WHY I DISTRUST REPORTING ON TECHNICAL SUBJECTS.

I'm long skeptical of press coverage of anything more difficult than booth review of completing the process of the catch, and a report filed by a Dave Gathman of the Daily Herald, misinforming yuppies in the northwestern suburbs, is a canonical example confirming my prior.  He looks at the Great Lakes Basin Railroad project from the perspective of suburbanites, from where the interests of Boone County farmers seem parochial, and well, selfish.  But we can be sure that the first benefit is incredible, but not in the sense Mr Gathman thinks it means.

Fewer waits for drivers at the Canadian National's former Elgin, Joliet & Eastern street crossings while two-mile-long trains crawl through such places as West Bartlett Road and downtown Barrington.

A map that accompanies the article gives readers the impression that those trains will no longer be delaying motorists (who lose much more time to the mal-timed and left-on-arrow-only traffic lights than they do to freight trains) if not for those people in Belvidere who "weren't thinking about convenience to people living 50 miles to the east in the suburbs."

Map retrieved from Daily Herald.

What the map does not show are the other CNR lines that connect with the J.  The importance of the J acquisition to CNR is that CNR is the only major railroad to operate main lines north, west, south, and east of Chicago, and it will not short-haul itself by handing cars to Great Lakes only to get the same cars back from Great Lakes elsewhere, unless the shipper has particular clout.

From the north, approximately parallel to Interstate 94, comes the CNR line handling cars from as far away as Vancouver, the prairie provinces, the Cities, and the Head of the Lakes.  Not a single such car will be handled by the Great Lakes.

From the west, approximately parallel to Interstate 90, comes the former Illinois Central line moving grain and ethanol from the upper Missouri River and Iowa.  Yes, Great Lakes promoters intend to build an interchange near the Rockford airport with this line, but I call that interchange Railroad Irrelevant as CNR is unlikely to hand any cars off to Great Lakes there when it can hand them off somewhere along the J or keep them on their own railroad.

From the south, along Interstate 57, is another former Illinois Central line from New Orleans.  CNR have recently built additional connecting tracks at Munger and near Kankakee to move north-to-south and west-to-south trains, and return moves, more expeditiously.

From the east, roughly along Interstate 80-90-94 as far as South Bend, come CNR trains with ladings from as far away as Halifax.

Interchanges between CNR and the other major railroads at existing locations on the J are subject to long-standing and workable divisions of the revenue that would have to be renegotiated in order for Great Lakes to solicit the traffic.

Sorry, Barrington, there will be no respite from those trains.  Furthermore, as Union Pacific have made no commitment to interchange cars with Great Lakes, the freight train interference on the three Union Pacific, the North Central, and the Milwaukee Road North lines is not likely to be affected.

The BNSF Railroad is an interesting case, in that the bulk of its freight traffic, particularly the priority container trains, runs on the old Santa Fe line, which is freight-only east of Galesburg.  And BNSF have a Chicago bypass for traffic headed south, by way of Galesburg and Centralia.

QUESTIONING THE PRESIDENTIAL CULT.

Just stop screwing things up, recommends Reason's Nick Gillespie.

So how about a presidential debate or town hall or iron-cage match in which the candidates tell us fewer fairy tales about how they will light a fire under the economy by giving their constituents more money and inform us about how they will stop throwing blankets on our economic activity and will deal with something they can control: How much the government spends this year and the next and the one(s) after that?

Yes. How, though, does a person run for president while lowering expectations?

"No, I do not intend to run the country.  I will execute my duties as specified in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.  I will deliver the reports and recommendations requested in Article II, Section 3 on paper, not exceeding ten pages double spaced."

"I propose to lower the expectations of the president so as to establish a precedent more protective of the health of future presidents."

The reactions of the political class to such proposals are likely to cause casualties.  Chris Matthews will die laughing.

WHEN AN IDEA IS READY TO BE BORN.

This evening I went to a local watering hole and some former students now working in administration were dealing with another day of business as usual.  Conversation turned to business as usual and I suggested it was time for someone to publicly proclaim that higher education is being run by truly stupid people and it ought to be made great again.

Now comes Bernie Reeves at Phi Beta Cons thinking along similar lines.

What is needed is a Donald Trump-style higher education czar to jerk a knot in American colleges and universities — to make American education great again.

