EMERGENCE IS MESSY.

Before the Black Swan took wing, Joshua Mitchell of Politico considered the foundations of Donald Trump's appeal. Put simply, "The post-1989 world order is unraveling. "If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War."

DECONSTRUCT THIS.

"When there is no truth, there can be no argument."  Wish I had known this epigram a quarter century ago, when the Canon Wars were in full fury.

PROGRESS IS NOT INEVITABLE.

Nor are all changes for the better, argues Robert D. Kaplan in Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World, tonight's Book Review N^o. 15.

It's become a thing of late for pundits and public intellectuals to go on anthropological excursions into the Flyover.  We've documented a number of these things, particularly since the surprise outcome of the national elections.

Mr. Kaplan, however, is an old hinterland hand, both in the States and abroad, and his vision tends to the tragic.  That's not necessarily the case as he earns the Rockies. That is a reference to his truckdriver father's experience with road trips, and it's not wholly wrong, there being a thousand miles of prairie and plain and plateau and seven-layer salad before the Front Range looms in the windshield.  Now imagine crossing all that open space in a prairie schooner.  But you have to appreciate an explorer who treats his in-car navigation as the enemy, "because it steers me only onto the interstates."  He ignores it.  Along the way he discovers the true source of American intellectual strength.  "The Big Ten is the capstone of a vast social, economic, and political process that, again, stares right at us, even as we don't notice it."  (Rockies: 74)  In Illinois, it's a different sort of player with railroads, in this case the flood-loading of land barges of grain hoppers.  "I know that it is the immensity of the continent that required the development of more powerful locomotives than in other parts of the world, something which, in turn, enabled the development of long-distance engines for our warships, so that the strength of our navy is directly related to the size of the dry-land continent and the rail lines spanning it."  (Rockies 77.)  And coastal types can eat their bread and pump their gasohol into their hybrid cars without ever contemplating how it gets there.  As far as those engines, well, the Electro-Motive 567 series diesel powered World War II passenger and freight trains, destroyer escorts, PT boats, and submarines alike.  And thus, cross-country, where a pattern emerges of the thinner people living in the more upscale areas, and where a lot of the citizenry are, in presidential terms, Jacksonians (a stance less common among the political class.)  Then in San Diego come the current warships, a "stabilizing presence" in his view.  But not enough of a power to function as tools of empire, conventionally understood.  All the same, those tools must be used wisely.  For in Mr Kaplan's view, the United States comprise a continental empire, one that -- as the settlers earning the Rockies and beyond learned -- must be frugal with their assets.

Earning the Rockies also draws heavily on the works of an earlier generation of social scientists: Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, Halford Mackinder.  Names now obscure, names perhaps in a bad odor because their perspectives don't align with contemporary aesthetics.  And yet it might not be possible to make sense of the actually existing United States without contemplating anew what they saw.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE BLACK SWAN IS ON THE POND.

Matthew Continetti, "The political class never expected Donald Trump to become president."

There's more at work, according to W. R. Mead.

The critical mass of support for Trump came from those who saw many of the defects which energize his opponents—but who nevertheless believed that this man, with all his flaws, was a better choice than any of the slick nonentities and earnest wonks who would labor to maintain the status quo.

Too many Democrats think that the Trump scandals, pushed to their logical conclusion, will bring an end to troubles that have seen the party sink to its lowest national ebb since the 1920s. By personalizing the problem, by thinking of Trump as a uniquely unscrupulous, uniquely insightful, but also uniquely incompetent demagogue, Democrats construct a reality for themselves in which his impeachment, or at least his humiliation, will leave upper middle class technocrats back securely in control of the regulatory state, the haute educational establishment and the media that really count. The rebels, abashed at the demonstrated unfitness of their leader, will disperse, the districts will demobilize, the Hunger Games will relaunch, and life in the Capital will go on as before.

Perhaps unfortunately, life is not that simple. The problem the Democrats face has never been the Republican Establishment, the Tea Party, or the Trump insurgency. The Republican disarray of 2017 is nothing new; Republicans do not know how to fix health care or to solve the fiscal problems of local and state governments without raising taxes or cutting services anymore than Democrats do. What drives Republican success isn’t public confidence in Republican policy ideas, but a public belief that given a choice between a party committed to the status quo and a party open at least to reforming it, dumb reformers are a better choice than clever custodians of the status quo.

