A RURAL AMERICA FIELD TRIP.

I've reported previously on the Sycamore Threshing Bee and the various county fairs an easy road-trip distance from Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

Yesterday offered an opportunity to visit the threshing bee and the Boone County Fair in one day.

Big machinery, such as this 1918 Minneapolis traction engine, is my usual rejoinder to anyone who looks askance at model railroaders.  Imagine storing, transporting, and maintaining this.  You probably can't get fittings at Ace Hardware.

Once upon a time, steamrollers really WERE steamrollers.  Some stunt, steering one with a sailboat tiller.

There's more than a little railroad influence in the design of this tractor.

That's the next generation at the helm of the Oil Pull.  I don't know whether it's a stock smaller unit (there were, apparently, steam-powered precursors of the lawn tractor, years ago) or a half-scale model.

Leave the driving to the kids seemed to be the theme among Oil Pull owners, though.  Small hay wagon and small tank in tow.

Here a model traction engine and a full-sized original serve as stationary engines. You have to be careful as operator or as spectator, as the power take-off doubles as a flywheel on many of them, and it's spinning whenever the throttle is open, whether a load is attached or not.

At the Boone County Fair, Thursday must have been Judging Day for Horse Handling.

Here, the Pony and Trap class await the awarding of ribbons.  I'm sure there are well-established standards for evaluating the animal's gait, the driver's interaction with the animal, the precision of the turning or backing up (yes, you can back up a horse or a team and the associated wagon), and whatever other criteria the governing body comes up with.  My eye is not practiced enough to tell the difference.

And yes, the beer truck is probably a productivity enhancement.  Two work-horses at the trot with a beer wagon behind are pretty impressive all the same.  The competition is still with empty wagons (all built to what look like the same plan, but lettered differently).  As of yet, there is no competition with wagons fully laden with beer kegs.

I can't tell you anything more about this Delavan Tableau Wagon 28 that was near the pony tents.  Perhaps one of the circus modelers I will see at the weekend knows something.

Lots of good food, so much that I decided I was too full to purchase a cream-puff.

SOMETIMES, DISPASSIONATELY, THEY HAD TO WEED.

The foundation for 2001: A Space Odyssey and its numerous sequels is an intelligent, long-lived, race of space-travelers incapable of staying in any solar system for any length of time, but capable of offering help to species they think of as promising.  Apparently, as the post title, cribbed both from that work and from 3001: The Final Odyssey, sometimes species that failed to live up to their promise had to be culled: these space-travelers couldn't always count on an unexpected supernova or an asteroid to end the experiment.  Book Review N^o. 20 deals with 3001.  I do not wish to publish any spoilers.  Let me pose a question, though: would a race that puts an alarm in a place that only a species capable of space travel be pleased or annoyed should that same species figure out that a weeding operation is about to commence?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

PRINCIPLES HAVE A WAY OF ENDURING.

Andrew Sullivan established his own Book Club, sometime after September 11, and he recommended the (at the time) recent Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, who has himself left us.

I purchased the book at about that time.  Book Review N^o. 19 deals with it only now, but not for any shortcomings of the book.  It's well written, and it's Mr Hitchens's attempt -- perhaps surprisingly, inspired by conservative historian Robert Conquest -- to explain George Orwell's differences with, and the continued relevance in these times, of those differences to the left, the right, the British, the United States, feminists, the academy, and literati.  It's useful to have as a reference, to understand the mind-set of people arguing from various perspectives, and also to remind yourself how little has changed in public policy positions over the past century or so.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

NEARLY AS BIG AS AKAGI.

Drudge has two links to coverage of a new Japanese destroyer.  One gives it a flight deck of 250 meters, about 820 feet, describing it as being able to carry fourteen helicopters.  The other has several illustrations.

Sky News photograph, no photographer credited.

Countries have permanent interests.  That's clear from one observation in the article.  "The ship has raised eyebrows in China and elsewhere because it bears a strong resemblance to a conventional aircraft carrier."  And history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Some experts believe the new Japanese helicopter carrier could be used to launch fighter jets or other aircraft that have the ability to take off vertically.

That would be a departure for Japan, which has one of the best-equipped and best-trained naval forces in the Pacific, but which has not sought to build aircraft carriers of its own because of constitutional restrictions that limit its military forces to a defensive role.

Yes, and the Washington Naval Treaty of the 1920s limited the number of battleships each major power could build.  Akagi was laid down as a battlecruiser, later converted to a carrier with a 249 meter (818 feet) flight deck, and capable of carrying up to 86 aircraft, none of which required catapults for takeoff.  The modern upgrade of a Zeke or a Betty is probably some kind of drone.

