MAYBE AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE.

Trendy tech-heavy Washington State can't find enough tax money.

At the Cascadia Rail Summit, enthusiasm to build a bullet train capable of going from Seattle to Portland — or to Vancouver — in one hour rubbed against an anti-tax message from the passage of Washington Initiative 976.

After bemoaning that the state’s highways, bridges, ferries and rail cars “are on a glide path to failure,” Washington Department of Transportation Secretary Roger Millar laid out the case for building an ultra-high-speed railway on dedicated track.

“As we regroup here in Washington state and think about investing $50 billion in ultra-high-speed rail,” Millar said, “do you think we’ll ever get to a place where highway expansion keeps up with economic expansion and population? It will not happen. It cannot happen.”

Millar estimated a cost of about $108 billion to add one additional lane to Interstate 5 in each direction from the Oregon border to the Canadian border.

“One hundred and eight billion dollars and we’ve got another lane of pavement in each direction and it still takes you all day to get from Portland to Vancouver,” he told the audience. “Half of that invested in ultra-high speed rail and it’s two hours. That’s game-changing stuff.”

I suppose it's subversive of me to suggest that the state obtain the money to widen the highways from the highway users, although that strikes me as a two-fer, providing motorists at the margin to consider riding the rails.

THIS PACKER QUARTERBACK WORE NUMBER TWELVE AND WON THREE RINGS.

One of those rings was as the emergency replacement for Bart Starr in the 1965 overtime game.

Edmund "Zeke" Bratkowski, onetime Air Force pilot and quarterback with the Rams, Bears, and Packers, has answered the final whistle.  RIP.

TRADE UNITES, POLITICS DIVIDES.

Regular readers will recognize that theme, particularly where the noxious Cult of the Presidency is concerned.  The good news is, columnist S. E. Cupp, who has a way bigger platform than I do, is sounding a similar theme.  "It seems like politics has surpassed sports and organized religion as the most defining part of our identity. Our politics has become synonymous with our values and our organizing life principle. Instead, politics really should merely be a mechanism to govern."  That's a pardonable lapse in a pundit: in real life, "What line of work are you in?" is generally a conversation-extender rather than "do you go to church?" or "Are you a Democrat?" or even "Are you a Badger fan?"

Read on, though.  It's the Cult, heretic!

Partly to blame is our increasing obsession with the American presidency as an embodiment of hope and change, to borrow a phrase.

Long before former President Barack Obama was supposed to save the country from its many suffering ills, so too were Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. These were merely men — politicians, at that — but onto each of them was foisted a heavy mantle of expectation that was never going to be fully realized.

Yes, and it's always the same few "transformational presidents," and yes, William Clinton is on record lamenting the absence of a saecular challenge of the magnitude of slavery or depression or Communism, thereby diminishing his shot at greatness.

Maybe it's time to lower expectations.

The American president, it is believed, must solve all our problems, both complex and mundane. He or she must reflect to us our idealized best selves and represent all we hope to become as a nation over the next four years. Whether we seek a Republican or a Democrat, a strong man or a caretaker, a traditionalist or a progressive, we truly believe we can find and deserve the Aaron Sorkin version of a president — a leader who is omnipresent in our lives and reflective of our values.

The problem with any kind of omnipresence is it kills initiative. Sometimes, whether you're making executive decisions, or simply managing a freight yard, you have to tell people who are asking irrelevant questions, "I can't manage my position and yours."  (In extremis, asking "why do I have to do all the thinking around here?" is over the top but justifiable.)

In reality, the president has very little to do with our day-to-day challenges. The most influential people in our daily lives likely run our schools, our municipalities, our health, safety and sanitation boards. Most of us couldn't name any one of those people.

Indeed, and those obscure people are often doing their jobs, so you can hit the loo without having to think about it.  "The problem isn't that we're too tribal — it's that we've let politics replace community."  Community can be emergent in a way that formal politics, particularly at the national level, cannot be.  Bet on emergence.

F.A.O. SCHWARTZ WOULD LET ANYONE BROWSE.

A week or two ago, the WMAQ Sunday morning news show had a reporter broadcasting from a new "Toys R Us" theme park. "Toys R Us Adventure will have more than a dozen interactive play rooms that include installations featuring the Toys R Us mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe."  Bring money.

Like Candytopia, it will charge admission: $28 for adults, $20 for kids 4 through 12 and free for children under 4.

