SHUT UP ABOUT HARVARD.

Ben Casselman: "A focus on elite schools ignores the issues most college students face."

That's long been my theme.  Mr Casselman's post is full of links, including links by way of endnotes (!) and he recognizes that for most collegians, the community colleges, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors are the relevant universe.  (I hope the footnotes work properly.  If not, read Mr Casselman's article.  I'm a railroad mechanic, not a coder!)

According to data from the Department of Education,¹ more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates ² attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.

Alas, the community colleges, the land grants, and the mid-majors don't provide a pipeline to the chattering classes.  Thus, perhaps, the Ivy obsession among the coastal readers.

Of course, the readerships of the Atlantic and Washington Post probably don’t mirror the U.S. as a whole. Many readers probably did attend selective institutions or have children they are hoping will. It’s understandable that media outlets would want to cater to their readers, particularly in stories that aim to give advice to students or their parents.

But it’s hard not to suspect that there is also another reason for reporters’ focus on elite colleges: At least in major national media outlets, that’s where most of them went. There’s no definitive data on where reporters went to school, but the newsrooms of influential media outlets in New York and Washington, D.C., are full of graduates from Ivy League or similarly selective colleges. Those who attended public colleges often went to a handful of top research universities such as the University of Michigan or the University of California, Berkeley. FiveThirtyEight is just as bad: The vast majority of our editorial staff, including me, went to elite, selective colleges. (I went to Columbia.)

“Ninety-five percent of the newsroom probably went to private institutions, they went to four-year institutions, and they went to elite institutions,” said Jeff Selingo, a longtime higher-education journalist who has a new book focused on giving advice to a broader group of students. “It is exactly the opposite of the experience for the bulk of American students.”

Fine, 538 can credibly commit itself to caring about life outside the bubble by recruiting at a Northern Illinois job fair, or signing an intern from Luther College or Creighton.

Unfortunately, Mr Casselman goes from a lament about how the focus on the same hundred aspirants to the top twenty slots in the U.S. News rankings to indirectly calling attention to why there is a U.S. News problem in the first place.

What few journalists seem to understand, [sociologist Sarah] Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often juggling multiple jobs that don’t readily align with class schedules. They are attending part time, which makes it take longer to graduate and reduces the chances of finishing at all. They are raising children, supporting parents and racking up debt trying to pay for it all.

“One little thing goes awry and it just falls apart,” Goldrick-Rab said. “And the consequences of it falling apart when they’re taking on all this debt are just so severe.”

Students keep taking that risk for a reason: A college degree remains the most likely path to a decent-paying job. They aren’t studying literary theory or philosophy; the most popular undergraduate majors in recent years have been business and health-related fields such as nursing.

Working backwards: a lot of higher education is vocational (that may be just as true in the Ivies, where the whole point is to do well enough to screen for Yale Law or Harvard Med or hire out on Wall Street later to qualify for Kellogg or Booth) and matriculants at the Ivies might be neither more nor less instrumental than their counterparts elsewhere.

On the other hand, the first two paragraphs lay out the tradeoffs between offering second chances and maintaining standards in such a way that matriculants arrive with better life-management skills.  Yes, at the margin, "one little thing goes awry," and yet, there's an accumulation of small disadvantages leading there.  How, then, dear reader, might a professor or an advisor come up with strategies for keeping students focused without appearing to enable dysfunctional behavior?  "Thus the importance of the mid-majors. Don't we owe our best students the same intellectual challenges the alleged name-brand universities are supposed to present?"  The challenge, dear colleagues, is to be able to make reasonable accommodations to genuine hardships without appearing to excuse irresponsibility.

Until the regional comprehensives and mid-majors tackle that challenge, U.S. News will continue to sell those rankings, and application season will continue to resemble the Hunger Games.

BET ON EMERGENCE.

Quillette's "George Gallatin" (a nom de plume) contemplates the evolutionary forces present in tribal formation, and fracture.