The most forbidding challenge to face the new czar is marshaling the nerve to obliterate the existing monolith of self-satisfied faculty and administrators. After decades of self-congratulation, conceit and power over 18-25-year olds, the professoriate, and their fellow traveling administration apparatchiks,  are imbued with a smug condescending demeanor suited to look down on the families, donors, alumni and, in many cases, taxpayers, who pay the freight — and their salaries.

There are two errors in the proposal.  The greater error is in vesting this authority in a Tsar.  That gives Someone in Authority powers that, while wielded today in the service of restoring the Canon and the Curriculum, might be wielded by someone else, perhaps the bastard grandson of some current Diversity Weenie, in the service of a restoration of the current madness.  The lesser error is in describing all of higher education in terms of the U.S. News league tables.

And yet, the bad ideas that originate at Harvard or Wesleyan or Santa Cruz leach into the soil everywhere.

Before most Americans noticed, a basic liberal arts degree was void of the wisdom of Western civilization over the past 2000 years. In its place, college children have been spoon-fed that the West, mostly America, is to be criticized, not praised. Consequently, the remarkable achievements of the world’s most advanced culture are tossed aside and stained with blame for exploiting everyone but white males.

Any cogent human free of the effects of collegiate propaganda can readily see the Academy, as it likes to call itself, is in need of shock treatment therapy, or a similar last resort. If desperate measures fail, the only alternative remaining is to shut down higher education to smithereens and start again — perhaps this time with a dress code that connotes maturity.

Or, perhaps, with trustees or legislators suggesting to administrative search firms that future potential chancellors, provosts, or presidents explain the ways in which they would be less prone to caving in to the failed policies of the present.

A DUBIOUS REVIVAL OF THE GARY ROUTE.

This morning, The Wall Street Journal offered an editorializing-rich report on the proposed Great Lakes Basin Railroad.  "Proposed 280-mile bypass faces opposition from landowners, financing hurdles."  Yeah, that's about right.

I went (as promised) to a Surface Transportation Board scoping meeting in Belvidere this morning seeking public commentary on potential environmental impacts.  That proved to be a particularly instructive session to attend, as Boone County soils are uniquely suited to growing crops and to filtering rainwater, with permeable subsoils that replenish a number of aquifers.  Thus local interests were particularly displeased with the latest proposed routing, which in detail runs through those soils and above some of the more useful substrata.  In addition, Boone County is home to numerous family farms some of which might have been established not long after Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis assisted Zachary Taylor in pursuing the Sauk toward the Mississippi River.  Thus local interests made a case for conserving cultural heritage in addition to the productive farmland.  Finally, there are more than a few Boone County residents who moved there for elbow room, and let's say they're less excited about having a heavily trafficked railroad in view than I might be.

A different cohort of the Board rule on the transportation merits of the project, and public comment on that phase is more difficult, although I am following up on that dimension, motivated in part by doubts about the business plan.  Representatives of the Boone County Board, however, did raise questions about the division of revenue and about the practicality of using existing rail lines or building along existing interstate highways rather than running cross-country.  That's likely to sit well with property owners who are close to the interstates.

A number of the objections involved emergency responders and school advocates who did not like the idea of long and frequent trains.  Those objections may be more theoretical than practical, as the proposed northern end of the Great Lakes Basin begins at Railroad Nowhere in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, and ends at Railroad Irrelevant near the Rockford airport.  That station is irrelevant as CNR, the successor to Illinois Central, is unlikely to short-haul itself by handing cars to Great Lakes near Rockford when it can hand them off to the Wisconsin and Southern at Rondout, and CNR owns a Chicago bypass of its own in the form of the old Elgin Joliet and Eastern, never mind the complaints of the good people of Barrington or the western reaches of Naperville about the additional trains.  Moreover, unlike the Chicago bypasses of old, which involved such revenue division spats as the Santa Fe short-hauling itself to the benefit of the New York Central at Streator, or Illinois Central short-hauling itself to the benefit of the Burlington at Centralia, the Great Lakes Basin is relying on both the originating and the terminating carrier short-hauling themselves.  That's where the transportation merits proceedings bear watching.

SPOUTING OFF ANGRY.

Bill O'Reilly was more worked up than usual during his Talking Points opener last night.

But he has an odd notion of what "limited government" involves.

When Bernie Sanders tells Americans that the economic system is rigged against them, he destroys incentive.