The experience will also feature toys from Melissa & Doug, Spin Master’s PAW Patrol brand and figurine company Schleich, the company said Thursday.

Back in the day, Mom or Dad would have to pony up for that portrait of their kid on Santa's lap, but otherwise they'd only pay for what they schlepped home.

In the Cold Spring Shops kitchen is a copy of Gene Leone's Leone's Italian Cookbook, which includes some advice on dining out.  He did not approve of the idea of tipping the steward.  "You are doing them a favor by spending your money for dinner in their place, you should not have to buy a table, too."   In the case of a toy store, with customer reviews of toys just a mouse click away, charging admission to test the merchandise sounds like a loser.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Sunday into Monday, we received three more inches of, er, climate chaos, most of which is still on the ground.  That prompted the university to implement Plan B, moving Monday's Veterans' Day observation from the flagpole where it usually occurs to the trustees' meeting room.  The schedule offered fewer speeches than is often the case, and the honor guard and rifle salute marked off, although a bugler played Taps.

The one speech was by senior Air Force veteran Brandon Smith, who set aside his prepared remarks to extemporize, thanking the Air Force and the university for helping "a kid from Chicago's south side" find structure in his life.  Apparently, although the various combat operations around the world aren't as much in the news, the blank check recruits write to Uncle Sam still include reservists subject to recall after their hitch is over.  Mr Smith noted that faculty were always supportive and helpful to him when his recalls, which always come at a bad time, like exam week, arrived.

That's long been a tradition at Northern Illinois, and it's the community colleges, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors that honor it.  Here's Inside Higher Ed's Wick Sloane.  "Bunker Hill Community College, where I first met veterans struggling toward a college education, has more than 300 veterans this fall."  That's from his annual survey of veteran enrollment in higher education.  The places you might have heard us, the places that fill the ranks of The Best and The Brightest, which is to say, the people who will send the next generation off to war, not so much.  "Yale, 15; Harvard, 17; Princeton, 18; Amherst, 13; Williams, fewer than 10."  That's from the development offices that responded to his survey.  It's easier to learn the name of a Washington whistleblower than to find out how many veterans matriculate at Cal Tech, apparently.

The veterans who enroll at the Ivies?  Perhaps it's OK to micro-aggress against them. ‘But don’t you ever feel like a sucker for serving?”  There's a longer excerpt at Insta Pundit; The Wall Street Journal left it outside the paywall on 11 November.

THIRTY YEARS SINCE THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN.

We can observe the non-observance of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

A SHORT CIRCUIT AT THE HOUSE OF WEINSTEIN.

Apparently the starlet-abuse scandal that sidelined movie mogul Harvey Weinstein also delayed the release of The Current War, a semi-truthful biographical movie in the spirit of Showman, the embellished story of P. T. Barnum (complete with computer generated elephants, so sad.)

When it comes to Benedict Cumberbatch portrayals of mercurial geniuses, the Alan Turing of “The Imitation Game” and the Doctor Strange of the MCU are a whole lot more interesting and compelling than the Thomas Edison of “The Current War.”

This Edison guy is SUCH a petulant, narcissistic, anti-social jerk. He seems to take little joy in pioneering everything from the electric light bulb to the phonograph to the motion picture camera, while expending a TON of energy belittling his underling Nikolai Tesla, engaging in dirty tricks against his rival George Westinghouse and preening like a peacock for the media.

Think of Mr Edison as a high-functioning sociopath, and Mr Cumberbatch simply has to channel his latter-day Sherlock Holmes.

Westinghouse is a smart and decent fellow with a firm grasp of science, and he’s brilliant businessman — but he’d be the first to admit he’s no genius on the level of Edison. Still, after Edison blows off a meeting between the two, Westinghouse becomes obsessed with besting Edison on the business field of play.

Edison, on the other hand, will resort to any means necessary to defeat Westinghouse, including mounting a public campaign to denounce AC as so dangerous it will surely kill people. He demonstrates his concerns by electrocuting a horse in front of invited press — the first of more than a dozen stunts. What a fun guy.

If George Westinghouse hadn't recognized the advantages of alternating current in transmitting power long distances, somebody else would have: the pioneer Pearl Street generating station could not power any lights in Greenwich Village. And Mr Edison's prejudices simply gave Team Westinghouse the human capital they were looking for.