The fundamental human social skill is the formation of groups that act with shared intentionality. The skill to coordinate intentions is what enabled our ancestors to form sophisticated social coalitions that outcompeted lower primates. Shared intentionality is a double-edged sword, though. The ability to form groups around intentions also means the ability to form breakaway sub-groups around different intentions. Thus, one of our primary evolutionary breakthroughs carried within it the potential for endless factionalism.

The reason why we are still tribal today is because tribalism appears to have been evolutionarily adaptive — at least for our ancestors. Researchers at McGill University have described it thusly: “ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries”.

Despite prevailing moral fashions, we are the products of this evolutionary competition. This observation has no moral polarity, it is a mere reality. And while it is undoubtedly noble to argue that we should try to overcome tribalism, it is a very different matter to argue that it is achievable, or that in doing so we won’t be outcompeted by less noble, more unified groups.

That's an intriguing variation on the Cold Spring Shops "Sharing works well among people 'from our own tribe and family.' Market interactions are a way by which self-interest elicits empathy, or at least, cooperation." The social science Mr Gallatin refers to raises the possibility that differentiating by family or tribe came later, perhaps as unthinking humanitarianism got mugged by reality too many times.

Thus, there are potential gains from embracing diversity; there are also risks.

Since human beings are so quick to form factions, it should be the goal of government policy to ameliorate division and ward off for as long as possible the demon of sectarianism. Our current public policies and cultural products seem aimed at doing the exact opposite. I think this is because the designers of these policies hold at least two mistaken assumptions about diversity and migration.

First, upscale boutique diversity is bourgeois interacting with bourgeois.  The facts on the ground are not always so benign.  Second, over time, people can expand their set of interactions, or they can fort up.  Emergence is messy.  As Mr Gallatin puts it, "It is a mistake to believe that unregulated mass migration will bring about redemption for guilty Westerners. For whatever economic benefits it may bring, it will also bring tribalism, disunity, and violence. And for those of you who think this isn’t a major issue or that the worst has passed, please note we are just in the opening act of this drama."

(Via Thomas Lifson at American Thinker.)

ROSENMONTAG.

As Karneval comes to a close, the festivities get more transgressive.

Düsseldorf.  Unattributed image retrieved from The Local Germany.

Roses Monday is not the Rose Parade.  Float designers take afflicting the comfortable seriously.

Carnival is the celebration of the “Narr” (jester or fool), whose purpose it was in the olden days, at the courts of the kings and nobility, to tell the truth, and most importantly without being punished. That’s why politics has a significant role in Carnival. And of course Carnival in the Rhineland, especially, has always been very political as it developed in its current form during the time of the French and Prussian occupations.

Thus, all through the Rhineland, including Düsseldorf, the point is to be over the top.  "It’s that time again - when the usual rules of polite society are thrown out the window."  To the south -- Swabia, parts of Bavaria, and Austria, there are revelries, with a different tone.  "Down in the Swabian region in southern Germany, as well as in parts of Switzerland and western Austria, a more serious tradition called Fastnacht, which distinguishes itself from the Rhenish carnival also bursts out in February."  The festivities evolved differently, but share common origins in Roman and German rites of spring (which, yes, might have been anticipated by groundhogs seeing their shadows) modified as a way to make merry before the penitence of Lent arrives.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters have received all of February and March's rations of snow in the past ten days.  But there are paczki in the larder.  "If you don't eat at least one paczek, you will be unlucky all year long."  I'm taking no chances.

CONSIDER A DIFFERENT FUNDING MODEL.

A Florida transit planner takes a ride on Brightline. "While I loved my travel experience, as a planner, I'm keenly aware that Brightline’s service model cannot be easily copied by public transportation agencies."  Perhaps the place to start, dear reader, is by reworking the public agency model.  Let's start with Ms Whitton's contrasts.  "Brightline cost billions to build, and it was built without direct public funding. That being said, several things give it an advantage that public transportation agencies do not have."

First, "[Florida East Coast] has owned or had exclusive access to right-of-way for the railroad tracks for more than a century."  Unlike the legacy commuter train operators of the big cities, who sought public assistance with the operating deficits, leading to a situation in which the subsidy-paying agency might be at odds with the freight railroad that owns the tracks, Florida East Coast are starting this service, and adding capacity, ab initio.

