The number of inpatient beds occupied by patients with COVID is currently 93,282, which is below the number of beds occupied in mid-September. And many of those are in the hospital for other reasons, but just happened to test positive for COVID.
What’s more, the seven-day moving average for the number of people who died with COVID is lower than it was on Oct. 24, which was the day that the current wave started – 1,100 compared with 1,323.
That’s strikingly different from previous waves, which as the chart above shows, saw daily deaths starting to climb along with cases, with only about a two-week lag.
If this outbreak had been like the previous ones, COVID-related deaths would have started climbing weeks ago.
What does this mean? Most likely it means that the disease is getting less lethal as it gets more transmittable, which is how viruses work.
That might be good news for most of us, but Giftzwerg would have to work on his fastball.
We can only speculate, but our guess is that power-mad politicians and public health tyrants like Anthony Fauci don’t want this sort of good news getting out. Better to keep the public in a constant state of panic so they can be more easily manipulated and controlled.
I really wish politicians of all stripes would devote more thought to, oh, making appeals to broader segments of the public. Instead, they're all about the rule rigging. I've edited each of the following passages to strip away partisan references and other clues. Decide for yourself, dear reader, who is being called out.
Excerpt 1: "This is all about installing ??? as a permanent majority. It’s not more complicated than that. If they can’t get ??? changed, they are going to lose big, and there’s no reason to believe ??? can otherwise turn things around another way."
Excerpt 2: "The moment ??? takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment."
Excerpt 3: "To the ??? and an increasingly large share of its [voters]1conservative base, there’s no such thing as a “legally valid” vote for ???, and no such thing as a legitimate election if ???."
Damon Linker is fearful. "The last thing America needs is another, deeper cycle of institutional delegitimation." Brace yourself, though, he sees the conditions that will bring it.
A pandemic involving a novel coronavirus, including a series of distinct variants with different fatality rates and levels of contagiousness, will inevitably produce a high degree of uncertainty among doctors and epidemiologists. At the same time, public health professionals tasked with communicating to the country how best to respond to the risk at any given moment in the pandemic understandably feel like they need to speak with authority and simplicity to be taken seriously. The tension between those poles — uncertainty in a fluid situation vs. an aspiration to authority and simplicity — is bound to produce mixed messaging and even, at times, the appearance of incompetence.
When that predictable outcome gets mixed up with the culture war, the result is something even worse — namely, the suspicion of bad faith on the part of public servants, along with the spread of corrosive distrust in experts and the institutions they lead. At its worst, this distrust can bleed over into the embrace of conspiracy theories about the government intentionally stamping out individual freedom and infringing on our bodily integrity for nefarious purposes.
Taking a broader view, the failure of the Wise Experts is yet another failure. It's been a long time coming, according to Andrew Bacevich.
A comprehensive narrative of the post-Cold War era, spanning the period from the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 through the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan just weeks ago, remains to be written. But even a preliminary account of that period will necessarily highlight its own trio of high-profile events. None of the three compares in scope or scale to the Great Depression, World War II, or the Cold War. Even so, the cumulative impact of the Iraq War, the coronavirus pandemic, and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 makes this much abundantly clear: Yesterday may be gone, but we find ourselves in a helluva mess today.
The stores of capital accrued by the exertions of the Greatest Generation have now been depleted. Mom and Dad aren’t around to bail boomers out of the fix they’ve gotten the nation into.
His conclusion? "As the calendar turns to a new year, we Americans are in for a long, hard winter."
No one man can kindle the ekpyrosis. The old institutional order, though, is out of ideas.
The party structures, the governing class, all the rest? Perhaps one of the lessons we've learned after fifty years of social change and the accretion of power by Wise Experts is that the Wise Experts don't control as much as they think they control. It's not so much a new establishment, as a chastened and less hubristic one.
I wrote that before I ever heard of Wuhan, and if anything, the past two years ought to have demonstrated that the lack of control by Wise Experts is universal. There's nothing quite like the hubris of The Best and the Brightest to accelerate the spread of distrust.