Nicholas Hoult shines in a supporting role as the Serbian immigrant Nikolai Tesla, whose own world-shattering inventions are shrugged off by Edison and the world in general, until his brilliance cannot be ignored. Tom Holland has a nothing role as Edison’s loyal assistant. Katherine Waterston is terrific as Westinghouse’s loyal wife and partner, who encourages him to take off the gloves and get tough as Westinghouse and Edison compete for the exclusive rights to provide power for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago (which looks spectacular in the CGI renderings late in the film).

It's a shame the movie neither showed some of Mr Tesla's demonstrations at the Columbian Exposition, which would look even more spectacular using real Tesla Coils, nor acknowledged that "loyal assistant," Briton Samuel Insull, who understood the mass merchandising of power and managed the establishment of the Chicago-area power and rapid transit infrastructure, some of which is still productive today. That could have been easily added to the "what happened after?" trailer.

Those weren't the worst oversights, though.  "Capturing Edison and Tesla's creative genius poses a formidable challenge, but the bare-knuckled corporate brawling should be a lot more fun than it is. Instead, the story detours too heavily into the use of electricity as a means of execution, a strand with lingering relevance that nevertheless plays here like a distraction."  There is a snuff film of Topsy the rogue elephant being "Westinghoused" that did not make it into the movie.  Neither did the moviemakers recognize that some of Mr Tesla's demonstrations were making the case that high voltages at high frequencies were not dangerous.  As you read this post, dear reader, radio waves at the 500 Hertz and higher frequencies are passing through you and around you.  The Tesla coil attached to an oscillator produces electrical waves at much higher voltages, but with insufficient current to cause injury.  How hard would it be to make that point in a movie?

JUST THINK OF IT AS WRESTLING.

Dave "Voluntary Xchange" Tufte asks the right question.  "Have you noticed that most of the people saying that politics has gotten more partisan, seem to be media types who might make more money if it was??" Yes, and there's evidently scholarly work, in Public Opinion Quarterly, making my impressions formal.

It's even possible to make the partisan nature of punditry into a virtue, at least if you're novelist John Atcheson.

Social media gets clicks galore and the nation descends into rabid screaming matches as each side squares off in preparation for the now dreaded Thanksgiving Dinner where Uncle Al holds forth on the latest conspiracy theories and threatens civil war if Trump is impeached.

If discourse in the US has descended into the level of the insane, it’s because the media doesn’t treat idiotic red herrings and bald-faced lies as what they are – attempts to distract, deceive, and destroy.  And it’s not just Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Their misinformation campaigns couldn’t withstand a concerted effort to actually inform Americans by the rest of the media.  But that’s not what they do.

That's rich, when he continues by saying good things about the Federal Constitution, an unusual stance to see on Common Dreams.

The Constitution was written on fragile parchment.  It has no power other than the history of respect, reverence and custom supporting the principles written upon it since it was ratified 231 years ago.

The real story in journalism today is that one party has abandoned that respect and reverence.  It is a party that hates government, yet wants to govern.

There's a false claim for you: perhaps it is important for some aspirants to public office to understand that governing better might mean governing less, and not believing in unicorns.  You likely get more clicks and more book sales by coming out more obviously in the Republicans Suck camp.  But that's just another day of writing fiction for Mr Atcheson.  "Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality. Decrees from on high – often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats – are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians."  Meanwhile, the Limbaughs and Fox News are trotting out their own denunciations of decrees issued by a different unholy alliance.

And, unlike pro wrestling, it doesn't end with two out of three falls.

THEY DIDN'T LISTEN, THEY'RE NOT LISTENING STILL.

At Inside Higher Ed, media theorist Michael Johnson lays on the jargon to decry administrative usurpations.

Research shows that the main culprit [in higher ed's "slow extinction"] has been the incremental and imperceptible increase over time of higher education administrators. In other words, the budget that could have been allocated to reducing student-to-teacher ratios by hiring tenure-track faculty members has been consumed by the salaries such bureaucrats command. Other researchers have also concluded that this incremental process has often occurred without much input from the faculty.

Admittedly, the erosion of faculty governance has a lengthy history that began well before I was born. Administrators have been hired without the faculty even knowing (typically during summers, when we’re technically supposed to be off work), while in other cases, they’ve been appointed despite outright rejection of any faculty input whatsoever. This incremental decline of faculty influence has diminished our ability as faculty members to spend time on priorities of our own making. And the imposition of a business-like model onto nonprofit educational institutions has created the time-consuming need for faculty members to perpetually attend to “performance indicators” and unending “assessment rubrics.”