Second, "All Aboard Florida’s business model includes revenues from nearby real estate developments."  I've called that the "Sim Trump" approach to railroad construction, and it seems to work in Japan.  But such "value capture" isn't so easily done by Commuter Rail operators (the prospect of Chicago's Metra getting too close to well-connected Pritzkers or McCaskeys isn't just a theoretical worry.)

Third, "During my ride, I noticed several 'official partners' of Brightline."  In plain language, naming rights (and well-patronized trains won't be white elephants.)  But again, where you have a government agency, with a monopoly on generating rents, you have the risk of corruption.  "While some larger transit agencies such a RTD in Denver and CTA in Chicago have corporate partnerships, the procurement rules or politics within most local governments would prohibit this revenue source."

Perhaps Brightline is a rarity, maybe even a one-off.  And yet, there might be ways for the Passenger Rail authorities to change their procedures.

It is a false assumption that public transit agencies can use Brightline’s entire playbook, but they can use some of its plays. There aren’t many locations where right-of-way is readily-available and cheap. Brightline also had access to developable land for transit-oriented development in already booming neighborhoods – an expensive and infrequent possibility in most cities. Generating revenue, such as with corporate sponsorships, is more realistic.

Put another way, rather than having the public money provide "demonstration projects," here is an entrepreneurial demonstration project that the Commuter Rail authorities might emulate.

NOT EXACTLY A COALITION OF THE ASCENDANT.

Betsy Newmark's morning roundup is a literature review of pundits contemplating the Democrats' coalition.  I found this visual in a Power Line "Week in Pictures" a few weeks ago that summarizes.

That might not be an easy coalition to hold together.  (Worst case scenario: the California of Kurt Schlichter's People's Republic.)

CROSS CROSSINGS CAUTIOUSLY.

Just after the State of the Union, the Congressional Republican Caucus took a train ride (!) to the Greenbrier Resort to talk about policy initiatives, including but not limited to not spending money on Passenger Rail.  (OK, I'm being outrageous to make a point, but what's the point of having my own private space to rant and not being outrageous.)

On the way, a truck blocking a grade crossing delayed the train.  (Not "hit a truck."  Not "was hit by a truck.")

The grade crossing was protected by both flashing lights and crossing gates. After the collision both lights and gates were seen to be working and undamaged. So why? There is but one plausible explanation: The truck tried to diagonally negotiate the lowered gates, its driver perhaps thinking a slow moving train was approaching. Had the truck ignored the gates, perhaps out of control, at least one gate would have sheared, but neither was.

Mr Frailey's post deals with the lousy reporting by the news media about how motorists get in the way of trains.

Look, this isn't rocket science.

Or, as Mr Frailey words it, "Who knows how many of us play Russian Roulette at crossing gates, and how many spin to the loaded cylinder? This was an educatable moment for the Big Three, and as so often happens nowadays, they blew it."

TRADE UNITES, POLITICS DIVIDES.

A Hamburg grocery store removed imported foodstuffs in order to send a virtue signal.  "In an effort to show people how boring Germany would be without diversity, their customers were left to do without food they consume regularly, such as tomatoes from Spain, olives from Greece, or cheese from France."  That may not be the best way to send the message, as Germany's diversity initiatives, like those elsewhere, are to persuade people to be neighborly.  National Brotherhood Week stuff, if you will.  Commerce, however, is a good social lubricant, flattening the world, if you will.

It's probably better, dear reader, that the Germans purchase their olives and cheese with Euro rather than with bullets.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

At oh-so-fashionable (well, among that dwindling population of slacktivists) Evergreen State College, graduates have funny ideas about success in business.

The Feminist Business School, founded by Evergreen State College graduate Jennifer Armbrust, teaches that capitalism is an “economy that values masculine traits” such as “meritocracy,” “competition,” and “individualism.” The California-based site recently launched two more online courses to coach aspiring businesswomen on how to “topple the patriarchy” and promote a more “feminist economy.”

Shunning the “profit seeking motive” of traditional commerce, the Feminist Business School advocates that businesswomen adopt more “feminine traits” such as “gratitude,” “intimacy,” and “connecting with nature.”

