old-style silk-screened metal boxcars populating the model railroad uses what might have been discarded can-stock, based on what's printed on the inside of the sides.

CONSTRUCTIVE SELF-CRITICISM.

Bari Weiss left New York's Times in part because of the struggle-session culture the newbies were imposing on the place.  She now uses the form of a confession in a good way.

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

She, along with much of the establishment commentariat, did not have the advantage of having a radio turned to Packer coverage, and more than a little analysis of the unrest in Kenosha and Madison last year.

Thus Cold Spring Shops didn't post a lot on those cases, as there were other things to pay attention to.  But Wisconsin media understood how the law works in America's Dairyland.  The key to what happened on Friday's verdict was that once the state failed to establish reasonable doubts about Kyle Rittenhouse acting in self defense with respect to any person, he was not guilty with respect to the death or injury of that person.  Only if the state establishes reasonable doubt can the jury work out the level of offense.  And there are people in Wisconsin who would like to revisit the long gun laws, in order that late adolescents (sixteen to eighteen) may own for hunting and sport shooting purposes, but must keep the guns broken down and cased anywhere away from the field or range.

To admit that the press, in the main, got just about every key fact in the Rittenhouse case wrong — that he crossed state lines with a gun, that he had the gun illegally, that he had no connection to Kenosha, that he was connected to white supremacist groups — has nothing to do with whether Kyle Rittenhouse should have gone to Kenosha that day. It has nothing to do with where one stands on the question of open carry. (I am opposed). Or whether or not a teenager should be allowed to walk around with a semiautomatic rifle. (I find it baffling that this is legal.)

No teenager should have been walking around the chaos in Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle that night. Still, doing so does not forfeit your right to self-defense.

Rittenhouse and his violent acts (justified or unjustified) are tragic. But it is a tragedy that could have been avoided. We saw the night of August 25 what can occur when the state fails or refuses to do what it is uniquely charged to do: maintain the rule of law.

It did not help that in many places last summer, cities and police forces indicated or explicitly said they wouldn’t defend people’s property from destruction or burglary during the unrest. And it didn’t help our understanding of what transpired on August 25 that we were told repeatedly by national media outlets that there weren’t riots, and there wasn’t violence in Kenosha that night until Kyle Rittenhouse discharged his weapon. We could all see the blocks of burning buildings with our own eyes.

To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It is simply to acknowledge reality. It is to say that facts are still facts and that lies are lies. It is to insist that mob justice is not justice. It is to say that media consensus is not the equivalent of due process.

Let's say that the tourist trolley in Kenosha is transiting a downtown area that looks more like South Minneapolis or the Twelfth Street neighborhood of Detroit than like a place to bring the kids to see the dinosaurs.

GOVERNMENT FAILURE SHOULD NOT BE FOREVER.

I've been documenting the failure of Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker's (D - Lake Geneva) corona tyranny for over a year.  I most recently argued, "I'm not hearing the governor or any of the functionaries suggesting that the infections and deaths would be higher still but for the ukases."

Look, I'm just a guy with a weblog and some F. U. money.  I'm not the mayor of Naperville.  "Steve Chirico on Friday said COVID infection rates in neighboring states without mask mandates are similar to those of Illinois."  Welp, there it is: lift the indoor mask mandate.  Naperville is probably too establishment a city to declare itself a sanctuary city with respect to the corona tyranny.  I do observe a lot of non-observance of the mandates at businesses elsewhere.

Kevin "Healthy Skeptic" Roche, who has some understanding of health policy, notes, "The governmental response to the epidemic has, in my opinion, generally been atrocious, with particularly pathetic communication to the public."  Dear reader, read and understand that post in full.  Here is a tease.

In any event, some genius decided that telling people to stay home, closing businesses, closing schools, just shutting people in, would interrupt transmission. Kind of funny since a lot of transmission occurs in the home. All I will say is that people can do all the dumb modeling studies they want, look at epidemic curves everywhere and explain how any of those tactics made any difference, especially in the long run.