Why work hard if the big banks will harm you no matter what?  If I am failing, it's not my fault -- the phantom billionaires are hurting me.

Sanders is correct that the feds need to stop fraud in the marketplace, but his message of wall-to-wall capitalist corruption is false and pernicious.

When a guy like Rand Paul tells Americans that they should be able to intoxicate themselves at will and public safety be dammed, he gives license to behavior that has destroyed untold billions of people the world over.  Not to mention the message that legalized drugs sends to children.

We don't live in a vacuum here.  The condition of others can directly affect us, just look at the drunk-driving stats.

When Al Sharpton and his grievance lobby assert that black Americans are oppressed by a racist system bent on hurting them, he provides an excuse for a litany of apathetic and destructive behaviors.

The kid struggling in a bad school with parents who don't care needs all the encouragement leadership can give him or her, not a list of historical atrocities that can cause even more bitterness.

Is government's role to limit dysfunctional behaviors, or to stop enabling them? Hard to tell. It gets better.

Here's what the government owes us:

Protection from foreign concerns who would harm us.

Protection from criminals who would harm us.

A secure border system whereby our immigration laws are enforced and respected.

An infrastructure of mass transportation that is safe and efficient.  What the U.S. airlines are doing to their passengers is a scandal and the fact that we don't have a high-speed rail system is flat out irresponsible.

The government also has an obligation to protect our constitutional rights and to protect private property.

Seizing assets after an American dies is abhorrent.  Many Americans work hard all their lives to give their children a better situation than they had.

Finally, it is the duty of those in power to foster a system that allows every single American a truly fair shot at material and emotional success.

That means schools with strong educational and disciplinary standards; subsidized benefits for the poor and infirmed that are delivered responsibly with clear guidelines; also, protections in the workplace against companies that would violate labor laws and exploit powerless employees.

That's the heart of what the government owes us and social engineering is not part of it, nor is free education, nor free health care, nor a free income if you choose to lay about.

It's not too often I can be more Jesuit than Mr. O'Reilly, but it's seriously bold and fresh to denounce social engineering after calling for labor protection laws and standards for the schools.  As far as that transportation, it's public money that pays for the airports, the intrusive passenger screening, and the interstate highways that aided shippers and travellers in deserting the railroads.

The truth is that individual motivation is being destroyed by phony politicians seeking power by promising an endless series of entitlements to a population that is moving away from achievement and into the gimme zone … gimme, gimme, gimme.

Sometimes, the fisking is a gimme. Cultural rot is real, yes. Using the government's monopoly on violence to fix it is a dubious enterprise.

THE RAILROAD TRACK IS NO PLACE TO PLAY.

Jeff Rossen of NBC thought it would be fun to take selfies on the tracks.  He shared some on television, and viewers properly called him on it.  He then filed this public apology.

At about 1 minute 29 seconds into the report is a picture of three young girls, and behind them is the train that will shortly run them down.

Illegal.  Dangerous.  Completely avoidable.

Kindly be governed accordingly.

THE SIMPLE CASE FOR MIDDLE-CLASS DISCIPLINE.

A City Lab post identifies the crime-reducing effects of property maintenance.  Where the city takes care of its public spaces, there's less crime.  That's also true where property owners take care of their yards.

The most powerful indicators of a decrease in crime were having a lawn, the presence of garden hoses or sprinklers, shrubs, tree cover, percentage of pervious area, and the presence of yard trees. The factors most strongly tied to more crime were the number of small street trees, litter, uncut lawn, and a dried out lawn.

It’s hard not to see the income-related implications of this: If you can afford to live in a leafy neighborhood and maintain a lawn with plentiful bushes and trees, chances are you’re in a safer place than if you live in a trash-strewn block with a dried up, unmowed yard and a bunch of weed trees left unattended along the roadside.

That's not immediately obvious, as those outward signs of prosperity might also be shouting STATE OF THE ART ELECTRONICS or UPSCALE JEWELRY or RIDING MOWER inside.  And a lot of that lawn maintenance gets contracted out, thanks to the Say Aggregation Principle and two income households.  But the author of the research isn't crediting frequent police patrols or expenditures on burglary alert services.

But there’s more to it than that, says author Morgan Grove, who’s also a researcher with the Forest Service. Criminals tend to look for spaces where they can operate without being seen, or where if they’re seen they won’t be reported.