A NEIGHBORHOOD IN TRANSITION.

Milwaukee Journal - Sentinel regional historian John Gurda revisits the Old South Side.

Consider my original take on the Historic South Side, the old Polish stronghold bordered by Greenfield and Oklahoma avenues between 1st and 27th streets. "One of the neighborhood's most impressive qualities," I fearlessly declaimed in 1987, "is its sense of continuity. Institutions developed in the last century have evolved to serve new generations. ... Mitchell Street's stores — including Kunzelmann-Esser Furniture, Goldmann's Department Store and a cluster of eight bridal shops — continue to draw loyal patrons from throughout the region."

Well, look again. Kunzelmann-Esser is now an apartment building, Goldmann's is a memory, and the bridal shops have dwindled to a couple. Although Mitchell St. is still a bustling commercial corridor, most of its current business is done in Spanish.

Yes, and it's been even longer since you could go shopping by Schuster's or be assisted by the parking lot controller in a tower behind Sears.

In the single decade between 2000 and 2010, the metro area's Latino population surged a remarkable 56% — one of the largest proportional gains for any group in Milwaukee's history. The greatest number of new arrivals — Mexicans, primarily, but also Puerto Ricans, Central Americans and Cubans — settled on the south side. The Walker's Point neighborhood provided a home for Milwaukee's first Spanish-speakers in the 1920s, and the community has expanded naturally from that base, annexing blocks south of Greenfield Ave. once dominated by Polish families.

I feel the changes personally. Ever since my ancestors emigrated from Poland in the 1880s, the south side and its suburbs have been my extended family's home turf. When friends with roots on the north side would speak wistfully about their old neighborhoods, most of which had long since become African-American, I found it difficult to relate, since so little had changed on my side of town.

It's difficult no longer. The landscape of my childhood and early adult years has been utterly transformed. Although the landmarks are still there, the group that built them has moved on. That can be a trifle unsettling, but it's also oddly energizing. The changes currently under way demonstrate that the city is a dynamic system, constantly in the process of reinventing itself. You can walk the streets of the south side and see Milwaukee changing before your eyes.

Those changes have been in progress for a long time, does Mr Gurda forget the theater near the old Christian Center that relabeled itself El Cine about the same time the North Shore Line quit, or the "Little Spain" neighborhood near the collection of Prairie School houses west of Layton Boulevard?

Icon of the Black Madonna at St. Stanislaus.

The churches have been adapting for a long time.

Businesses can change with the stroke of a pen, but churches have to straddle the border between two cultures until the transition is complete. Although the process has hardly been pain-free, most south side parishes have demonstrated a will to adapt and survive. A sign above the entrance to St. Hyacinth's Church — my grandmother's home congregation — bids visitors Witamy and Bienvenidos — "Welcome" in Polish and Spanish. The Basilica of St. Josaphat, gloriously restored in recent years, displays two matching Madonnas on its side altars: Our Lady of Czestochowa for Polish worshipers and Our Lady of Guadalupe for the Mexican faithful.

And St. Helen's have recently introduced a "Polka Fiesta."  That's not so much as a stretch, as anyone even a little bit familiar with Texican music can tell you.  I have a couple of tapes of oom-pah music for road trips that I've picked up at taquerias.

NEW ENGLAND VARNISH.

Destination: Freedom continues its exploration of the Downeaster.  I opted to go to Brunswick and nose around the college and the commercial area.  Their correspondent made time for Freeport as well.

Brunswick is a quaint and historic town, with much to offer a visitor. The campus of Bowdoin College, a small liberal-arts college, contains several historic buildings, and the town contains many historic and beautiful houses. The town has a museum operated by the Pejepscot Historical Society, as well as two museums operated by Bowdoin College and located on campus. One is an art museum, and the other is devoted to Arctic exploration and art created by people who live in the region. Brunswick also celebrates its hometown hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who led a Maine regiment with distinction at the Battle of Gettysburg 150 years ago. Chamberlain had been a member of the Bowdoin faculty before the war and spent many years as the president of the college after the war. He also served a term as Governor of Maine. His house is preserved as a house museum.