The recent surge in COVID-19 cases will sideline Illinois lawmakers for most of January.
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Senate President Don Harmon announced Thursday that the General Assembly will start the 2022 session on Wednesday. However, they have canceled session dates for Tuesday and Thursday next week.
I hear Florida is a good place to visit this time of year. If word reaches me of any legislators going on an extended fact-finding tour, I'll let you know.
Arvid Haag signed up for “Critical Whiteness Perspectives on Nordic Culture” at Stockholm University because, he said, “local pandemic grant rules had equipped him and other students with an unexpected financial aid windfall.”
Haag thought he’d “get something fun” out of the “harmless” and “absurd” class, but he soon realized many of his peers took the “American-born ideology” seriously.
Arvid bided his time, occasionally offering some “critical” comments here and there, but saved the best for last: an essay titled “Black and White Drinks,” described as “an account of what had happened from the early 20th century in the struggle between coffee and milk.”
According to Fria Tider, Haag related “how the marketing of the coffee has been characterized by highlighting ‘black and exotic elements’ of the drink. When it comes to milk, it has instead been ‘the local and white’ that has been emphasized.”
I don't know if the paper was submitted in Swedish; the rendering into Woke English is spot on.
The question one can ask is whether it is really a reconciliation between milk and coffee that has been implemented or whether adding milk to the coffee is a way to take away from the coffee its unique properties and instead impose the black drink white properties.
Milk in the coffee can with critical glasses be seen as a drink-based colonization. The hot and strong coffee cools and is rounded off in taste with the help of the milk, which thereby controls and domesticates the coffee.
Good enough for a B. Do I laugh, cry, or pop more popcorn?
Seattle socialist Rep. Pramila Jayapal takes the proverbial cake for losing.
She is the vicious chair of the “Congressional Progressive Caucus,” and the public face behind a radical mission to use the bipartisan infrastructure bill to force Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other potentially reluctant Democrats into passing the “Build Back Better” social welfare extravaganza.
During the summer and fall, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed numerous infrastructure votes because of Jayapal, who once ranted, “We will agree to the bipartisan bill if, and only if, we also pass the reconciliation bill first.”
Try not to think of a jack o'lantern in the first week of November. Or the spectacle of an even larger omnibus bill in Congress, which would have enabled the Gimme Caucus to avoid having to stake out that position.
Now for the pedantic point: in logic, "if and only if" is synonymous with "necessary and sufficient" or "implies and is implied by." We can talk about passage of the "reconciliation bill" (the latest porkulus) preceding the Gimme Caucus agreeing to the "bipartisan bill" (that saddles municipalities with yet more roads and sewer mains they can't maintain). Porkulus thus implies infrastructure, meaning porkulus is sufficient for the Gimme Caucus allowing a vote on infrastructure. I can envision a House of Representatives in which porkulus passed without any consideration of infrastructure, thus infrastructure could be necessary for porkulus, but not the only way to get porkulus.
The converse proposition, the way the representative worded it, cannot be true. The whole point of the Gimme Caucus blocking a vote on infrastructure all summer was to pass porkulus first, meaning infrastructure was not sufficient for porkulus in the House. It's a logical error commonly made. "As you may imagine, with the logic of conditions being so entwined, it is very easy to get tangled in a mess of necessary and sufficient conditions. This is especially the case when attempting to state whether one thing will cause another to happen." But logic is to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires.
Wisconsin played Arizona State in the Las Vegas Bowl. Both teams were short a few players owing to coronavirus concerns, injuries, and perhaps Combine candidates holding themselves out. Wisconsin took a 20-6 lead at halftime, and they would receive the second half kickoff.
Three and out. Three and out. Three and out. An Arizona State touchdown somewhere in the third quarter.
Thus, when Arizona State downed a punt on the Wisconsin three with about ten minutes to play in the game, you had to like Arizona State's chances. That punt play was kind of weird, with Wisconsin special teams committing a five yard "running into the kicker" penalty that rendered the primary punter hors de combat, and the replacement punter getting that second punt in a good place.