Unfortunately, the dumb reformers too often confine their reform to the conventional process stuff, neglecting more imaginative approaches that might have more potential.

Our society is becoming more dysfunctional; neither Democrats nor Republicans have real answers, so our politics is becoming more embittered, and quackery flourishes in the absence of serious reform.

Meanwhile, we note with alarm that more and more of America’s energy goes into the endless process of two year presidential campaigns immediately followed by nonstop relitigation by scandal. We now cluster around our screens to catch the latest scandal mini-scoop the way we used to look at Iowa polling numbers before the caucus. Our intellectual and political energy is being consumed by the ephemeral at ever greater rates even as we run low on time to address genuinely vital issues. We are thinking about horse races, not the historic challenges that the United States faces at home and abroad.

Perhaps there are encouraging signs somewhere, being put into place by people who aren't forever tied to those screens. Unfortunately, the default setting for the political class and the correspondents appears to be that if it isn't happening in D.C., it isn't happening.  There might be a deeper meaning to Mr Continetti's closing sentence.  "Turns out, there's another hermetic bubble, one that stretches from West Forty-Third Street in Manhattan to the corner of Seventeenth and I streets in D.C. It didn't expect Donald Trump to win, it dismissed any discouraging information to the contrary, and it did not, in the words of Pat Toomey, 'expect to be in this situation.' And if we didn't expect to be where we are today, how on Earth can we know where we'll be tomorrow?"

Emergence is like that.

TODAY'S TRENCHANT OBSERVATION.

Betsy Newmark, nominally on the follies of contemporary lit-crits and their so-called Theory.

The idea that a literary critic would brag about discussing "an imaginary Jane Austen" indicates how baseless her theory is. But why should that matter. She likes Austen's novels; she's a radical; ergo Austen must have been one also. Evidence can be imaginary since the theory itself is what matters. It resembles a lot of liberal policy proposals - the intent is good, therefore the policy is admirable - forget the unintended consequences of a hiked minimum wage, universal healthcare, or peace with Iran.

Just the thing as the unintended consequences of universal health care (and a lack of imagination on the part of Our Political Masters) hit, and hit hard.

RAILWAY PRESERVATION IS WORK.

A few years ago, here's what Milwaukee Electric container car M-37 looked like.

All that chipping and priming has been to good purpose.  Here's the same car, late last month.

There is a functional Milwaukee Electric box motor, thus the museum is capable of operating a merchandise dispatch train, as well as re-enacting a Lakeside Power Plant coal train.

CONSIDER THE TRADE TESTED BETTERMENTS.

I continue to be frustrated by Official Washington's focus on things like insurance coverage and tax penalties rather than, oh, making possible more trade-tested betterments in medical care.

There's something longer to come, but, really, Pajamas Media's Michael Walsh has it.  "Getting the government out of the private businesses of medical care and deregulating medical insurance would go a long way to improving the American health-care system, and it wouldn't cost a dime."

You could go to John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane and just keep scrolling.  Or start here.  "The combination of free market and exchange has to be designed to keep people out of the exchanges."

Unlikely, though, that our political masters will be so sensible.

MAKING THE SUMMER JOB GREAT AGAIN.

A number of the local landscaping services have "Help Wanted" signs at their farms and greenhouses.  I'm enough of a home gardener to have no idea who the usual labor force is, or whether some presidential tough talk about tightening the border is having an effect.

But for years I have remarked on the tourism business, most notably at Wisconsin Dells, staffing the eateries and water parks with young people from the Former Soviet Bloc.  That's delicious, given that by state law, school (and the public universities) cannot resume for the fall before Labor Day.

In the summer entertainment sector, there may be a connection between labor shortages and visa shortages.  It's affecting itinerant carnivals.

In a typical summer, Alpine Amusement has a traveling staff of about 50 people.

The carnival operator crisscrosses Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, where workers set up, run and take down more than 20 rides every week from May to October.

This summer, Alpine has a spartan crew working long hours. What was once a six-hour setup now takes two days. The carnival doesn't even put up half its rides because it doesn't have the manpower.