Cooperation is more likely where there is mutual benefit.  Profit-seeking is a way of identifying where such benefits might be present.  But the temptation to do business whilst engaging in virtue-signalling never goes away, does it?

“There is no template for radical entrepreneurship. An out-of-the-box solution for feminist business doesn't exist,” the course description states. “Only you can engineer a business the embodies your values, fulfills your unique needs, and enlivens your purpose.” Just like the first class, the Structures and Support class will guide students along the process of “birthing a business” through the lens of feminist theory.

It will not teach business skills, such as accounting or marketing.

The school plans to host a virtual Feminist Summer Camp, which appears to function like a discussion group rather than an online course. The students will discuss “feminist entrepreneurship” with the goal of “sloughing off patriarchal belief systems and expanding our entrepreneurial vision.”

That's not likely to turn out well, but then, if you have the cast of mind that thinks getting your priors tightened at Evergreen is the road to success, and organizing summer seminars might land you that gig at The Nation or MSNBC, why, hang on to your illusions.

In reality, on the other hand, the Arkansas Steelmaking Academy appears to have some promise.  It's a partnership of SMS Group, a manufacturer of steel mill machinery, with Arkansas Northeastern College, a community college hard by the Mississippi Delta cluster of high-tech steel recycling firms.

SMS are a German corporation, probably with prior experience in industry partnerships with technical schools there.  Whether this academy will be open to expansions of the entrepreneurial vision to the liking of the Evergreen types is left to the reader as an exercise.

THE MARKET FOR WHITE ELEPHANTS IS THIN.

Wednesday wasn't even a snow day.  "There wasn’t a single investor or business representative in attendance Wednesday morning for Northern Illinois University’s open house as it tries to sell the naming rights to the Convocation Center."  The spin from headquarters? "[Associate athletic director John] Cheney said many national businesses have expressed interest and downloaded an informational packet about the Convocation Center and the bidding process, but he couldn’t provide information regarding which businesses and how many have downloaded the packet."

Business owners have a sense when throwing good money after bad is unproductive.

WEIBERFASTNACHT.

Fasching, or Karneval, has been under way since November.  The serious partying begins now until the close of festivities at the end of Fasching Dienstag.

Prosit!

UNTHINKABLE.

A fixed-formation Acela trainset comes unglued.

The New York Post reports that Acela Express train 2150 was moving at 125 mph when it separated in Maryland. The news organization shows a photo of what appears to be a loose drawbar on the semi-permanently coupled trainset hanging between cars as though it had nowhere in particular to go. Thank God, no one was hurt.

But this happened.

In the United States of America.

So far, most media organizations haven't grasped the gravity of this. The closest I can come up with is if the Acela were an airplane, this would be the wing coming off in mid-air. Or if it were a automobile, the auto's frame split in two with the back section falling out and the front still moving forward.

Regardless of the analogy, each incident is an example of a catastrophic failure of things coming apart that shouldn't unless you have an acetylene torch and some time. And this incident comes just days after the Silver Star crash near Columbia, S.C.

Take care of the O-rings and the Space Shuttle will take care of itself.

THE PURPOSEFUL COMMUTER CAN RESERVE A SEAT.

It's wise to pay the four euro or whatever it is to reserve a seat on a German Inter-City train.

It's now possible for purposeful commuters to do the same thing on the Nürnberg regional trains.

Ab sofort können Reisende der S-Bahn Nürnberg Sitzplätze für ihre Fahrt reservieren. Möglich ist zum einen eine dauerhafte Sitzplatzreservierung für ein Jahresabo, zum anderen eine Einzelplatzreservierung pro Fahrt. „Mit dem neuen Angebot bieten wir gerade für Pendler einen zusätzlichen Service an, den sich zahlreiche Fahrgäste gewünscht haben. Jeden Tag seinen gewohnten Sitzplatz einnehmen zu können, macht die Fahrt noch entspannter und einfacher“, sagt Patrick Pönisch, Marketingleiter von DB Regio Bayern.