There is a strong and positive relationship between Brunswick and the train, too. Deborah King, who heads the Brunswick Downtown Business Association, said that thousands of people came out to celebrate National Train Day in Brunswick this past May, and that people couldn’t get enough of the promotional literature available for the train or for Downtown Brunswick. King said that many of the train’s riders from Brunswick are business travelers to Boston or students from Bowdoin College. Students get a break on the fare, with a price of $74.00 for six one-way fares to Boston.

Freeport is not as quaint a town as Brunswick. It has a main street with lots of stores, a museum and some historic houses. Its primary attraction is shopping, and it hosts a number of outlet stores. The largest and most famous is L.L. Bean, one of the world’s largest “outdoor” stores, which also sells sportswear and housewares. The flagship store is located in downtown Freeport and is open all night. There is enough interesting merchandise to fill hours of browsing time, there are comfortable places to sit while taking a break, and the people-watching in the middle of the night is a unique experience. Across the street from L.L. Bean is Derosier’s, a grocery store that has been in business since 1904 and also sells sandwiches and other prepared foods. They feature a lobster roll; a spongy white roll with chunks of lobster meat on it (considered a delicacy in Maine), for ten dollars. Other places charge as much as $25 for one.

Rudolph reports that the town council in Freeport has voted to make the town a “quiet zone” where the trains will no longer be allowed to sound their horns at the eight grade crossings in town. How safety concerns over this move will affect any plans to expand service through the town is yet to be determined.

The article notes some of the shortcomings of the existing service; it also notes that ridership has been increasing all the same.

Also from New England comes the understanding that Edna St. Vincent Millay can only take a train where a train is going, which has not included the Housatonic Valley lately.  That, too, might change.

John Hanlon, President of the Housatonic Railroad, the company that owns the tracks that currently only carry freight cars, was delighted to see the governor and other officials continuing with their support.

"What a wonderful day," said Hanlon.

The Housatonic Railroad Company commissioned a study in 2011 conducted by Williams College economist Stephen Sheppard. The study estimated that restoring passenger rail would amount to a $343 million increase in sold goods and services in Berkshire County over a 10-year period.

Hanlon, who said his company is seeking the support of the federal government and the state governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut to expand service, believes that rail is the best way to bring in new investment from out of state to the Berkshire region.

"There's never going to be a new road, there's never going to be scheduled airline service so for public transportation to occur up here, rail is pretty much it," said Hanlon.

The Berkshire Regional Planning Commission is also working within the county to find suitable station locations for passenger rail.

Through service between Pittsfield and Grand Central Terminal, with parlor car service on some trains, lasted into the early Penn Central era.

COUNTRIES HAVE PERMANENT INTERESTS.

Interesting picture in a Via Media foreign policy essay.

Getty Images photograph.

This time around, though, there's a different aggressor.

Chinese aggression has driven former friends, like Vietnam, in search of new allies. Japan, with similar China problems, is a natural choice. So is the United States. Indeed, US military ties with ASEAN countries are strengthening as well: the Air Force plans to rotate jets and other aircraft through bases in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, India, and possibly the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Not too long ago, Philippine foreign policy included the closure of United States bases in the islands.   Better, apparently, to have Corregidor properly garrisoned, rather than undergo three years of occupation.

ABOUT TIME.

General David Petraeus and Brookings senior fellow Michael O'Hanlon offer a Trenchant Observation for Our Time.

Washington should not exaggerate government's role in our economic future. Beyond the Beltway, the gradual recovery of the housing market, the reinvigoration of domestic energy production and U.S. manufacturing, exciting progress in new technologies such as cyber and 3-D printing, and the ongoing electronics revolution are beginning to bring our economy back — and our deficit down.

Washington does not need to be the only answer. It just needs to avoid being the main problem — and then live to fight another budget battle as the parties seek new mandates from the voters in 2014 and 2016. That is how it is supposed to work. That is why Congress and the president should seek a compromise deal now.

The gravamen of the article is that there's more room for compromise in today's political economy than there was ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.

The consummation devoutly to be wished, though, is the day one of the major Sunday shows changes its backdrop to something other than the Capitol, and opens with a development that involves Washington peripherally, if at all.

BEER AND CIRCUSES.

Never mind the folly of Wednesday Night Football.  Would alcohol sales help solve attendance issue? One participant in the forum names three other kids (thanks, Mom) that have already jumped off the bridge.

Toledo announced that the university received a permit to sell alcohol at football and basketball home games. The Rockets become the fourth team in the MAC, following Bowling Green, Akron and Kent State, to allow alcohol sales at major athletic events. What are your thoughts on alcohol being sold at college football games?

The other notes that there's a lot of colored water in blue cans being consumed before the game.