Such “accountability measures” demonstrate a fetishistic need to quantify everything in keeping with a capitalist model of profitability that reduces people and their work to numerical values represented by credit hours, FTEs, K-factors and WTUs relative to cost-benefit analyses. That has resulted in the systematic undermining of our collective power as faculty members who know best not only what to teach but also how to teach it, in what numbers it can be taught and under what conditions to do so.

Unfortunately, the growing managerial class is often represented by administrative positions that focus on cost-effectiveness and vague and changing metrics of student learning. One predictable consequence of the imposition of this kind of neoliberal ideology is the decline in the arts and other creative disciplines. Faculty teaching small classes or one on one, as is commonly the case in art or music or other teaching-intensive disciplines, is a best practice that should be encouraged and supported. But when faculty are forced to teach increasingly larger class sizes, despite research that says such actions produce poor student performance, it shouldn’t be surprising that declining morale among the faculty becomes an issue. Though that may well not be a concern for administrative officials pathologically dedicated to cost-effectiveness, it should matter to faculty members, who have a professional obligation to uphold the principles with which all academicians should be preoccupied: the education of future members of society.

Another unfortunate, but entirely avoidable, by-product of the rise of managerialism and neoliberal policies is the recharacterization of the student (or sometimes parent) as a consumer, ripe with an unearned sense of entitlement to an education that should be delivered to them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- complete with the righteous need to justify why our intellectual demands upon their time shouldn’t be equivalent to reading Wikipedia.

It's probably too late to push back, and where were the brain-brothers of Professor Johnson when the administrative usurpations were to override faculty hiring committees in the name of Diversity, and the rubrics and all the other impedimenta heaved up by the colleges of education were in the service of Access and Retention?  "It came to this, dear reader, when the faculty first acquiesced to administrative usurpations, because the usurpers appeared to be on the side of the angels."

That's the bed the woke scholars of today will have to lie in.  Sorry, not sorry.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A LOT OF LINKS.

Perhaps Snopes engages in link-whoring?

First, Babylon Bee has some fun with the Christmas-creep (noted here.)  "Playing Christmas Music Before Thanksgiving Now A Federal Crime."

Then comes the fact-checking.

The article went on to note that the legislation had unanimously passed both the House and Senate, with all members voting and not a single vote against, and quoted an unnamed member of Congress waxing enthusiastic about uniting “around our hatred for being forced to listen to sappy Christmas standards.”

As should be obvious, not a word of this was true. No such vote occurred; no such legislation was passed.

So far, Pajamas Media have not been led into temptation delivering readers from Snopesian machinations.

FIFTEEN PERCENT OF THE LOCAL CORN CROP HAS BEEN HARVESTED.

There's some of that crop still in the field across the mile road.  Here's yesterday's snow coming down.

The two snowiest Hallowe'ens in the neighborhood have occured in the instant decade, with Rockford recording 0.1" of snow in 2014 and over four inches yesterday.

There were still maybe twenty to forty kids braving the elements, as the snow quit after 4 pm and the sun came out for the early kids until sunset.  My impression was that a lot of the kids had immigrant parents, if that's giving the kids an opportunity to experience one of our traditions, it's a good thing.

Reason's Nick Gillespie has a point.  Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night nor process-worshipping bureaucrats should deprive kids of their opportunity to scoop up all sorts of sweet treats and trade them (for mutual gain) with their neighbors.

It's an object lesson that traditional, compulsory K-12 education persists mostly to remind kids that authority is brutal, stupid, and arbitrary, and to provide source material for the next iteration of Pink Floyd's The Wall, To Sir, With Love, Alice Cooper's "School's Out," Heathers, Mean Girls, or the next great youth-in-revolt statement. Indeed, the only good reason I can think of to oppose choice and letting parents and kids sort themselves into schools they really like is the negative effect it would have on future music, movies, novels, TV shows, and other forms of popular culture.

Meanwhile, the seasonal Music Choice channel went from it's Hallowe'en programming to its Christmas programming overnight, and one of the local groceries was replacing the remaing snack and fun size candy packages with their Christmas treats.  Here's your opportunity to dream of a white Christmas.