Used to be, experienced workers who had previously come into the country on the H-2B visa could return, without counting against the limit on visas.  This year, they do.  (Perhaps that's what's affecting local landscaping companies.)  In Wisconsin, the eateries catering to the tourist trade face the same challenge.

The state's restaurants are already struggling to fill openings, a problem that's only exacerbated by the summer season, said Susan Quam of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association.

Employers say the high school and college students who used to take on these summer jobs now have other commitments, such as organized sports or summer internships.

The labor shortage is so severe, the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association has created a task force to deal with the issue, said Trisha Pugal, the group's CEO and president.

Some resort areas, such as the Wisconsin Dells and Door County, have a workaround already in place: They have long hired international college students through the J-1 visa program, which is touted as a cultural exchange program.

Thus, at the Dells, the youngsters are working their way through college. Plus polishing their English skills.

Down East, well, this story got Instalanched, and it's not a parody. Maine Town Resorts To Hiring Americans As Visas Run Out.

The article describes some of the “creative ways to attract local labor” and they include things such as offering flexible hours and even… (gasp) higher wages. If your business is booming all summer to the degree that you can’t hire enough workers to meet the demand, then in a normal capitalist system the demand for labor would drive up the cost. Higher wages attract more and better workers… it’s really that simple. And if that enhanced compensation package is attracting more employees locally, why are you relying on the H-2B program to begin with?

Put another way, is the argument about immigrant workers "doing jobs Americans won't do" incomplete: it's taking the work at lower wages?

STILL A REGRESSIVE TRANSFER?

Dimitrios Halikias and Richard Reeves of Brookings evaluate the effectiveness of the state colleges and universities.  Some of the news is not good.  "Just 20 percent of America’s selective public universities manage to accomplish both objectives—to be both ladders [providing upward income mobility] and labs [establishing a reputation for scholarship]. Twenty-five percent are laggards, failing on both counts."  They don't quite say "subprime party school," but consider this.  "The majority of low-mobility universities also produce little to no research."  And the egalitarians who are offended by the reality of mediocre students from wealthy neighborhoods matriculating at a rate higher than that of strong students from poor neighborhoods will not be surprised.  "Almost thirty percent of students at low-mobility, low-research institutions come from the top quintile of earners, while under 7 percent come from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution." Safety school!

And the regressive transfer is there.

[W]e estimate that students from top-quintile families at these laggard public universities receive almost two billion dollars in annual subsidies. Such expenditures seem almost indefensible. Why should taxpayers pay to send relatively affluent students to public universities that both fail to produce research and fail to facilitate social mobility? There is a strong case that this money could be spent more wisely.

Don't apologize for being selective, and look for that excess capacity in what I call access-assessment-remediation-retention.  I like "laggards" in place of my lengthy formulation.

But there is trouble, even among the ladders, notes longtime higher education skeptic Richard Vedder.

Only 70 schools, 20 percent of the sample, were cited as the “leaders” in higher education (having high-income mobility among the students, along with high levels of research among the faculty). I took six schools from the top 20 on that list: the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of New Orleans, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Wayne State University, the University of South Alabama and Cleveland State University. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education website College Scorecard, I observed that at all of these schools, a large majority (over 60 percent) of full-time students failed to graduate in six years –well above the national average. These “leaders” did not do what many of us consider Job One: graduate entering students.

A decidedly alternative interpretation: many schools prey upon the poor and academically unprepared: they admit them, telling them college is a ticket to a better, solidly middle-class life, knowing full well that most of them will fail to graduate –but will incur large student loan debts (at “leader” Wayne State, over 60 percent of students who borrowed had failed to pay at least one dollar of their student loans back –three years after attending). Yet these schools sucker academics of the Thomas Piketty perspective into believing they are “leaders” in the quest for intergenerational income mobility. A better than decent case can be made that some of the Halikias-Reeves “leader” universities should actually die: their social costs exceed the social benefits.

That might be equally true of any institution of higher education that will not recognize its work is the same as the Ivies and the state flagships, but achieving a political consensus to defund whole campuses and limit enrollments to the college-ready, -willing, and -able doesn't seem likely.