“The level of maintenance of the yard is almost like a neighborhood watch sign saying, ‘We have eyes on the street and we will say something,’” Grove says. “There’s a physical fact, which is that people can see criminals, but also this symbolic meaning that reinforces the social order that people will act upon their own behalf and on behalf of others.”

So mote it be.

HOW FAR BEYOND PARODY ARE WE?

Spring semester at many colleges and universities is for identity politics months.  At Northern Illinois University, Gaypril has mutated into LGBTQIA Awareness Month.  (Some of those letters might stand for more than one form of transgressiveness.)

Here's a description of an upcoming event.

Masculinity has long permeated queer spaces, but as of late, it has grown to be a toxic ideal. Together we will examine and deconstruct the systems of power that have made masculinity so toxic today.

I have other plans for the evening, thus I'm unlikely to go enlighten myself, or discover whether it's just more trashing of frat-boy culture, or the ways in which ghetto thugs with pit-bulls get a free pass.

But in today's Oppression Olympics, being the G in BLTGQUINOA means having to walk on eggshells around the T and the Q and perhaps the B.

Even though white cis gay men are marginalized in society due to being gay, they still have male privilege, white privilege, and cis privilege.

This doesn’t mean that white cis men are born evil or that they don’t work hard to succeed. Societal privilege just means that people born with certain traits are given more access to opportunities to work hard and then succeed.

White cisgender gay men have access to leadership positions, higher pay than women and people of color, more media representation than any other group of LGBTQIA+ people, and the kind of implicit trust from strangers that societal privilege can afford.

If you’re a white, cisgender gay man, you have a vast amount of access, visibility, and power, even though you are a queer person in a homophobic society.

Wow. I suspect, though, that deconstructing what remains of the "implicit trust" (put differently, replacing whatever evolutionary advantage existing institutions confer with mistrust and virtue-signalling) is not going to make for a better place.  Meanwhile, the sexual underground eats its own.

The other day I was having coffee with a friend.

“I love trans people, but I do not feel like I need to identify as cisgender,” my friend stated. She went on to say, “I am not transgender, I was born a woman and identify as a woman. Why should I say I am “cis” and how do I have ‘cisgender’ privilege? I’m just normal. How is being normal a privilege?”

What she didn’t realize was that saying she was normal – while speaking to me, a transgender man, as unintentionally “abnormal” – is exactly where cis privilege starts.

I don't make this stuff up, I just quote it.  But then I understand words well enough to recognize that "normal" can be descriptive without being prescriptive.

PIONEERING DON'T PAY.

Mental Floss might tell you everything you wanted to know, or more, about Me and My RC.

Royal Crown Cola used to be one of the most innovative companies in the beverage industry. It came out with the first canned soda, the first caffeine-free soda, and the first 16-ounce soda. It was the first to take diet cola mainstream, and the first to stage nationwide taste tests.

The things you learn ... RC is the successor company to Nehi.  And the original RC Cola (that "cola" was once contested, which might be one reason Xerox was and Kimberly Clark remain vigilant about the vernacularization of their brand names) remains the chaser of choice for a Moon Pie.

That diet cola?  How many different ways can we ring the changes on "well-intentioned but poorly thought-out law?"

PUSHING BACK AGAINST PRIVILEGE SHAMING.

The point of the Diversity Weenies setting up their Tunnels of Oppression and their Privilege Checking appears to be to guilt-trip the inheritors of the institutions and traditions that make it possible for the Diversity Weenies to be parasitic on their host culture.  But instead of taking a re-education from the Weenies, we're seeing, in the electorate and in the general culture, the same kind of in-your-face respones to the Excessively Earnest that gets hailed as guerrilla theater when it's carried out by the proper kind of marginalized mascot.  On campus, perhaps Donald Trump becomes a symbol when only a properly futile and stupid gesture will serve.  Just as I anticipated.  "[Y}ou can be sure that somewhere on Greek Row there are bros looking for a way to push back against the indoctrination that passes as "affirming diversity" and recognizing that it doesn't take a really futile and stupid gesture to set the Perpetually Aggrieved off."

“Greek life may have taken after Trump so well because of the pressure that the PC Police and administrations have put on Greek life in the last 10 years,” [an Old Row spokesman] said of many fraternity and sorority members taking to The Donald. “Students are sick of the PC police on campus telling them what to think, criticizing everything someone does, being offended by everything, and taking away the traditions of their organizations.”