The chances are most of this will melt away or be washed away over the next few days.  Enjoy.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw gets a cheap opportunity to send a virtue signal to his colleagues and the Never Trumpers among his associates.

I just came back from city hall, where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent). Two reasons:

First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out.

I'll let the people who pay more attention to things like party loyalty and preferring losing honorably to winning parse all that.

RAY BRADBURY'S MECHANICAL HOUND WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DYSTOPIAN FICTION.

The device made its appearance in Fahrenheit 451.

The Mechanical Hound is a robotic assassin in the novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury.This robot is described as being made out of copper wire and storage batteries. Its purpose is to enforce the laws set by the government.

The Mechanical Hound was inspired by the use of dogs by firefighters in rescue operations. Whereas the purpose of rescue hounds is to locate those in need and help them, the purpose of the Mechanical Hound is to locate those who do not adhere to the rules and punish them.

The character has been likened to the Furies in ancient Greek mythology, symbolizing the government's appropriation of technological advances for its own agenda of oppression.

What the description does not tell you, dear reader, is the way in which the Hound sometimes assists in the Maintenance of the Rulers' Narrative, such as, at the end of the book, where the state-sponsored coverage of their version of a White Bronco chase ends with a guy, probably a deviant of some sort for the crime of going out for a morning walk, being put down by the Hound while the real bad guy gets away.

Then I watched last Wednesday's Chicago P.D.

The biggest mistake Intelligence made was trusting a facial recognition software that was still in its beta stages.

The interim Mayor Crawford felt optimistic about the software and convinced Voight's team to use it to find their suspect but ultimately, it was their poor decision-making that created this mess.

Nowhere during the show did any of the supposedly best detectives in all of Chicago consider the possibility that the gang-banger's lieutenant who didn't want the capo di bangers working with the police to identify who blew away two kids playing video games had more than a passing resemblance to the patsy who turned up on a surveillance camera being more likely to be the prime suspect than Ivory Soap was pure.

Technology fails often. It should serve as an aid, but it should never replace a case built from the ground up by detectives that are supposed to be the "best in the city."

When [the patsy] denied any responsibility for the death of two nine-year-old boys, Intelligence attempted to pull a guilty confession from him at all costs by throwing him into County to break him.

One of the deputy banger's associates got himself booked into County and disposed of the patsy; only then did the investigators identify the real killer. Who they turned over to the capo di bangers for a little street justice. Then the Powers That Be announced the case was closed, as the now dead patsy had been properly identified by an experimental face recognition program.  The warning being to all and sundry, whether participants in the ongoing gang wars, disgruntled Bear fans cutting up after another loss, or people requesting Republican ballots in the primary voting, that they might run but they just can't hide.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Yes, there's a lot going on in the wider world, but I've been having too much fun to let that get to me.  Maybe next month.

With our Hallowe'en looking more like the White Christmas we probably won't get (based on past experience) there has been plenty of time for improving the infrastructure, in between the rare dry sunny days where yard work is in order.

I call the layout "Gloucester Branch" and maybe it's far enough along now to start putting that level of track in.

The house might have been custom-built with a model railroad in mind, and yet, keeping the sections I want to be level level requires a bit of attention.  This segment, along the west wall, will be the location of Manchester-By-the-Sea, a real town on the real Gloucester Branch, complete with a small harbor and lobster boats.  Here, the harbor entrance, which, if all goes well, will feature a working bascule bridge, will be set up between the two uprights at center.  I have to install the Tortoise switch machines and ballast the track in staging, where you see the tracks, first.

I'm providing here for two levels of track, on the lower level there will be additional, primarily passenger train, staging occupying the space in the center of the cellar, while the Gloucester Branch will continue to rise through Magnolia and onward to West Gloucester.  The branch has to keep climbing to reach Rockport, which is the middle level of benchwork near the stepladder in the background.  I've learned a thing or two about how to build for more than one level of track at once.  Keep watching.

We're looking at the narrowest part of the layout, which is a walk-around plan.  The lead to lower staging and the Gloucester Branch will curve around the support column at left, then the aisle gets wider out of view beyond.  I'm planning to install a lighthouse and some kind of delayed motion detector to sound a foghorn if anybody stands too long in the narrows.