Our public health experts, most of whom are employed by the government or academic medical centers, have distinguished themselves with their unrelenting poor advice, usually backed with no data or research. And I say this seriously, while some of these people may be bright and productive, you end up in government for a reason and people in both government and academia are highly risk-averse and not very good at logical analysis or sound decision-making. And as Exhibit A, I give you the responses they have crafted and are still crafting to this epidemic. Two years in, no evidence that any of it works–closing things down, testing everyone constantly and tracing contacts, masking, social distancing, plastic barriers every where–none of it has made a bit of difference. But they are still pushing the same insipid, inane measures, because by God, they might work this time. The politicians and the public health experts lack the basic common sense to say “we aren’t going to do anything until we have clear evidence that it will actually lessen spread”.

I would add: people in both government and academia are quite good at peacocking and straining at gnats.  There has to be a better way.  Maybe healthy skepticism works.

What would a better approach have been? It would have started with more respect for real data and science and more tailoring of mitigation measures to address the obvious bifurcation of serious disease. We should have focused on protection of the frail elderly, although realistically there was never a lot that could be done, and we forced absolute isolation on an already lonely group. We never should have closed schools or businesses. Mask mandates were and remain a delusion and a fetish. So yes, we should have accepted the inevitable and let people make their own decisions, with as good a data and advice as we could provide, about what activities they would engage in and what protective measures they would adopt. We would be in no different place than we are now, just faster and with less total pain.

CV-19 is taking us where we were always going to go. It is going to run through the population until enough of us have adaptive immunity, potentially aided by vaccines, to keep transmission and serious disease to a very low level. Florida may be there. Even then, it isn’t going away. Can anyone in their right mind actually believe we are going to suppress this virus?

"Zero covid" is a dream of the followers of Leon Trotsky, but he did qualify that question with an "in their right mind."

It is long past time for the mask mandates to end.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Classic Trains contributor Kevin P. Keefe recalls Amtrak's first in-house provided system timetable, which took effect on 14 November 1971.

What got me thinking about the system timetable this week was an email from my friend and former boss Kevin McKinney, founder of Passenger Train Journal and now a columnist for the magazine. McKinney, you see, is also a timetable true believer, and has the war stories to prove it, including this one from November 1971, 50 years ago this week.

Back then, McKinney was working as the railroad’s manager of scheduling and timetables, having graduated the year before from the transportation program at Michigan State. A big day loomed on the calendar: November 14, the day the first Amtrak-created timetable was issued; earlier ones had come from the publishers of the old Official Guide.

You'll find scans here of both the original, Official Guide typeface timetable and the airline-style quick reference part (subsequently eliminated as connectivity went in the dumper) of the 14 November issue.  There might not be the collectible value of a baseball card, and yet among ferroequinologists, there might be some collector value.  "That Nov. 14, 1971, timetable would be a nice collector’s item to have. The full-page ad on the back is an interesting blend of promotion and apologia. More than anything, it reminds me of the dedication of those early Amtrak officials — Kevin McKinney among them — who considered the passenger train a calling, not just a job."

Yes, it had to be a challenge selling a new service under the blurb "We're making the trains worth traveling again," and in a later campaign bragging on selecting the 1200 or so best cars from among what the freight railroads had left, and had allowed to run down.

For a while, though, the timetable and the revised train consists were encouraging things to see.  There's a series of pictures here from Thanksgiving weekend, 1971.  Just for a tease, though, imagine Burlington Northern coaches and a Gulf Mobile and Ohio parlor car running on a Hiawatha service to Minneapolis.

These days, there's only one train between Chicago and St. Paul, and you're on your own making connections between the St. Louis trains and the Milwaukee trains, let alone among any of the other regional trains stemming from Chicago.

SOMETIMES YOU DO GET NICE THINGS IF YOU'RE FROM MILWAUKEE.

Not often, and is confusing it with Minneapolis a microaggression, or referring to it as a Chicago suburb an insult?