But something that cannot go on, won't.

LIMIT OTHER FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.

There isn't enough traffic in Hawaii for tandem and triple trailer rigs, but Jim "Travel and Trains" Loomis encounters them when he's on the mainland.  (On some of his cross-country trip reports, it would be interesting to know how many triples are being kept off the interstates because they're on container and van trains.)

I have no idea what sort of safety record these double and triple units have, but it’s got to be scary for other drivers who have to negotiate around them.

It is, particularly given the free-for all the rig operators engage in to get in ahead of the competition.

On top of that, there’s the latest device the big trucking companies are using to skirt the law and increase their profits: they turn their drivers into independent contractors. Since, technically, they are no longer employees, the trucking company is no longer responsible if the drivers choose to be on the road 12 or 14 hours a day. Or even more.

It's worse than that, but the fleet operators who hire in these contractors have yet to grasp why there's a driver shortage.

And now comes one more thing to worry about. There is a proposal pending in Congress to increase the maximum allowable weight for trucks from 80,000 pounds to 91,000 pounds.

Holy Gross Tonnage, Batman! Did you realize that some of these big trucks highballing along our highways could weigh as much as forty tons? And now they want to raise the limit by another five-and-a-half tons?

It’s estimated that some 60,000 bridges in this country are potentially unsafe. Swell! Then let us, by all means, allow the truckers to carry an additional five-and-half tons over those bridges and out onto whatever Interstate highway is nearby. There’s too damn much government regulation in our lives anyway.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say there's too much rent-seeking. That Congressional mandate becomes another unfunded mandate for the states, which are running short of money to fix the roads they've already built.

Something that cannot go on, won't.

POLITICS DIVIDES, TRADE UNITES.

"Additional steel tariffs would actually damage the U.S. economy."  Martin Feldstein, Alan Greenspan, Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Joseph Stiglitz, Laura Tyson inter alia concur.  Additional background.

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE.

Destination: Freedom will cease weekly distribution effective 31 July, 2017.  The National Corridors Initiative organization and web presence will continue.

LIDICE, INDIANA.

Kurt Schlichter's Indian Country is a warning, inspired by the attempts of the self-styled resistance and the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academic Complex's efforts to impose their vision on the country.  "Maybe someday we will realize that the path we are currently on ends in a place that looks a lot like Kosovo...  The people there chose expedience and violence over the hard work of sustaining the rule of law."

Is that the course the United States are on?  Book Review N^o. 14 will not offer spoilers.  I purchased the paperback edition.  Is its publication in large type with a lot of white space a statement that in future, print editions of books will have in mind the deteriorating eyes of aging Baby Boomers, as everyone younger can still pick up the words on portable screens?

The events of Indian Country take place shortly after the partition of what was the United States, thus serving as a prequel to People's Republic, a prequel that none-the-less allows plenty of opportunity to describe the effects of all sorts of arms and ammunition, as well as to make fun of the pronoun pretensions of the preening progressives running the People's Republic.

But those preening freakazoids of unknown body type, while probably older versions of these future Morale Conditioners from Evergreen College, none-the-less have historical precedent for coming up with the muscle they will deploy in Indiana.

Retrieved from Bret Weinstein's Twitter postings.

The formula is simple enough:  arm some former felons, tell them they are facing a race and class enemy, condition them to think of that enemy is "deplorable" (an Americanized version of Untermenschen), then turn them loose.

Mr Schlichter suggests that, sales and other interest permitting, there might be additional stories about this partition of the country.  People's Republic has a hint that the principal character might be back at work in the failing part of the country; that the protagonists were able to block two Interstate Highways and get the leaders of Hillaryland to contemplate starvation of the cities suggests another set of possibilities.  That somehow, the nachalstvo in Chicago or on Manhattan or in Washington City or in San Francisco still have their cafes and craft beers also raises possibilities, more along the lines of Roumanians turning on the Ceaucescu clan.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IT TAKES SOMETHING TO BEAT NOTHING.

The American Conservative reposted a lament by longtime Republican court intellectual Bruce Bartlett.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.

I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.