Let’s face it, alcohol is a huge part of the college football culture. Just walk by the field on the east side of Huskie Stadium before any home game, you’ll see people chugging and shotgunning beers, and the occasional beer bong, as well. People are going to drink at college football games, and as someone who has attended games as a student and alum, I’ve witnessed fans illegally bring their own cans of beer into Huskie Stadium.

The past few years, the attendance, or lack thereof, at Huskie Stadium has been a big issue with fans. There’s no doubt in my mind that if fans could buy alcohol at games, more people would show up. How many more? It’s tough to say, but there always is going to be a crowd who would rather watch the game at a bar – where alcohol is available.

Overall, I think it would be a good move to follow the lead of the schools you mentioned. Beer is flowing at every NFL stadium. Why shouldn’t it be the same on Saturdays, where alcohol sales could bring revenue for the university?

Note: revenue, so much for family-friendly environment or an absence of brawling in the stands.

I can’t figure out why NIU’s home football attendance has been so disappointing. Sure, there are certain factors you can point to (lack of marquee opponents, midweek games, etc.), but it should be better. I just think if alcohol were available, it would put more people in the seats and bring in revenue for the university on top of that.

It's called compromising your integrity, and if changing a home game to Sunday night for the television contract is feasible, why not obtain a liquor license?  The Orange Bowl appearance has boosted applications, although I have private information that many of those applicants aren't up to our standards.

To move further in the beer-'n-circus direction risks turning out graduates that wind up underemployed with a lot of debt.  But hey, did they have fun at the tailgating area and in the stands.  Even if through an alcohol haze.

THE RESILIENCE OF THE RAILS.

I confess to a Falling Skies addiction.  The end of this summer's season, though, left me skeptical.  Short plot summary:  Earth (or at least the United States, or perhaps the major military powers) invaded by space travelers coming for reasons not clear, these invaders kill adults and enslave children with the help of large aquatic earwigs.  These space travelers are in a conflict with other space travelers, who have also become involved in the conflict on earth, or perhaps in North America.

The first invasion wrecked a lot of infrastructure, and almost all aircraft capable of flying, and somehow the resistance in the Boston area manages to cross the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac and possibly the James rivers in order to get to Charleston.

The second set of space travelers are building some kind of beam weapon, and this weapon gets barged from Charleston to Boston, somehow avoiding a known strongpoint in New York City and detection from any robot fighters called "beamers".  A decoy weapon gets loaded onto a train that is headed for Chicago, involving a rail crossing of at a minimum the Ohio River, plus possibly the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, to credibly get near Chicago.  There's apparently enough diesel fuel to move this train, which is either powered by contemporary six-axle diesels (the exterior shots) or at least one F unit (best evaluation of the interior shots, with an impossibly crowded cab).  This train also evades interdiction until it gets near Chicago, and that interdiction may require the presence of a known spy.

Taken together, the show suggests the first set of invaders are technically advanced (capable of interstellar travel) yet not very bright.  In addition to not being able to spot large moving objects or destroy all possible river crossings (collapsing a few rail tunnels would also work), their rationale for cleaning Earth up is one that would appeal to tree-huggers and the Blame America First crowd.  Had they introduced some agents into the academy to prepare the grounds, they might have been hailed as secular saviors.  Instead, they apparently arrived above the stratosphere prepared to take out any military opposition.

IN PLACE OF THE CAMP TRAIN.

A Slate columnist meditates on summer camp.  In his environment, it's no longer driving to the exurbs and dropping the tween off for two weeks, it's meeting an airplane from somewhere.  In more rarified settings, eight weeks at summer camp includes a pickup at the nearby airport, and costs more than a year of community college tuition.

It's a long way from rolling the spawn of the Eastern Establishment into the Big Woods on old 12 - sleepers.

INSPECT THE INTAKE.

An Inside Higher Ed column notes the obvious.

The easiest way for colleges to improve their graduation rates is to serve fewer disadvantaged students, according to two new studies released this week.

Well, you can wring your hands about the lucky sperm club, or you can stop enabling failure by lowering standards and calling it access, you can encourage the common schools to develop middle-class values,  you can raise the costs of the high schools that send the Distressed Material your way.

SPARE A MOMENT FOR THE REST OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN.

Raise the incomes of fast-food workers, and that 17 cent or 25 cent per dollar increase in the price of a fast food meal dips into the pocket of high-frequency trader and agricultural worker alike.

Here's Ralph Nader, on the continued state of life in the fields.