Yes, and engaging in guilt-tripping of mainstream Americans whilst twisting logic to rationalize the failures and the foolishness of the mascots du jour.  Sometimes the only way to deal with the idiocy is to laugh at it.  Having the courage to laugh sometimes brings out the courage in others.

“It seems the Chalkening made a lot of people that were on the fence step back and realize how silly outrage culture has become, and that is really fantastic.”

They particularly found the accusations that the chalk marks were forms of “racial intimidation” particularly egregious. The staffer believes the outrage is unfortunately a part of the larger phenomenon of American colleges no longer tolerating different points of view.

“The fact that writing the name of the front-runner of a major political party during an election season could even be considered ‘racial intimidation’ shows how absurd outrage culture has become. This is simply thought oppression that is happening on campuses all over the country, which is really sad,” he said.

“College is supposed to expose you to a wide variety of ideas, especially ones you disagree with.”

It's a strange world, in which a spokesman for the Greek-letter organizations is the last defender of academic inquiry.  Given that the chancellor at highly-regarded California-San Diego is on record endorsing the outrage culture, it is likely that the Trumpening will continue, if as a form of civil disobedience.

This graffiti runs counter to our campus values of equity and inclusion. We value diversity and respect for all cultures.

UC San Diego is steadfast in the commitment to our Principles of Community which reflect a collective dedication to a campus where we uphold each individual’s right to dignity, justice and respect. We affirm the Principles of Community as the guide for all campus citizens as we move forward to foster the best working and learning environment.

Free speech for everybody but the Trumpkins?

But the Diversity Weenies deserve only to be mocked.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AN ADVANCED TRIBAL SOCIETY.

Johan Norberg takes to Reason to spell out some features of Swedish political economy that might not be exactly what Senator Sanders ought imitate.  It's a long article, here are choice excerpts.  "Being more like modern Sweden actually means deregulation, free trade, a national school voucher system, partially privatized pensions, no property tax, no inheritance tax, and much lower corporate taxes."  And the Scandinavian experiment in social democracy really began after the Allied victory.  The governments could free ride on U.S. deterrence and treat a peace dividend like it was permanent income.

During its laissez faire period, between 1850 and 1950, Swedish income per capita increased eightfold as the population doubled. Infant mortality fell from 15 to 2 percent, and life expectancy increased by a whopping 28 years. And all this happened before the welfare state was even a glint in the taxman's eye.

As late as 1950, total taxes as a percent of GDP in Denmark and Sweden were not just lower than in other European countries but lower than in the U.S.: 20 and 19 percent, respectively, vs. 24 percent in America.

It was at this point, when we Scandinavians had satisfied our thirst, that we thought that we could turn our backs to the well. We began to regulate. We increased taxes and beefed up the public sector. It's easy to see how foreigners observing the implementation of these unorthodox policies might confuse cause and effect. But those who think the semi-socialism made us rich would also probably look at a snapshot of Bill Gates and conclude that you become the world's wealthiest man by giving your money away.

Instead, the Scandinavian countries became a real life version of the old joke about how to make a small fortune; you start with a large one. Sweden took democratic socialist policies further than its neighbors, and as a result its economy fell more steeply. Slowly but steadily the policies of Prime Ministers Tage Erlander and Olof Palme eroded productivity and the long-renowned Scandinavian work ethic. In 1970, Sweden was 25 percent richer than the OECD average. Twenty years later, the average had almost caught up with us. Once the fourth richest country on the planet, Sweden was now the fourteenth.

Feel free to compare and contrast the secular stagnation in Scandinavia with the rot that set in along with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Sweden's most famous author, Vilhelm Moberg, wrote that the government was out of control, and that we were turning into a third way between democracy and dictatorship "where everybody is discontented and disappointed." Our most famous film director, Ingmar Bergman, was snatched by the police at the Royal Theatre on charges of tax crimes (later dropped). He had a nervous breakdown and left the country.

Our most famous author of children's books, Astrid Lindgren, had to pay more than 100 percent in marginal income tax, prompting her to write a bitter, satirical essay about the kind old witch Pomperipossa and vicious tax authorities: "She had thought that the rights of everybody would be respected in a democratic country. People should not be punished and persecuted because they happened—with or against their will—to make money in an honest way." But in the end, she finds a solution to her problems: "But suddenly it struck her—woman, you must be able to get welfare benefits! Oh, wonderful thought! And then Pomperipossa lived on welfare happily ever after. And she never wrote another book."