Every so often, though, something unexpected happens.  "In the championship matchup of an NCAA-style tournament of 64 American cities on Twitter, Milwaukee crushed New York, beating the most populous city in America on Friday by a whopping 70.4% to 29.6%, with a total of 11,994 votes cast."  Perhaps, because the poll was set up by what appears to be an academic, rather than a blue-check, there wasn't the sort of online engagement there otherwise might have been.  But so what?

Nolan Gray, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, launched the bracket at the end of October to determine what people think is the best city in America.

And, of course, who didn’t think Milwaukee wouldn’t reign supreme, what with the Bucks, Brewers, Summerfest and all that delicious beer.

Gray started the round of 64 on Oct. 26 and 27. People had 24 hours to vote via Twitter polls. The No. 10 seed Milwaukee narrowly beat out No. 7 seed Austin in the first round, 53% to 47%.

During the round of 32, Milwaukee blew second-seeded Miami out of the water, 59.5% to 40.5%.

The round of 16 was held on Halloween. Once again, Milwaukee dominated. It beat out No. 3 seed San Francisco, 59% to 41%.

Wisconsin competed with its neighbor to the west in the quarterfinal round, with Milwaukee taking down Minneapolis, 54.8% to 45.2%.

In the semifinals, Milwaukee faced border rival Chicago. And while it was a nail-biter, Milwaukee pulled out the win, 51.9% to 48.1%, to move on to the championship game against New York, where it once again reigned supreme.

On Saturday, after proclaiming Milwaukee the winner, Gray reached out to his great expansion of friends living on a Great Lake, tweeting, “So, uh, to my 2,000 new Milwaukeean followers: I’ve never been to your city and now feel an obligation to correct that. Anyone want to show me around?”

Here are a few possibilities.  Yes, that reads a lot like the usual metrofexual twee stuff, and it might be wise to plan your trip for the summer, and work in a Brewer game or a harbor cruise to go with the festivals, but check out the festivals.  "From Juneteenth celebrations, The Polish Fest, the Lakefront Festival of Art, and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to Art in Bloom, the Locust Street Festival, Croatia Fest, and the Dragonboat Festival, Milwaukee has earned its reputation as 'The City of Festivals.'"  And, selbstverständlich, "drink das Bier."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Half a million heavily armed people will be taking to the woods of Wisconsin.  It's deer season.

1.  Democrats want you to be miserable.  Your continued misery is their formula for winning elections.  "Democrats desperately need Black America and various other disparate groups to remain a permanent underclass voting bloc if they — the Democrats — are to survive as a viable party."

2.  Upcoming ulcers for tax preparers.  "A tax bill in April for money the government advanced to you, on top of inflation that shows no signs of slowing down and a brittle supply chain?"

3.  The slow-motion emergency.  "Indeed, underinclusiveness of this sort is often regarded as a telltale sign that the government's interest in enacting a liberty-restraining pronouncement is not in fact 'compelling.'"  We leave for another day whether subjecting all businesses, irrespective of their size, to the same mandate, has the effect of raising the costs for the smaller firms.

4.  Let kids play.

5.  The fruits of deplorable-shaming: "They lied to you because they think you're stupid."

6.  Why I refer to corporate welfare for roadhogs.  "Operators of pavement-pummeling heavy trucks and bulk-commodities hauling inland waterways barges have been mooching off the public purse for generations." It's Railway Age, and the railroad rent-seeking is on display.

7.  Manage your own risks.  "Getting Democrats to just say that — out loud and in public — is the first step to making it happen."

8.  Let's go, Brandon.  "His foremost mistake was overestimating an attenuated electoral mandate for pedestrian governance as a permission slip for passing nearly the entirety of the progressive agenda in the space of less than a year."

9.  Unintended Consequences come for the Fatal Conceit.  "As a litany of crises induced by ill-advised policies sweep the country, Democrats’ grip on power is now endangered by a disgruntled American public, a newly energized Republican Party, and internal divisions threatening to tear the Democrat coalition apart."

10.  Take the valley girl with you, Brandon.  "It is high levels of inflation, high levels of crime, and high levels of Kamala Harris."

11.  Tell your statistics to shut up.  "[H]ow many 100,000 fan football games with no masks, distancing, or worries do you need?"  Plus some serious talk about asymptomatic carriers false positives.  "[A]t a million tests a day, even at zero covid, you could not hit this."