It is a perversely inverted society when the people who do the backbreaking work to harvest one of the necessities of life are underpaid, underinsured, under-protected and under-respected while the Chicago commodity brokers – where the white collar gamblers sit in air-conditioned spaces and speculate on futures in foodstuffs’ prices – are quite well off, to put it modestly.

It probably won’t surprise you that the grapes, peaches, watermelons, strawberries, apricots and lettuce that you’re eating this week are brought to you from the fields by the descendants of the early migrant workers. Their plight is not that much better, except for the very few working under a real union contract.

He continues with the expected call for consciousness-raising, union-organizing, and solidarity.

Before we get to the lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, we have the all-beef patties.  The political economy of meat production figured prominently in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and the ability of the Big Food companies to deliver relatively cheap food relies heavily on the ability of the packers to hire help cheaply.

Now for the puzzle: what happens if higher pay for field hands, packing house workers, and grill and counter help turns either into prices customers resist, or into additional mechanization of the fields, packing houses, and eateries?

STEER CLEAR OF FINANCIAL EXPERTS.

London's Telegraph examines life among the quants.

Since the 1969 moon landing, the American government had cut funding for science programmes and diverted it to the war in Vietnam.

“A generation of physicists who had gone to graduate school left with their PhDs and entered a severely depressed job market,” explains James Owen Weatherall, author of The Physics of Finance. They had to earn a living somehow, and, seeing how much money that there was to be made on Wall Street, many decided to move into finance.

In Britain, the fall of the Soviet Union led to an influx of Warsaw Pact scientists. In both cases, these scientists brought with them a new methodology based on analysing data and also a faith that, using sufficient computing firepower, it was possible to predict the market. It was the start of a new discipline, quantitative analysis, and the most famous “quant” of all was a shambling donnish maths genius with a scraggly beard and aversion to socks called Jim Simons.

For those who know their physics, Simons is a living legend. A piece of mathematics he co-created, the Chern-Simons 3-form, is one of the most important elements of string theory, the so-called “theory of everything”. Highly academic, Simons never seemed the sort of person who would gravitate to the earthy environs of Wall Street. But in 1982, he founded an extraordinarily successful hedge fund management company, Renaissance Technologies, whose signature fund, Medallion, went on to earn an incredible 2,478.6 per cent return in its first 10 years, way above every other hedge fund on the planet, including George Soros’s Quantum Fund.

It's not clear from the story whether the expertise is going into designing ever-better trend-extraction techniques or ever-faster searches for arbitrage opportunities, but at least one trader notes that incentives matter.

After 16 years in the City, Simon Jones is now planning to go travelling. “A quant can earn up to seven figures,” he tells me, “but sometimes I do wonder whether I contributed positively to society.”

And what does he conclude? He pauses. “I was working with the best of the best,” he says. “My bank employed the brightest engineers, chemists and scientists – and we were all working together to get richer. The chemical and physics and health industries are worse off because of what we do because I tell you this: if there was a pay bonus structure similar to what we had in the City for curing cancer, we’d have found a cure for cancer.”

I find that sad and a little bit frightening. So, I ask, quants: good or bad? Jones looks at me and says, “Humans just found a new way of being greedy.”

Is the absence of such a bonus structure a consequence of the National Health Service, or other rate-of-return regulations in medicine?

THE CASE FOR PEER REVIEW.

I pulled out the heavy artillery of elasticities (specifically, the price elasticity of demand and the elasticities of substitution) to mock a silly Huffington Post article about McDonald's being able to double everybody's pay.  A Columbia Journalism Review audit of the article suggests the algebra is wrong too.

The only way to get the 17 percent-of-revenue labor figure is to divide payroll and benefits at company-operated restaurants by total revenues. But here’s the thing: More than 80 percent of McDonald’s restaurants are franchises, and the company makes scads of money from them in no small part because it has no direct labor expense at those stores. The HuffPost explicitly includes executive compensation in its 17 percent figure, but executive comp and the pay of folks in Chicago who run marketing and the like are housed in “selling, general & administrative expenses,” not under payroll & employee benefits at company-operated stores.

You have to divide company-operated payroll & employee benefits by company-operated sales to get an apples-to-apples measure. That gets you 25 percent. So a Big Mac would, in fact, have to go up by a full dollar, not 68 cents, in order to double wages at McDonald’s. And the Dollar Menu would have to become the Dollar Twenty-Five menu.