Kjell-Olof Feldt, the Social Democratic minister of finance from 1983 to 1990, admitted in a 1992 book that some of the government's program was "unsustainable," some of the policies "absurd," and the tax system "perverse." These policies also collapsed after a debt- and inflation-fuelled boom in the late 1980s.

What's Swedish for "Government is not the solution to our problems.  Government.  Is.  The.  Problem?"  Moreover, perhaps rent-seeking is less common in Scandinavia.  (Is that a lesson going back to the end of Northumbria paying Dane-geld?)

Sweden and Denmark are more economically free than the United States when it comes to legal structure and property rights, sound money, free trade, business regulation, and credit market regulations. We don't have the multitude of occupational licensing laws that block competition in the United States.

But that's only the beginning of the ways the Scandinavian political economy is different.  I've long speculated that rules of allocation descended from kinship ties are, well, ways to marginalize the other, at the same time that they might strengthen social cohesion.  Thus Mr Norberg.

Apparently, you can take Scandinavians out of Scandinavia, but not the Scandinavia out of Scandinavians. There is a cultural background that explains some of our success, going even further back than the laissez faire period in the late 19th and early 20th century, a culture of social trust, comparative lack of corruption, and a Lutheran work ethic. This may reflect a long history of internal stability, scant levels of feudalism, and a strong tradition of trading.

Two Scandinavian economists, Andreas Bergh and Christian Bjørnskov, have documented that a high degree of trust is an old legacy, and that descendants of those who emigrated from Scandinavia 100 years before the welfare state are also more trusting. Their conclusion is that trust in others and social cohesion creates the welfare state rather than the other way around, since it is more tempting to give power to politicians and money to strangers if you believe that they are decent people who would never cheat the system.

That doesn't work so well once Moslems show up in Malmo, and Minnesota Nice is getting strained with Moslems in Minneapolis.  But buying into America is about a mind-set, not about ancestry.  So, too, might it be with Sweden.

It was easier to have a one-size-fits-all approach when we were all alike, from the same background, with the same faith and attitude and a similar education. We need a more flexible model now that we are becoming a little bit more like…well, the United States.

Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the two leading Social Democratic thinkers of the 20th century, thought that the Scandinavian countries were uniquely suited for experimenting with high taxes and redistribution. They had homogenous populations with a strong work ethic, non-corrupt civil services, a high degree of trust in bureaucracies and politicians—and competitive free trade economies to foot the bill. If it did not work there, they suggested, it would be difficult to think it could work anywhere.

Strong work ethic. Non-corrupt. Trust. Competitive free trade.  Put another way, all the mediating institutions that the enablers of dysfunction have deconstructed.

THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED.

Paul Krugman explains why he's not always down for the struggle.  Ask a Bernie Sanders supporter for clarification, and sooner or later there's nothing behind the intentions.

It’s about an attitude, the sense that righteousness excuses you from the need for hard thinking and that any questioning of the righteous is treason to the cause. When you see Sanders supporters going over the top about “corporate whores” and such, you’re not seeing a mysterious intrusion of bad behavior into an idealistic movement; you’re seeing the intolerance that was always just under the surface of the movement, right from the start.

Perhaps an attitude reinforced, particularly in the gentry precincts and the academy, by the misuse of Democrat cliches as policy profundities.  Eight years on, and it's the same silliness.  I await the day when Academician Krugman confesses that he, too, has been mugged by reality.

THERE ARE NORMS. THERE ARE CUSTOMS.

Deconstruct them, Andrew Klavan cautions, and enjoy the chaos.

The eyes see what they see; the heart knows what it knows. Bottle up the human experience in silence, and it will ultimately break forth in rage. Thus, the result of these last 50 years of ceaseless left-wing incivility has been not a rainbow-striped paradise of social justice, but the utter collapse of our civic dialogue as the Right now responds with vulgar cruelty of its own. “Those to whom evil is done,” as the poet Auden wrote, “do evil in return.”

Did the thought leaders really think that they could stick their fingers in the eyes of normal Americans, and that normal Americans would refrain from being transgressive when everybody else's transgressiveness gets celebrated?