Auburn's special teams downed a punt inside the Wisconsin 1. (Yes, some replays showed that ball in the end zone, but I'm persuaded that instant replay is leading to sloppy refereeing, as the on-field guys are counting on the upstairs guys to bail them out. That's for another season.)
No doubt the Auburn fans were still hanging onto some hope at this time. Despite Wisconsin's two-touchdown lead, there were still six minutes or so to play, with the SEC's best defense and a potent offense waiting for some more snaps. And that defense came within a second of sacking quarterback John Stocco for a safety, but Stocco completed the pass for a first down. A few more runs, a few more pass plays, a few more first downs, and now it's first and goal with under two minutes to play. Auburn's coaching staff didn't prolong the obvious with spite times-out (one wishes there was some equivalent to tipping over the King in football and basketball games with the result decided), and two more running plays and a game-ending take-a-knee ends it.
Those long drives that kept the ball out of the hands of the other team's offense and ran out the clock were a key feature of the Rose Bowl seasons. It is difficult to conceive of a more fitting end to the Alvarez era at Wisconsin.
Play after play, yard after yard and second after precious second.
“They’re scary,” said Arizona State coach Herm Edwards, whose team finished 8-5. "Because when you watch them on tape, that's what they can do, they can chew up some drives. They can chew up a lot of time.
Eighteen plays.
“I kept looking up at that clock, trust me. Every time they made a first down I kept looking at the clock, I said: ‘We’re running out of time.’ ”
Ninety yards.
“We came out with the mentality that we were going to own this drive, make it ours,” [right tackle Tanor] Bortolini said. “There was nothing they could do to stop us if we all clicked.
"It was just Wisconsin football.”
Nine minutes, 57 seconds, and one first down when the defense jumped offside, which is something we know a little bit about in Packer Nation.
The game ran too long into the night for my liking, but it was worth watching, and hoisting a Sprecher in victory afterward.
Let us be grateful the Grinch didn't study critical theory at Antioch, otherwise his dislike of Christmas might have read something like this.
I don't mean to minimize the pain that we collectively (and you personally) may be experiencing as I type these words on my computer. My computer itself is one of the contributors to much of that collective pain. Its components have been mined in unsustainable and destructive ways. It was assembled in a factory where people may have suffered terribly. The fossil fuels used in its production and operation are contributing to the dire heating of our planet and the rapid extinction of species. And that's just my computer. If we take a moment to examine the impacts of the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, and the products we buy on other people and animals, the misery we leave in our path can take one's breath away.
On the Grinch’s trajectory toward redemption—from evil to good, shrunken heart to rebirthed soul—we often forget that it is the Whos’ persistent joy, their determination to sing in the face of material disaster, that makes his redemption possible.
We expect a certain degree of joy and material comfort during the Christmas season. We’ve watched enough movies to know what Christmas “should” look like: perfect tree, beautiful presents, immaculate feast. Even when these things fail us, we want to be assured of cheer and good health, familial wholeness and communal peace.
Unless you're Zoe Weil, the Grinch's soul sister.
Let us be grateful that the sourest of "cultural appropriation" scolds have not yet come for public television. Chicago's WTTW filled in the eleven p.m. block with a Christmas concert from Belmont University (in Nashville) that included a chorus of white girls performing "Go Tell It on the Mountain" in an enthusiastic gospel style, and a steel-pan and marimba version of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." Let that be your seasonal reminder that no matter the location, mission, or ownership of a college or university, all serious institutions of higher education ought consider themselves in the same business as the Ivies. And note, dear reader, that public television's Christmas programming (and yes, they still use that term) features Wheaton and DePaul and St. Thomas and St. Olaf: maybe people with high college board scores (whilst that remains a thing) never mastered the hand-bell, let alone the steel pan or the violin.