No doubt, there are people who will seriously argue that paying a quarter more on the dollar is still a small price to pay to ensure a living wage for the counter help.  But there's still the little problem of those elasticities.

But why might a dubious research project get such prominent play in a major political website?

Unfortunately, what it originally claimed was a study by a University of Kansas researcher turns out to be something—a term paper, maybe?—given to Huffington Post by a KU undergrad. And there are serious problems with it.

Might it be because the policy sensibilities of the self-styled progressives are simply the aesthetic sensibilities of sophomores?

TROLLEY PAGEANT

We offered you a sample earlier in July.

The Central Electric Railfans' Association has full coverage. Take your pick: a five car Chicago Limited or seven Spam Cans or a four car Wheaton Local or three steels to the Fox Valley. I'm working on a video just of the heavy traction.

Enjoy the slideshow.  It's too nice a day to be at this computer much longer.

CONNECTIVITY, FREQUENCY, RELIABILITY.

Travel and Trains notes, "If You Build It (and Speed It Up), People Will Come."  That's in Michigan, where a Michigan Live article focuses on the speeded-up Wolverines between Chicago and Pontiac, still popularly referred to as the Chicago - Detroit service.  It may be more accurate to speak well of the accelerated service between Chicago and Dearborn, as east of there it's all poking along through yard limits.  I recall watching or hearing Grand Trunk Western's midday pig train buzzing through Royal Oak at about 60 or so on welded rail, and heck, the vestigial commuter service once offered by GTW with a state subsidy moved rather expeditiously from mile road to mile road,  thus there's precedent for faster train service to the northeast, and there are already plenty of riders making relatively local trips from the Oakland County suburbs to college in Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo.

The same article notes ridership is down on the Grand Rapids (only one train) and Port Huron (only one train, no connection, no through cars to Toronto) services.

Infrastructure improvements in Missouri have improved timekeeping on the relatively slow Kansas City and St. Louis service (there has to be a way of providing connections at Kansas City to the Southwest Chief, and at St. Louis to the Eagle), and faster running in Illinois is drawing passengers.

Business on Amtrak in Missouri and Illinois has been booming. Folks are parking their cars, skipping the airport and taking the train. More people are boarding the train in St. Louis and going north to Chicago or west to Kansas City than ever before.

Marc Magliari is a spokesman for Amtrak, “Ridership has more than doubled because there are more opportunities for people to arrive, more opportunities for people to go back and forth the same day.”

Kevin Hagerty rode the train recently to Chicago with his son. “I think people are trying to save money and this is the way to save money,” he said.

St. Louis can pay as little as $26 and go all the way to the Windy City, cheaper than driving or flying.

Madelynn Kennebeck enjoys traveling on the train with her grandchildren. “Be able to show the kids train travel for one to be able to show them what the country looks like on an intimate basis,” she said.

Between major cities like Washington and New York 3 times as many travelers choose Amtrak over the the airlines.  A greater number of business people are riding the rails in Illinois and Missouri. Andre Collins is one of them.  He said, “There`s no check-in there`s no lines, get right on the train.”

Ridership has also jumped on the Missouri River Runner, the train from St. Louis to Kansas City. Although there are only two round trips a day people are turning to Amtrak because it`s now dependable.

Note: with conventional Amfleet and Horizon cars, and with some relatively early departure or late arrival times at Chicago or Kansas City, and no connectivity to other Illinois corridor lines.  One thing at a time.

A COLLEGE SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY GOES THERE.

INSIDE HIGHER ED'S Doug Lederman may or may not be acting surprised that college rankings mean things, and people act as if those rankings mean things.

But higher education has a hierarchy, and that is where the picture starts to change. The authors [researchers at Georgetown University] divide postsecondary education into three tiers: most-selective (which incorporates the most, highly, and very competitive segments identified by Barron’s), a middle “competitive” tier of four-year colleges, and all other four-year and two-year institutions, all of which essentially admit all students.

Between 1995 and 2009, the most-selective category proportionally saw the most expansion, growing in enrollment by 78 percent, from 325,068 to 578,645. (The middle tier grew to near 560,000 from 435,000, and the open-access institutions to 1.63 million from 1.35 million.) The growth in the top tier may seem counterintuitive, given that highly selective institutions typically do not grow (after all, many are selective precisely because they limit the number of students they admit, even as competition for the seats increases).

There's nothing that stops a university from committing resources to raising its academic profile. McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts can add gourmet coffee, is it so wrong for George Mason to hire a Nobel Laureate in economics?