His fear at the time was that his allegedly conservative brethren failed to have a message that might appeal to, well, an electoral majority in a presidential election, and to the relevant majorities in elections to the Senate and House of Representatives. Then the Affordable Care Act came unglued, and the Obama stimulus packages failed to stimulate, and, well, you know ...

SOMETIMES IT IS SIMPLE.

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff gets the last word, and the deep word, on David Brooks's disquisition on food snobbery.

Brooks has it right at the beginning of his article. It’s all about behavior codes. If you get them right, it doesn’t make that much difference what neighborhood you start out in, and you don’t even need to know what a latte is.

I'm discovering other public intellectuals with platforms bigger than mine who are discovering the same thing, and hope to report on those discoveries shortly.

YOU'D THINK THEY'D UNDERSTAND THIS.

By Attacking Western Civ, the Left Empowers the Alt-Right.  Didn't the Communist Party pick up a lot of sympathizers, fellow-travellers, and useful idiots when hardcore segregationists suggested that any effort to protect the right to vote as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment, and the freedom to use public facilities, as guaranteed in a number of ways, and the opportunity to participate in any housing market, which is the quintessence of free enterprise, were all communist plots?  (Yes, there were people who thought that way.  Do your own research.)

Apparently, the current crop of intelligentsia, if that's an accurate description, don't get it.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

Put another way: if a defense of the traditions of free minds, free markets, and skeptical inquiry become signifiers of the political right, I am directing my course to starboard.

But to grasp that point requires thought.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

There's still a lot of work to be done: simply change the inventory to read "freedom from religion, the rules are a system of power, property is theft, popular sovereignty is a scam, and equal dignity implies privilege."  But cleaning up after the deconstruction is work.

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS, AND STACKER OF BURRITOS.

Truth to tell, you can find just about any kind of Mexican (or Central American, or Caribbean) food in Chicago, at any level of extravagance, in any kind of atmosphere.  But the division of labor is different in metropolitan areas.

As we can see, the largest cities in the country dominate this list. Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles hold the top three positions. Cities on the list are from all over the country, though there is an abundance of cities from the Southwest (especially Texas).

This list is a bit disingenuous though, and I’ll explain why. As we said at the beginning, we are looking for the cities with the most Mexican food - when I hear that, I think of independently owned restaurants or smaller chains. This list above includes many fast food and fast casual chains that many taco/burrito enthusiasts would not consider authentic, for example, Taco Bell.

But the enthusiasts know where to look, or they develop their own local knowledge.

And the article (via Marginal Revolution) hasn't considered the taco trucks.

WAL-MART SHOULD GET A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

And other cheerful tales about the benefits of voluntary exchange and trade-tested betterments, from Voluntary Xchange.

INSTEAD OF DONNING SACKCLOTH AND ASHES?

Perhaps the reason Chris "Tingles" Matthews is so over-wrought about Our President these days is to atone for his efforts to ... get entertainer Donald Trump thinking about national office.

His one hour show included several such clips, in which national affairs or public office might never have come up in the course of discussing, say, Celebrity Apprentice, or New York infrastructure, or whatever frivolity fills in the minutes before there was any Bush Derangement Sydrome or Obama Hagiography, or which might have offered a bit of summer relief from same.

But somehow, Tingles steers the conversation to something involving national affairs and public office; and note, it's all respectful and on occasion insightful or provocative.

The spittle starts flying only after that famous escalator ride, and we see greater escalation as the Trump candidacy goes from entertainment to there's something happening to acceptance speeches and inauguration.

Watch, review the evidence, click the other clips if you wish, and make up your own mind.

TOO MUCH WATER FOR THIS ELEPHANT.

It takes a lot of water to sweep an elephant out to sea, but it happens.  Fortunately, the Sri Lankan navy understands Semper Paratus.

Photos posted on the navy’s website show the animal trying to keep its trunk above the water as divers approached it. Elephants use their trunks as a natural snorkel and have a unique lung structure among mammals that allows them to withstand variations in pressure above and below the water.

Genetically, they are also close relatives of manatees and dugongs, both water-dwelling animals.

Biologists have speculated that elephants might have first reached Sri Lanka by taking a similar route to the animal retrieved on Monday, swimming from southern India.

See you on down the road.