Yes, that means it is possible to reserve a seat for a single journey, or on the same train for an entire year. (Whether that reservation is relevant at weekends, I don't know.)

Herr Pönisch's observation about being able to take the same seat each day is intriguing.  There are regular riders on commuter trains in the States, and often they take the same seat, or bunch of seats, each day.  Somehow it even works for groups boarding at stations toward the city, as there's a lot of habit persistence among passengers beginning with the station of origin, and without reservations.

This is the Wired Age, and the reservation service might even include smart-phone connectivity.

I HOPE THIS LAW HASN'T YET TAKEN EFFECT.

Philly Lawmakers Seek to Ban Bulletproof Glass in Liquor Stores.

City Councilwoman Cindy Bass proposed the legislation, seeking to regulate the small stores in her district that she claims sell liquor but little else.

“Nuisance establishments like stop-and-gos harm neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia in several ways,” Bass told Philly Mag.

"Stop-'n-go" is the name of a chain of Seven-Eleven style convenience stores (headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, and the closest one to Cold Spring Shops is in Rochelle) but I think the right honorable lady is thinking of what a Detroiter would understand as a "party store."  That would hardly be a "nuisance establishment" as it is the place to go for your beer and your lottery tickets.  But that line of business offends the right honorable lady's aesthetic sensibilities.

According to Bass, these storefronts take advantage of the city’s lax restaurant liquor license provision while contributing to a variety of quality-of-life issues in low-income communities. Content to rely solely on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol, along with a bag of Doritos or two, many of these business owners don’t even sell the food that they advertise.

Somehow, though, if the party stores go away, the local residents will eat better.

Much like check-cashing establishments and lenders that charge exorbitant interest rates, Bass says, stop-and-go convenience stores target Philly’s most vulnerable – especially in her 8th District, where you can find more of these establishments than public schools. “Kids can buy candy, soda, and snacks while adults buy liquor by the shot, black-and-milds, and other adult products,” Bass explains. “Children aren’t allowed in bars, so why should they be allowed in establishments that operate in this manner?”

To be sure, Bass is not calling for a total ban on all convenience stores across Philadelphia. “We need them to operate in ways that contribute positively to the neighbors, community, and our city,” she says. “We must also separate what a convenience store is and does versus what a restaurant is and does.” To do so, Bass’s bill would separate businesses seeking restaurant liquor licenses into two distinct categories with different requirements.

Sounds like she would like to go after the poverty industry. I wonder what's her stance on gentrification, or on inculcating bourgeois habits among her constituents.

But with Eagles fans acting like they had never won a world championship before, perhaps the operators of party stores downtown were glad of their bulletproof glass.

HOW HIGHER EDUCATION BECLOWNS ITSELF.

Professor: Small Chairs in Preschools Are Sexist, ‘Problematic,’ and ‘Disempowering.’  I can't make this kind of stuff up.  Kat Timpf supplies suitable mockery.

Even if talking with chairs were normal, I would still say that this seems pretty crazy. That physically small chairs are the standard for physically small people seems . . . well . . . standard. What do these preschool kids need, giant barcaloungers? To finger paint in? So that no one feels disempowered by a piece of furniture? That would be a great use of taxpayer money?

Here's the opening of the abstract. "This philosophically driven work is intended to trouble the position of the small chair in early childhood settings. It is theoretically driven by an aspect of sociological and cultural theory called hauntology, and by the theories of new feminist materialism."

Apparently I was never clever enough to make up my own research practices, in which an extended literature review could constitute an entire article, without any testable propositions or data collection.  "The methodological approach is intra-active and diffractive."  Nor did I think of taking a self-portrait near a steel mill rather than gathering information about the machinery therein and the shipments therefrom.  "As part of her research, Bone even visited an IKEA furniture store so that she could sit in child-sized chairs. Included in the article are two pictures of Bone sitting in small chairs. The author also included a brief account of the experience." I have no doubt, none at all, that this professor offers at least one class that would satisfy a diversity and oppression requirement in the States or Canada.  Has the intersectionality disease infected Australia as well?