As in the past few years, the Vatican talking point remains the "marginalized shepherds." Note, though, the mask rituals. If you're playing the violin, it stays on. If you're swinging the censer, it stays on. If you're playing a wind instrument or brass, it comes off while you're playing and then it goes back on. If you're reading something, you have leave to take it off. But if you're the congregation, you have to keep your Biden muzzle on while you're reciting the Credo. Somehow, that keeps people safer than they would be, if they were breathing freely, the way the Belmont and DePaul performers were on their shows.
The differences in mask rituals strike me as contemporary parallels to formerly fraught religious practices. If you grant the premise of Christmas, which is God taking human form with the intention of being sacrificed in a cruel way to redeem the sins of humans, in order that those who believe will be in the company of the saints and angels once their earthly life ends, have you really talked yourself out of that redemption (or into that redemption) every time you conclude the Our Father with "For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever?" Likewise, do you cross yourself with two fingers extended or three, or is genuflection not part of your Christmas service? When you face the final curtain, what difference, at that point, will it make? The premise is the same in all the churches, whether they're swinging censers or handbells, crossing themselves or not, or holding services according to the Gregorian calendar, or the Julian.
With the Wuhan coronavirus proving to be good at swapping components with other coronaviruses, what difference will all that mask wearing and standing at a distance make? That's a point Ben Shapiro made. "[B]ad stuff happened to Job despite Job following all of God's requests, and that it was the pagan priests who would scold the tribe for not rain-dancing enthusiastically enough or otherwise not doing enough to propitiate the gods. It was never bad advice from the elders, no, never." Newsweek's L. R. Cohen raises a similar point. "The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested."
Unlike the Whos' Christmas, the winter cold is not pleasant, but it comes all the same.
It's the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. "Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned," they cry out. And it's not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It's politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it's really weird.
These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the "fight" against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn't care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.
It's amusing to see the people who profess the most confidence in Science and Logic disporting themselves like primitives who sense the Rain Gods are displeased.
People with little sense of history might treat the automobile as a Faustian bargain, in which people gain mobility at the cost of thousands of lives lost each year in the United States alone. I deliberately used the archaic expression "horseless carriage" to call attention to the possibility that the absence of a horse was a feature. That hearkens to a wisecrack somebody made about doomsday environmentalists years ago, something to the effect that a Gilded Age version of the Club of Rome would have extrapolated humanity smothering in horse dung by the turn of the (nineteenth to twentieth) century. Or if not smothering, perhaps being sickened: the dawning of the germ theory of disease brought with it recognition that all that horse poop in the streets had to be hazardous to your health. Yes, and the urban infrastructure of carriage houses on alleys behind the house rather than facing the street in the manner of today's snout houses might have been a way to conceal some of the stink and the slop, although that placement of the stables might have made the spread of epizootics more widespread.
But then comes Reason's Chelsea Follett with a further reason to go horseless. "Crashing Through the Snow: The Grim Sarcasm Behind 'Jingle Bells.'" Yes, I recall the full version of the song, not the etiolated cuts that fill the airwaves these days (it's so bad that some young radio guys couldn't figure out "Parson Brown" in "Winter Wonderland" despite the stanza itself providing more than enough context to puzzle it out without puzzling for three hours until their puzzlers were sore.)
In the full version, the sleigh gets into a drifting bank, and all aboard were upsot.
In the next verse, which is [these days] often skipped, the narrator relates being thrown out of the sleigh onto his back and getting laughed at by a romantic rival. His misfortune was relatively minor, but being thrown from a sleigh or carriage was not always a laughing matter.
During the time of horse-drawn vehicles, accidents frequently caused not only delays and inconveniences but also injuries and deaths. The British historian Paul Hair called the horse "one of man's most dangerous tools," arguing that "it is likely that per unit of travel the horse was more dangerous than the motor vehicle."
He quotes Britain's registrar general as noting in 1865 that "street accidents by horse carriages kill more people in a year than railways" and estimates a horse-related mortality rate of around 55 deaths annually per million people in 1874. In 2020, there were 1,516 road deaths in the United Kingdom. Divided by the current U.K. population of 67.2 million, that translates into a mortality rate from motor vehicle accidents of about 23 deaths annually per million people, making modern car rides more than twice as safe as Victorian horse carriage rides. And car deaths are becoming more rare almost everywhere.