12.  It is time to learn to live with endemic coronavirus.  "'We want control,' Fauci said. 'And I think the confusion is, at what level of control are you going to accept it in its endemicity?'" At least that Giftzwerg is recognizing reality.  "A degree of realism means ending any mitigation effort we don’t want to carry on in perpetuity."  A "degree of realism" also means telling the Giftzwerg to stuff it.  "The only way out of this in America is to stop following CDC’s guidelines, just the way we already do in so many other domains of life."

13.  Self-styled progressives, nostalgic for the food economy of the Civil War.  "The grocery cartel has created an illusion of choice and efficiency to disguise their profiteering off of the American consumer, who is unwillingly asked to trade abundance for resilience."   Seriously.  "Additionally, the authors urge the establishment of more grocery cooperatives, food hubs, and local processors."

14.  Don't like being called "woke?"  Would you prefer to be called "moonbats?"  "If your movement finds itself repeatedly changing the names of things and inventing new euphemisms to break the connection between names and things — or, worse, inveighing against names themselves — you really should reconsider whether the things you’re defending are actually defensible in clear, frank, and open language."  Let's be clear.  "A movement that fears any name at all for what it proposes to do is, ultimately, trying to smother any sort of democratic debate of its goals."

15.  Sic semper tyrannis.  "[Kansas governor Laura] Kelly has only to look at her neighbors to know top-down government orders to control a virus have been an abject failure. States like Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota had some of the least restrictive pandemic orders in the nation, suffered no worse from COVID-19 than other states, and are now leading the nation in [low rates of] unemployment."

16.  In order to be competitive in a district, you have to have a proper message.  "While far more fair than [Wisconsin Senate's district proposals], they still leave Democrats with a built-in disadvantage, pointing to the need of Democrats to broaden their base."  (Lots of stuff for map geeks and electoral rule enthusiasts at the link.)

17.  This week in Progressive Cluelessness.  "Many Americans are noticing the rising price of goods from sour cream to carburetors as politicians sound the alarm on an inflation crisis."

18.  Indeed.  "[Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal] is a big deal not only because of the merits of the individual case, which manifestly shouldn’t have been brought, but because all the effort around it by the left was aimed at establishing the principle that their thugs could riot in the streets, but that normals don’t dare resist. This is a huge setback for that effort."

THAT DOCKED TAIL IS ATTEMPTING TO WAG A VERY HEAVY DOG.

So did I characterize, last week, a Pew disaggregation of political affiliations in these United States.  "But in the same way that there is something absurd about a continent governed by an island, there is something absurd about a polity being governed by a vanguard."

Let's add to that absurdity.  The vanguard is turning off people who might be disposed to agree with them on some things.

What [political consultant Danny] Barefoot found is that while the women agreed with Democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

In Virginia, the Democrats gave suburban voters all sorts of reasons to not want a Donk anywhere near a school.  Note how the class divide manifests itself.

The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped.

Yes, Republican operatives and friendly talkers helped, and yet, the views of the voters aligned more with the criticisms those operatives and talkers offered.

It was the purest expression of the way Republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a GOP theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of Trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from Republicans into the arms of Democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by Democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.

You have to keep reading the article, but eventually you see how docked the tail is, and how big the dog.

Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.

Now, for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party. Take, for instance, one of the women in Barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if Democrats share their cultural values, she said, “They fight for the right things and I usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.”

It's not the education mom who needs to be re-educated, it's the faculty lounge rhetoric that needs to go.  Otherwise, the Democrats risk alienating more of what used to be their coalition.

Cultural traditionalists, according to [political strategist Andrew] Levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think Democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”

Levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many Black and Latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that Democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of Democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.

What the opposing parties, whether Republican or of some other stripe, are not yet doing is improving their pitch to those voters.  "A major new survey from Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics points to another way that cultural chasm can be bridged: with candidates who focus on [traditional Democratic] economic issues but don’t talk like juniors at Oberlin."