GOOD THING THEY WEREN'T DEALING WITH THE GERMANS, THE FRENCH, OR THE SWEDES.

Russia calls in army after 'snowfall of the century' in Moscow.  Had this storm been the result of a Soviet weather modification test, TASS would be bragging. "More than a month’s worth of snow fell on Moscow within just 36 hours at the weekend as the temperature hovered below zero degrees Celsius, the biggest snowfall in the Russian capital since meteorological records began." Evidently, Russian kids aren't as hale and hearty as they used to be, either.  "Children in Moscow were given the day off school on Monday when the temperature stood at minus 12 degrees Celsius. The authorities encouraged people to leave their cars at home and use public transport instead."  That's about plus six, Wisconsin style, or a warm day for a Packer playoff game at home.

POINTS FAILURES ARE PREDICTABLE.

The best reason for the Roadmaster to keep the track in line, particularly through the frogs at switches, is that the jostling through the special-work is really good at jarring accumulated snow, ice, and probably mud off the frames of the rolling stock.

Should snow accumulate on the rolling stock and detach itself exactly due to excitation originating from a point of discontinuity of the rail, the snow is likely to drop at the location of a turnout. It was clearly observed in 2009–2010 that snow tends to drop from rolling stock in turnout areas; this means that, in adverse weather conditions, the acceleration levels created at turnout locations are sufficient to drop snow from rolling stock. The acceleration levels established by the measurements may therefore be used to develop methods to drop the snow, such as introducing intentional points of discontinuity in the rail to drop snow from the rolling stock.

I'm not so sure about that "intentional points of discontinuity." Joints, soft spots in the ballast, spikes or clamps working loose do a pretty good job of messing up that alignment.  Might be easier to keep the closure rails and stock rails in line.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM.

The best case for emergence and self-organization might well be the continuing, multiple failures of Intelligent Design.

Consider the following meditations, just from this week.  Start with Victor Hanson.

Our best and brightest, with the most impressive resumes and degrees, not the “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever” of Middle America ran up $20 trillion in national debt. Our best failed over a decade to achieve 3 percent economic growth. The supposedly smartest warped the health care system. The brightest could not translate overseas interventions into a strategic or cost-to-benefit advantage. The anointed eroded the border. The most knowledgeable gave us state nullification of federal law. The purportedly most ethical weaponized the IRS, the FISA courts, the DOJ, and the FBI, undermined the idea of free-speech in the university, and politicized everything from the eroding NFL to the increasingly irrelevant Oscars.

That's his peroration: he could as well have opened his essay with that passage, which he then backs up at length, then to conclude with "'Elite' is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it."

I believe his references to health care and overseas interventions refer to this century, although the allegation has had some force for half a century, at least.

Vietnam was different. Driven by the technocratic concept of “channeling” the most intelligent Americans into critical non-military occupations, the post-1948 draft provided deferments to university students. The majority of the 15.4 million draft deferments given out during Vietnam were student deferments. This loophole was largely closed to working class Americans by only being available to full-time college students. Employed part-time students, who were invariably from humbler backgrounds, were ineligible for student deferments.

Medical exemptions offered other perverse rewards to wealth. An entire cottage industry sprang up to advise young men on how to fake injuries, insanity, ill health, and other conditions that would obviate military service. Self-mutilation was a rare equal opportunity option. Wealthier men who could afford to pay for professional documentation of an ailment (or, in extremis, get braces) had a 90 percent chance of receiving a physical or psychological medical deferment from military physicians who lacked the time and desire to challenge them.

For others with connections the reserves and National Guard offered another refuge. With all these avenues for the upper class to avoid combat service, it is small wonder that many elite U.S. universities can count their Vietnam war dead on one or two hands. Journalist James Fallows could only recall two of his 1200 Harvard classmates who served in combat in Vietnam.

That's Gil Barndollar for The American Conservative, and he suggests that was the beginning of the divide between Ruling Class and Country Class.  That "channeling?"  It went by the rubric of "selective service" and the idea was to intelligently design the work force for national needs: infantrymen selected this way, rocket scientists another way.  James Fallows, let the record show, has long had reservations about the way Selective Service worked: see his "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" that appeared in Washington Monthly and a subsequent reflection essay in The Atlantic.  Summarized in one sentence, "While perhaps four out of five of my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys."