The full study looks at a variety of violent deaths in Britain. The sources do not allow the authors to work out the death rates per passenger mile. Sometimes it's solo riders thrown from their horses, that's the nineteenth century's analogue to motorcycle fatalities. Sometimes it's multiple people hurt or killed when that surrey with a fringe on top, or that one horse open sleigh, turns over.
In the United States, that motorcycle is still a relatively dangerous way to travel.
If there were ever doubts as to the inherent dangers of riding a motorcycle, figures from Ian Savage at Northwestern University should put paid to them. In his research paper entitled 'Comparing the fatality risks in United States transportation acrossmodes and over time', Savage analyzes the number of passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009.
With a rate of 212.57, riding a motorcycle is by far the most deadly way to get around - an enormous distance ahead of the second-most dangerous mode of transport - a car or light truck - with 7.28 fatalities per billion passenger miles. To give this some more perspective, Savage writes: "A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks."
It was my practice to offer my graduate price theory students extended time for their high-stakes midterm exam. That sometimes meant a change of venue, depending on when the evening classes would arrive at our assigned classroom. One year, the only room available for the full time slot I requested was in the fieldhouse. That made for an interesting experience, as the basketball team was practicing scoring a lot of points in two minutes, and the horn kept sounding. (That team also practiced cutting down the nets for their conference tournament. The opportunity to do so arose more frequently in those days.)
The room was apparently used for health and safety briefings for the athletes, and the notion of safe sex was apparently of some importance, with condom use being something much encouraged. It's hard to at the same time urge students to take precautions and at the same time contain the rabbit culture that collegians would be tempted by simply because of their age, let alone counsel athletes to refrain from sexual harassment and other secular sins that their previous experience, possibly including during recruiting when an implicit promise of access to women was part of the pitch. That's all familiar turf. It was the juvenile art that accompanied the briefings that provoked this post. A few students put together drawings with a rubber stapled to a sketch of a cemetery or a gravestone to reinforce the message that fooling around could prove fatal, and not from some jealous rival's pistol.
These veterans of the federal bureaucracy [Doctors Birx, Fauci, and Redfield] had worked closely together during the AIDS epidemic, and their track record was hardly reassuring. Their long and costly quest to develop an AIDS vaccine ultimately failed, but they did manage to persuade the public that AIDS would spread widely beyond gay men and intravenous drug users. Redfield, with some help from Fauci, was the chief prophet of a “heterosexual breakout,” a threat that terrified Americans for more than a decade but never materialized.
But we got some scary student art out of it, as well as the playbook for the latest fearmongering.
Fauci still wasn’t satisfied, as [Stanford's Scott] Atlas discovered when Fauci complained during one meeting that Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. “I challenged him to clarify his point,” Atlas writes, “because I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘So you think people aren’t frightened enough?’ He said, ‘Yes, they need to be more afraid.’ To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. . . . Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”
Particularly once evidence of who was really at risk of a bad experience with any of the coronavirus variants emerged. By Fauci's flawed fruits shall we know him. Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis renders his verdict.
Dr. Fauci has been the man behind our nation’s COVID response from day one, and he repeatedly gives us reasons not to trust him or his judgment. I think it’s about time Fauci steps aside. He’s failed us.
Turf him out. Or maybe send his office those graveyard-and-rubber drawings, and suggest he step out of line and disappear.
In Naples, Italy, the mayor cited COVID to announce a ban on fireworks for a second straight New Year’s Eve. This was the response from citizens.pic.twitter.com/duu7Jkb7yK
It has long beenmy custom to post a Festive Season video, highlighting progress on the permanent model railroad and featuring vintage tinplate trains under the Christmas tree in the traditional fashion, to a musical accompaniment. Here is this year's video.