But much of the growth in students in the top competitive tiers has occurred because of significant growth in the number of colleges in those tiers. In 1995, Barron’s listed 326 in its top three levels of competitiveness (which includes at the lower end institutions with median test scores of between 1150 and 1240 on the SAT or 24-26 on the ACT, and that admit between a third and three-fourths of their applicants). By 2009, 468 colleges were in the three categories.

Apparently, though, the report, or Mr Lederman, suggest there are racial differences in the propensity of students to apply to the more competitive institutions, perhaps more than enough to offset the perceived mismatches affirmative action supposedly creates in entering classes.

The data presented thus far open the door to the objection that is often offered when the issue of educational outcomes by race is raised: but aren’t the students less academically prepared?

To a point, yes, the authors note: “College readiness is clearly a factor in explaining African-American and Hispanic students’ access to selective education.” But the report presents data showing that even similarly qualified students of different races take different paths.

Twenty-two percent of white students who had an A average in high school end up at open-access two- and four-year colleges, compared to 30 percent of African-American and Hispanic students, the study found.

Mr Lederman makes a conventional argument about higher education replicating existing social hierarchies.

So instead of working to correct or counteract "the racial and ethnic stratification in educational opportunity entrenched in the nation’s K-12 education system" and evidenced in "white flight from the center city to better neighborhood schools in the leafy green suburbs," those inequities are increasingly being "faithfully reproduced ... across the full range of American colleges and universities."

His reflection on public policy is similarly conventional.

But many of those students don't necessarily meet the regular admissions standards of some of the more-selective colleges, and whether they will be able to give such students an edge in admissions, Carnevale said, may depend in part on the legal fate of race-based preferences in admission.

But all the affirmative action in the world won't solve the inequity that higher education is, at this point, merely replicating and reflecting, the authors argue. Because of how integrated various aspects of the problem are with one another -- "the fact that the whole system is one mechanism, one sorting device," as Carnevale puts it -- undoing it will not be easy. The report does not even attempt a solution.

There's a simpler explanation: mid-tier universities that are too aggressive in practicing, let alone bragging on, their commitment to diversity, might well be ringing the leper's bell of access-assessment-remediation-retention (It's Thursday afternoon. Indulge me the cumbersome metaphor.) Insta Pundit, who apparently is working on his own education policy book, appends a comment to his link to Mr Lederman's essay.

The biggest danger was when smart women from less-well-off backgrounds [whether admitted on diversity grounds or not to top-tier institutuions] got onto what [Paying for the Party authors Elizabeth] Armstrong and [Laura] Hamilton call the “party pathway.” The richer girls who did this usually emerged okay, with family connections and parental subsidies allowing them to snag good jobs and internships in spite of any partying-related stumbles. The poorer girls with similar credentials (“strivers”) who got on the party track tended to emerge with low GPAs, unimpressive post-college jobs (frequently jobs that they could have gotten without a college degree) and burdened with debt. They actually often wound up with downward mobility, rather than the upward mobility that colleges sell. (Interestingly, the “strivers” who did best were the ones who transferred to less-prestigious regional state universities, which were also often cheaper. These schools – the Northern Kentucky Universities of the world – focus more on teaching, and are often more oriented toward student success, frequently in a less party-oriented atmosphere). The big schools, for the “strivers,” were often an expensive detour.

The message for the Northern [State] Universities (the generalization left as an exercise) is, however, making sure the strivers get the kind of academic experience in which they can thrive, rather than a low-budget version of the club and sports scene that can waylay students.  Student success, though, implies a degree of stratification going forward.

SECOND SECTION.  The dean at Pioneer Valley Community read the report, and offers an instructive suggestion.

And honestly, from inside a community college, the whole “undermatching” thesis is patently offensive.  If you accept the premise that only ten percent of colleges are academically worthwhile, then the arguments about the judicious allocation of spots in the freshman classes for those ten percent become crucial.  But what if you reject the premise?  Instead of trying to pry the “low-hanging” (!!) talented students of low income out of their communities, wouldn’t it be better to improve the colleges they actually choose?

I don’t disagree with Carnevale’s concern about class stratification.  But I’m more than a little perplexed that the solution is to toss life preservers more accurately.  We’d do better to make sure that every ship is seaworthy.  Multiply choices, improve the options, and make sure that community colleges and public four-year colleges can do right by students wherever they are, and celebrate successes where and when they happen.

Every ship seaworthy, indeed.

LIFE'S ILLUSIONS.