Now the boys from Chelsea have their own champion, and Rod Dreher is enjoying the popcorn.  "I am against identity politics across the board, because they tribalize us and dehumanize the Other. But if you are going to pick up that powerful but malignant weapon and use it against your political opponents, don’t be surprised if they do the same." That comes after a review of a recent interview of Fred Siegel, whose The Revolt Against the Masses led to this review.  "The frustrations documented by Mr Siegel were in place long before those Wisconsin and Michigan electoral votes went on the board."  Quite possibly, a long time before.

When you have tried Intelligent Design and found it wanting, might it make sense to give emergence a chance?

IT'S STILL A WHITE ELEPHANT.

The sports arena, er, Convocation Center, at Northern Illinois University, that is.  Don't say I didn't warn you these projects are money pits, without the mystery of the Knights Templar or salt-sea pirates.  "The Convocation Center was built without the consent of students or faculty, and the Jehovah's Witnesses were willing to pay a substantial rent for its use."  Even the opening festivities, featuring Bill Cosby, ultimately went sour.

The way forward, apparently, is to sell naming rights.  "Sean T. Frazier, NIU associate vice president and athletic director, said in a news release this is an important step as the university looks to maximize potential revenue for NIU athletics."  That's at least truth in packaging.  It's a sports arena, used incidentally for such things as the farm implement show or the occasional concert.  "'We want a partner which matches our visions and goals,' Frazier said. 'We need a partner with a history of service – someone who serves the university, the community and, frankly, the Chicagoland area. We want to make sure we have a partner who understands and believes in what we’re doing, and isn’t just writing a check.'"  But Illinois is no longer a good place to live, and people are leaving, and that's showing up in reduced enrollments at Northern Illinois, at Illinois State, at the University of Illinois.  "'The Convocation Center was built with student fees built into the funding model,' said John Cheney, senior associate athletic director/internal operations. 'Obviously, as student enrollment goes down, so do your fee hours. You have to find other ways to generate revenues.'"  That's life in the Mid-American conference, where all the sports programs rely heavily on student fees that frequently time-crunched students view as sunk costs on game day, or game night as the case may be.  For all the good that will do.  Two of the three bowl-eligible football teams that didn't get invited were from the Mid-American (Buffalo and Western Michigan), and it's likely that only the conference tournament winner in either men's or women's basketball will make the field of 66, or whatever it is these days.

TAKING STOCK.

Our President delivered his Speech from the Throne on Tuesday.  On Friday, some process memo went public, and that's what all the conversation on the public affairs shows was about this morning.  Or at least, I think it was, the conversations were agreeably soporific, and I got a nap in.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler scorns the process-worship.

I’m not comfortable acting as a supporter or defender of Trump, but I’m even less comfortable with the appearance of a rogue security and law enforcement apparatus gone blatantly political. The so far poorly-explained antics at the FBI and DOJ reflect badly on all vested authority in the country — and especially for any faction that pretends to be on the side of justice. This is a much larger problem than the public debate seems to recognize. We are not far from a point where nobody will be able to believe anything official in this land.

That is, perhaps, the best case for a government of limited and enumerated powers, but if the financial collapse Mr Kunstler keeps betting on occurs, a government of limited and enumerated powers is unlikely to be a policy option.

PUT YOUR HOUSES IN ORDER FIRST.

Illinois public colleges and universities are shedding enrollment, and yet, the presidents thereof are asking the legislators for more resources.  (Rude question: if there are fewer students, isn't there money in the personnel budget for student affairs and diversity and the other impedimenta that might be reallocated?)

The editorial writers of Chicago's Tribune aren't quite that rude, but they're also not buying the pleading.  "Because Illinois higher ed looks paralyzed, clueless, as many of this state’s students plan their futures — in Madison, Bloomington, Columbus, Columbia, West Lafayette, East Lansing, Iowa City, Winona, Milwaukee …"  This is no time for Business As Usual.