Thank you for looking in. I'm going to take a couple of weeks away from the social media frenzy. Catch you next year.
The Denver Post, which was a major cheerleader for Denver’s $4.9 billion FasTracks plan until it became the $7.9 billion FasTracks plan, by which time it was too late, is now a major cheerleader for the Front Range passenger train plan. It claims that an Amtrak train between Chicago and Milwaukee “shows what it could be.” Yes, because Fort Collins (population: 170,000) and Pueblo (population: 112,000) are just like Milwaukee (population: 577,000), and Denver (population: 715,000) is just like Chicago (population: 2.75 million).
Mr O'Toole did not provide a link to that Post article. Here it is. The challenge is coming up with the right kind of project and the proper use of the freight tracks the trains will use.
The possibility of a similar arrangement between Colorado and Amtrak means that for all the costs and hurdles facing the creation of a Front Range rail line — and there are many — it’s closer to reality than it might appear.
For one thing, a heavily favored 191-mile corridor between Pueblo and Fort Collins mostly would follow existing freight-rail tracks. Even with modifications needed to support passenger trains, starting up a line likely would cost a fraction of the eye-popping $10.7 billion price tag estimated by a state report earlier this year.
That estimate was for a full build-out of dedicated double-track for the entire length — a long-term, gold-standard scenario that by 2045 would allow for two dozen roundtrips each weekday serving an estimated 6,900 riders.
Building the project by increments makes sense. Amtrak's Hiawatha service started with three trips each way, and a full day in Milwaukee was not possible. It had a two-track railroad in pretty good shape to start with, and that railroad got some improvements for faster intermodal trains. The augmented service of today, with the Milwaukee airport stop, came later.
When Lily Trienens boarded a train in downtown Milwaukee that would take her more than 70 miles to visit family in the north Chicago suburbs, she got a glimpse of the possible future of rail travel back home in Colorado.
The 35-year-old Lyons resident had flown to Wisconsin’s most populous city for a quick business trip. Looking for an easy option to make the trek south, she found it for $24 — an hourlong journey on Amtrak’s Hiawatha train that deposited her at a station in Glenview, Illinois, close enough to be picked up.
“It’s worked out perfectly,” she said on a recent Thursday morning as the crop fields and barns outside her window in Wisconsin and northern Illinois gave way to Chicago’s sprawling suburban landscape. “It’s been so convenient. It’s been really easy. It’s affordable. It’s fast.”
As Colorado looks elsewhere for inspiration, the 86-mile Hiawatha line stands out as a well-established yardstick.
It costs $25 for the full trip from downtown Milwaukee’s Intermodal Station to Union Station in Chicago, a journey that includes three brief stops in between and takes just under 90 minutes — often faster than driving. Wireless internet is available and electrical outlets are at each seat. In Wisconsin, Amtrak Thruway-branded buses have connected several other cities to the Milwaukee station for two years.
The Hiawatha can reach speeds up to 79 mph in some sections, helping it to grow into Amtrak’s highest-ridership Midwest train prior to the pandemic, carrying nearly 880,000 riders in 2019. Its recent on-time rating was 95%, according to Amtrak data.
Ridership has been recovering gradually since pandemic service cuts were reversed in May, though the early August trains still included three passenger cars instead of the usual six.
As a train pulled out of Union Station just after 5 p.m. on a recent weekday, workers who commute from Wisconsin to downtown Chicago opened their laptops. Other riders sat with shopping bags from downtown stores at their feet.
For the first 10 minutes, the three-year-old Siemens locomotive pulled three older Amtrak coach cars slowly past warehouses and redeveloping westside neighborhoods. Then it accelerated, a change noticed by a 5-year-old boy with curly blond hair as he looked out the window.
“The train’s going fast!” he said.
“We’re getting up to speed,” replied his mother, Amy Bell-Ferries.