Why are they allowed to do things that we're not allowed to do?

The militias await.

CONTEMPLATING REGRESSIVE TRANSFERS.

Here's Megan McArdle, four years ago, responding to assorted answers to "Why Have Public Universities at All?"  "Why, after all, should the state subsidize certain educational institutions if what they are fundamentally trying to do is the same thing that private universities do and in the same way?"  The stiffer challenge, dear reader, remains today what it was four years ago, or for as long as Cold Spring Shops posts have been appearing, is tempering the principle that the state-subsidized universities are in the same business as the privates with the practicality that state-subsidized universities which lift their academic profile are more likely to cater to matriculants from more favored circumstances who will themselves do well in life.

The current tussles between state university administrators and stingy legislators, however, is generally over underachieving graduates and disengaged dropouts, not over course offerings and job placements that put the Ivies to shame.

WHY NOBODY GOES TO THE TALKIES.

In the past week, the AMC chain of movie houses moved to acquire Carmike Cinemas, and AMC also antagonized the consumers it still has by announcing that some of its psychoplexes would permit viewers to send text messages during the show.  That announcement has since gone down the memory hole, but Steve Johnson of Chicago's Tribune points out that the current movie-going experience doesn't offer much by way of inducement to go there rather than stream the picture on your computer or rent the disk.

Movie theaters’ real problem is with the entirety of the experience. The food and drink choices are pitched at the American teenager circa 1985, and they barely change from place to place. Nothing better has happened in the world of candy, apparently, than Milk Duds, and the only way to satisfy a craving for savory food is with the kind of pizza you might find in a Little League refreshment stand or with corn kernels popped and soaked in a butter-esque sludge.

Beverages start with 28 grams of sugar or the equivalent amount of Aspartame. The rest of the world is practically afloat in craft beer and decent coffee, but movie theaters offer mostly a trip to the supermarket soda aisle.

So after you’ve got your Junior Mints -- frequently the only tolerable ingestion choice --  the experience doesn’t improve. It’s an old refrain, but pre-film on-screen clutter has indeed grown too long and too insistent. Moviegoers are paying to be taken away from the real world, not bombarded with reminders that our society is mostly about the sales pitch.

After the overt ads come the trailers, and they usually fail on two fronts. They give away almost the whole plot, especially, it seems, in the stunted rom-com genre; we already know that the couple will meet cute, tragically separate and then magically reunite even without seeing all those key moments crammed into the preview. Trailers also too often tease a movie coming six months from now; like wearing white, thinking about the next “Independence Day” movie shouldn’t be allowed until after Memorial Day.

And if you want those Milk Duds (or my preference, the snow caps) expect the counter operator to attempt to sell you a larger slug of sugar or a half-peck of that butteresque sludge.  Shut up and sell me my stuff.

I once sent Carmike a letter detailing these things ... it was after my feature picture advertised for 1.30 started a few minutes past 2, which way exceeds my patience for business necessity.  They have not yet responded.  I have not gone back.  Nor, apparently have many other viewers.

TRULY ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY.

Some locavore posted a photograph that proposes what seems to be a good idea, at least until somebody gets the idea of cutting some trees, building some longships, and pillaging those fields.

Idiot artist unknown.  Retrieved from Scott Lincicome's Twitter feed.

Cold Spring Shops readers all understand that specialization and division of labor are the beginning of prosperity.  But hippies, Scott Tracinski quips, must discover the principles ab initio.

If we start with the idea of people growing crops and trading with one another—as if it were some radical new idea, not the way things have worked for about 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture—and we follow it to its logical conclusion, we would end up reconstructing all of modern industrial capitalism.

So the story here is that a hippie accidentally stumbled upon the concepts of division of labor and trade and the science of economics. He came across all of it as if it were some weird new revelation that no one had ever thought of before, because clearly he has never thought about it before (and probably won’t, even now that he has stumbled across it).

Market exchange is emergent, and productive enough that hobby farmers can contemplate being productive enough to swap carrots for peppers (kale, quinoa, and mangoes will be a more difficult matter) and enjoy the privilege of being able to devote both eyes to observing the weather rather than having to keep one alert for Vikings bent on pillage.

THE LONGEST WAY FROM MARKET-BASED MEDICINE TO MARKET-BASED MEDICINE.