George Will asks readers to distinguish good intentions from bad results.

Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of part of the Detroit-based portion of America's automobile industry, [more here] says "apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit's problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs." Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because "America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility."

There you have today's liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of "voting in elections" — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.

The restoration of America's vitality depends on, among many other things, avoiding the bottomless sinkhole that would be created by the federal government rescuing one-party cities, and one-party states such as Illinois, from the consequences of unchecked power. Those consequences of such power — incompetence, magical thinking, cynicism and sometimes criminality — are written in Detroit's ruins.

Meanwhile, Illinois state legislators continue working on getting their pay restored rather than let the governor dictate what they debate and vote on.

LET'S RECLAIM THE CULTURE.

Gawker columnist Cord Jefferson used coverage of Surfers Gone Wild in Huntington Beach, California, to demonstrate the absurdity of racial profiling by being absurd.

A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the area. Businesses were vandalized and looted, portable toilets overturned, and brutal fistfights waged right out in the open. It was an ugly display and a sad day for California. But more than that, it was a reminder that we must begin to seriously consider the values of our thuggish white youth.

Where he gets deeper into parody, he's genuinely onto something.

White-on-white violence is a menace to white communities across the country, and yet you never hear white leaders like Pastor Joel Osteen, Bill O'Reilly, or Hillary Clinton take a firm stance against the scourge.

More important than white politicians are the white parents. I'd like to ask the caregivers of the children in these videos what they've been doing. When did so many white parents fall asleep at the wheel? You can complain about poor schools all you'd like, but the fact of the matter is that it's the parents of these children who are letting them leave the house looking like slobs in their baggy board shorts and Hollister t-shirts. It's the parents of these kids who are letting them listen to violent, self-destructive trash like "Anarchy in the UK" or "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue"—performed loudly by noted conservative rocker Johnny Ramone.

As I said, I know a lot of whites don't want to hear this kind of tough talk. But as an American of color who considers himself an ally to the white community, I'm just tired of seeing young, belligerent white people disgrace themselves year after year at surfing events, horse racing infields, and Ivy League campuses. Whites in America have been out from under their European ancestors' boot heels for centuries; California specifically outlawed preferences for nonwhites in state hiring and education nearly two decades ago. So being "oppressed" is no longer an excuse for behavior like this. How long must we wait for the white community to get its act together?

I found out about this column by way of Chris Hayes, who ran with it on his evening show on Nation TV.

"You probably haven't heard much about the white riot in Huntington Beach," Hayes began. "That's because the story of white criminal culture is not a story the mainstream media will tell you. But once you scratch the surface, these stories are everywhere you look."

Hayes and Jefferson engaged in a back-and-forth that parodied several tired tropes that surface when talking heads discuss race on TV.

"There are people that are going to tell you that ... this has nothing to do with white people, it's just a few bad apples. What do you say to that?" Hayes asked.

"To that I say that if that's your actual belief then you're living with your head in the sand," Jefferson said. "I used to live in New York City and would occassionally go to Hoboken, New Jersey's St. Patrick's Day parade, and there were so many young white men there vomiting in the streets, urinating in the streets, getting in fistfights in the streets. It was a sight to be seen."

Mr Hayes ended his segment, which is available for viewing at Huffington Post, with a public service announcement along the lines of "don't rely on comfortable stereotypes."  Fair enough, even Nation TV can't be all earnest chin-pulling and metrofexual snobbery all the time.  Addicting Info's Egberto Willies takes a useful first step into the social science.

There is a systemic class and race problem. An economic system is marginalizing many leaving them without hope and outlet. Violence is generally an outcome of that irrespective of race. Minorities are disproportionately jailed or given harsher sentencing by the justice system, which has a direct effect on that family’s economy. Minorities still face discrimination in hiring whether for the job proper or wages. This furthers the generational down spiral.

Yes, and Mr Jefferson has only scratched the surface calling out white parents falling asleep at the wheel.  The Huntington Beach riot included more than a little footage of the diversity of Pacific Rim lumpenproletariat acting out; the more racialized version of thuggish white youth being Britain's Yob Nation, or any weekend at a college fraternity.  He missed the chance to call out Jersey Shore and similar celebrations of lumpenproletariat white folks behaving badly.  Or perhaps to ask whether the Zeitgeist is marginalizing all males (not just blacks or whites) by viewing them as thuggish per se.

Perhaps it is up to Mr Hayes and Mr Jefferson and others of their birth cohort to rediscover the older notions of propriety and of perversity.