Yes, the former Milwaukee Road trackage is posted for 79 mph north of Pacific Junction, but that's not what "really starting to move" used to mean. Never mind that: you build the service for the infrastructure you have, provide the extra frequencies, and only then start thinking about free rein to 125. Get too eager to spend Federal money to build capacity for bullet trains in a relatively sparsely settled region, and you run into trouble. Think about connecting Denver to the Southwest Chief route at Trindad, and then start thinking about something resembling a corridor service toward Lincoln and Omaha or extending toward Texas. Otherwise you well might be creating a boondoggle. Note in that High Speed Rail post discussing connectivity in the Front Range the example they cited. "Planners should look at projects like Brightline Florida, which launched with hourly service. Frequent departures are important to making sure these projects are truly useful to passengers." The service did not start with hourly trains, although as rider interest increased, so did frequencies. In addition, Brightline's trains are diesel formations capable of free rein to 125 with proper signalling and grade crossing protection, meaning they don't require the really expensive tracks.
It's likely that the metrofexual aesthetes (see the first comment) will cringe at some of the entries, e.g. college sports, large meal portions, and large houses, but it's hard not to argue with root beer, complimentary ice water at eateries, and ethnic foods of all nationalities done well.
We'll close with a secular symbol of a fallen world.
The festive season of 2019-2020 turned out to be the final season for the Holiday Lights Train in Waterman. The Illinois corona tyrants placed limitations on outdoor gatherings that obviated any Easter 2020 train, and by October of 2020 the railroad had been sold and I hope children of all ages somewhere in Indiana are enjoying it.
We return to the tale this year, with the nightclubbing at Novello's where the boys met the girls. Novello's qualifies as a supper club, according to supper club maven Ron Faiola, and he also confers that status on the Carousel Club in New York City (doesn't that interfere with the change of trains in New York, as well as to the protagonists being short on funds??) and he then notes that when the guys get to their former commander's lodge in Vermont, their server delivers a relish tray. Can't get more Wisconsin than "radishes, black and green olives, and celery," even in Vermont. Maybe the cheddar was from Wisconsin, too.
That supper club book also clarifies something I noted in the earlier post, about Milwaukee's Frenchy's as very different from your canonical Wisconsin supper club. "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." Shows what I know. "Clifford's Supper Club owner Clifford Schill bought Frenchy's, kept the name, but changed the concept to Dixieland." That didn't end well.
Now I'm checking this week's television listings to see whether White Christmas will be on air somewhere. I would like to see listings for Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way, which used to be seasonal regulars.
He's raised the argument in the sense of winning all the games. But if the Bears stopped attempting to hold up Chicago politicians for stadium subsidies, he could have more conventional ownership rights.
The Green Bay Packers have won their last six meetings with the Chicago Bears and are looking like possible Super Bowl contenders. The Bears, meanwhile, look likely to miss the playoffs again. But that's not the biggest difference between the teams. The Bears have been threatening to move to the suburbs unless the Chicago city government pays to upgrade their stadium. The Packers, despite playing in the National Football League's smallest market, are asking their fans to fund their stadium improvements voluntarily.
That works because the Packers have an unusual ownership arrangement, dating back to the Depression and made possible in part by Bear owner George Halas, whose descendants, in the manner of the House of Hanover, have not lived up to the standards set by Papa Bear. Ownership rights are minimal, shareholders don't vote, and there is no solicitation of proxies authorizing Aaron Rodgers, who is the employee of the shareholders, to exercise whatever discretion he sees fit as owner of the Bears.
The Packers have an exemption: The team has been owned by stockholders since 1923, when it sold shares of the organization to keep the team afloat and to keep it in Green Bay. To prevent owners from selling the team to move it to a larger market, these shares could only be sold back to the team at a fraction of the price.
The Packers held similar stock sales in 1935 and 1950 to financially stabilize the team, and in 1997 and 2011 to fund additions and redevelopment to their stadium. Another stock sale is ongoing now. The shares provide minimal benefits: an ownership certificate, an invite to the annual owners meeting, and trivial voting rights on the future of the franchise. Even so, the sales have been enormously popular, with the offerings raising $24 million in 1997, $64 million in 2011, and a projected $90 million this time around.