Rick Moran notes the latest instance of Atlas Shrugging.  Apparently participating in the Obamacare exchanges is a losing proposition for the insurance companies.  (That despite all the opportunities for rent-seeking the creation of the two lies for the price of one Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offered.)

How serious a problem is there? The Kaiser Foundation has been one of Obamacare's biggest cheerleaders. For them to even mention a mass  pullout by insurance companies, you know it's more than a possibility.

The "young and healthy" are not signing up for Obamacare largely because they don't have to. The individual mandate has proven to be so unpopular that the administration felt it a political necessity to carve out numerous exemptions. Even with big subsidies, the "indestructibles" don't feel the need to purchase insurance.

When the end comes, it will come rapidly. The tipping point will come when all insurers pull out of some states completely, setting off a chain reaction that will throw millions of individuals off of their insurance plans and the companies who are left will be unable to handle the number of sick people buying their plans. Costs will far exceed income and Obamacare will sink below the waves.

This would be an incredibly disruptive way to get rid of the law. There are alternatives that would ease the transition back to a private insurance market without the massive numbers of people losing coverage and insurance companies going belly up. That's a desirable goal once Obamacare is history.

But if we view the exchanges as a necessarily messy way to destroy the insurance companies and pave the way for universal Medicaid, all is proceeding as the true believers would have it.  The companies that are left will be taken down the same way that most of the Eastern railroads came down after the wreck of the Penn Central.  Delaware and Hudson managed to stay solvent, and competitor Erie Lackawanna's bankruptcy followed Hurricane Agnes.  And perhaps the political class saw the railroads as sufficiently irrelevant to let Ronald Reagan sell Conrail.

But advocates of a government takeover of health insurance might profitably study the coming of Conrail.  First, hem in the railroads with regulations.  Then create a public agency to pick up the pieces.  The transition will not be pretty.  On the other hand, a future Ronald Reagan might see the opportunity to sell the agency off.

The hemming in with regulations is under way.  The unraveling is coming.  The public agency will not be as simple to sell off as a railroad, in part because the very act of destroying the insurance companies will destroy the knowledge base in risk management apart from that appropriated by Medicaid.

We have much to look forward to.

EVEN THE FRENCH CAN LESSEN COMPLEXITY!

Too much nuance in the construction of a rotary defeats its purpose.  In Rockford, the road commissioner is having trouble with two-lane roundabouts (you have to get rid of the 53 foot trailers.)  Then there's Paris, where you don't have 53 foot trailers, but you do have up to eight lanes circling the Place de la Nation.  But they're understanding that ripping up the paving is an improvement.

Seven sites in total are getting people-friendly makeovers, including tourist-frequented places like the streets around the Panthéon. This means expanding sidewalks and bike lanes, adding more greenery, and rolling out cafe chairs and tables. There’s very good precedent for this at the Place de la République, which underwent a similar makeover in 2013 that was so popular with Parisians the changes have remained to this day.

Many of these overgrown rotaries already circle monuments or existing buildings.  The overdesigned roundabouts of the State Line unfortunately create inaccessible dead space in the center.

Simplice!  Simplice!  Tojours le simplice!

SOCIALISM IS A CONSPIRACY OF LOSERS AGAINST ACHIEVERS.

Everything else is details.

THIS IS WHAT RENT-SEEKING LOOKS LIKE.

Seth Abrahamson spells out the obvious for Huffington Post readers.

Mr. Sanders has implied that there are only two possible answers: (a) the money wasn’t for the speeches themselves, but for the influence major institutional players on Wall Street thought that money could buy them if and when Clinton ran for President; or (b) the speeches laid out a defense of Wall Street greed so passionate and total that hearing it uttered by a person of power and influence was worth every penny.

Per Clinton surrogates and attendees at these speeches, the answer appears to be both (a) and (b).

Here’s a compilation of what those close to Clinton and/or the institutions that paid her obscene sums to chat with them are saying about those never-to-be-released speeches.

Go there and read if you wish.  The sums are not obscene, as we know what they are.  The speeches are obscene, in the traditional sense of actions the reader is left to infer.  But it's only drinkers of the Clinton koolaid that are likely to be shaken up by being compelled to confirm their inferences.

Those of us who understand that governance as an advance auction of stolen goods generates and dissipates rents see business as usual.  Why otherwise intelligent people remain in denial about what business as usual looks like is the bigger mystery.