It's common for sports teams' billionaire owners to push cities into bidding wars for new taxpayer-funded stadiums. The Bears' current threats are hardly the only example. The Raiders recently moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, where Clark County shelled out more than $645 million in bonds to fund a stadium.
Clark County got hosed. As did the Twin Cities, although they have bigger problems than the money they're losing on that pathetic purple gang.
Thus, although Reason's Eric Peterson sees some humor in the Bears taking an idea from "the hated Packers," rather than become another corporate welfare drain for the Combine, it might be balance returning to the universe, with George Halas's suggestion coming home.
It's been nearly two years since a Saturday bridge column, have I really been that preoccupied with the world gone wrong? In that column, though, I had yet another gripe about the simulation being programmed to do some odd things in bidding. That 18 January column depicted a disastrous down three on a grand slam contract, and the 4 January column depicted more artificial intelligence quirks, with the bot chickening out on a relatively mundane jump raise.
Sometimes, though, man and machine get it together. In the following diagram, the East bot deals.
East passes, I open 2♣, West passes, North bot has the expected 2♦, thereafter neither East nor West bids. I show my long suit with 2♥ and North raises to 2♠. I continue with 2NT and the bot offers 3♣. Here's where it would be useful to have a live partner who understands that my 4NT is a call for aces. (There are several different interpretations of 4NT in play, and several different methods of responding.) North, with no special Cliff Notes interpretation of what's next. continues 5♠ and I offer 5NT. North then offers 6♦, showing a second suit, I offer 6♥ and the bot raises to 7♠. That would be feasible with these cards, but I'm still fearful that in a slam bid on a suit contract, the defender will open with a long suit, the other defender will be void in that suit, and a low trump messes up the contract. Thus we play for Seven No Trump.
The opening lead is the ♦3. (Why not the ♣3? The artificial intelligence might change the way people play the game, too.) Take stock: four Spade winners in hand, and an extra winner on the board. Two Heart winners in hand, save one of those losers for a Spade lead off the board. Two Diamond winners in hand, and two more on the board, as well as two Club winners in hand, and an extra one on the board. That's ten winners in hand and four extra winners on the board, more than enough to account for those three Heart losers. Just save enough entries. Win the opening lead with the ♦K (short side first), cash the ♥ King and ♥ Ace, discarding a low ♣ and a low ♠, then cash the ♣ Ace and ♣ Queen, finally leading the ♦4 to the board, using the two additional Diamonds and the ♣ King to wash out the low Hearts, and we're done.
Something else Bridge Base has done recently is revised their scoring system. That deal, plus the three other hands in it, scored as 21st best in their history. That's encouraging when more recently the system is telling me some fifty thousand people have handled the deal better.
What did I tell you in 2005? "Huh? I'll never lack for work explaining the backward-bending labor supply curve. The Left and the Right have been trading shots for years over whether it's unions or economic growth that contributed to rising wages, and whether the shorter workweek antedated the Fair Labor Standards Act." Did I change my mind in 2011? "That's long been a pet cause at Cold Spring Shops, although it's something more likely to emerge out of a multitude of small decisions long before any new Fair Labor Standards Act codifies it."
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the biggest bloc of liberal lawmakers in Congress, on Dec. 7 endorsed a bold bill proposed by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., which would seek to implement a four-day workweek. It's a measure that has no real prospect of becoming law in the near term, but it's a compelling idea that's garnering more attention worldwide—and it could serve as a potential point of focus for the American left in the future.
Or the law could simply codify that which is already taking place in the economy.
Simultaneous boosts in well-being and productivity have also been reported at companies in the U.S., New Zealand and Japan. Businesses that have had success with the model have reported using strategies to streamline the work day by doing things like reducing meetings and blocking out time for uninterrupted work. It also seems to help that employees also are able to attend to personal business outside of work hours with the spare time, making any given day more focused.
There's a Parkinson Law at work in that reference to meetings, isn't there? But I'm still betting on emergence.