The next track to be installed will be here, which is the double-track Saugus Branch through Lynn Common to West Lynn.  If you have a railroad atlas, you'll know that this is loosely based on the real thing, with perhaps a longer industrial lead at Lynn Common.  On the real thing, there's a perfect spur track off a curve, which would go well into a corner in a smaller scale.  In O Scale, you have to pay attention to the ability of operators to reach.

For now, people arriving at the base of the stairs can still get around most of the basement.  That is going to change.

Eventually, there will be two sets of tracks separated by a view block in here.  To the left will be the station at Salem (note the witch.)  To the right, on the opposite side of the view block, will be the Hood Milk plant and an oil tank dock that are in Lynn.  In the distance is the Gloucester Branch, climbing up through Beverly Shores (yes, that's modeller's license, I have my reason) and leveling out at Manchester before continuing to rise through Magnolia toward West Gloucester, out of view to the right.

Now to get enough of this presentable between now and the March Meet.

GO FOR THE 4-H PROJECTS, AND ENJOY A CREAM PUFF.

American Thinker essayist Dave Ball sees in the county fairs a barometer of political sentiment, mostly not to the liking of coastal cosmopolitans.

The Washington County [Pennsylvania] Republican Party had a large booth at the fair, as it always does.  The booth was a big attraction from morning to night. During the evenings, there were consistently large groups of people at the booth. Some just wanted to talk about how the president’s policies were helping their businesses. Others talked about pay raises, still others about how the president was keeping his promises. Results matter to these people, and they are seeing results. Family and country matter to these people, and they see their families and their country better off under President Trump. Many who stopped wanted their picture taken with the “Don and Melania” cutout.

Many wanted to register to vote or to change their registration to Republican. Many of the registrations and changes were twenty-somethings, which is telling. Many others wanted to sign up to work for the party.

If we had Trump signs available, we could have given out a thousand or more to people who wanted to put them in their yards that day. Some 400 people joined the party as active workers. There were two booths this year selling Trump merchandise.  In total, this far exceeded what we saw several months before the 2016 election. Imagine what it will be at this time next year.

Across the aisle from us was the Democratic Party booth. It is no exaggeration to say it was mostly empty. There was no enthusiasm or energy on the other side.

County fair season ends before the baseball pennant races are even settled, which is to say, far, far, before anyone need worry about national politics.  Yes, it might be the case that sentiments the cosmopolitans might find, er, triggering, are more common on the fairgrounds than, say, in the common room.

WILL THIS FOURTH TURNING BRING ABOUT A DEVOLUTION?

If so, that might be a re-setting of the normal saecular dynamics.  The United States came into being as part of the Revolutionary Saeculum.  The States became a nation in the aftermath of the possibly foreshortened Civil War Saeculum.  The modern, allegedly omnicompetent State, in the control of The Best and The Brightest, emerged from the Great Power Saeculum.

Of late, though, The Best and The Brightest have been ... anything but.

In the manner of traditionalists everywhere, though, they continue to invoke the old maxims and the old incantations.  "The next time a legislator, mayor, or governor rails about plastic straws or the Paris Climate Accord, be assured that his state’s roads are clogged, his public schools failing—and he is clueless or indifferent about it."  Now, all the leaves are burnt, and the skies are gray.  "California has long been a bellwether for the country. Thus its inability to address problems with the physical environment is cause for concern. Is America really doomed to a future of complete incompetence?"

Never mind that California's problems might have both been foreseeable and subject to melioration.  The right incantations, notes Tyler Cowen, were more important than, oh, working the problem.

Economists themselves have been of no great help. My Twitter feed includes plenty of the world’s greatest (or at least best-known) economists. They love to debate Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a wealth tax, an idea that probably isn’t going to happen (just ask Mitch McConnell or, for that matter, any moderate Democratic senator). When it comes to designing a better incentive model for California power utilities — a concrete problem for which economics is remarkably well-suited — there has been close to complete silence.

It's not for the National Political Class or The Best and The Brightest to fix.  Perhaps, though, the place to beta test fixes is in a different state, or a county.  National Affairs are pro wrestling (I know, I know, the preferred locution is "Kabuki Theater," but deal with it.)

Let the emergence emerge.

PUTTING THE PRESERVATION RAILWAYS AWAY.

With the end of October comes the end of the preservation railway season in Illinois and Wisconsin.

A few members of Illinois Railway Museum paid a visit to the nearby Fox River Trolley Museum, where one of the cars recently received a new coat of paint, and recovery from the vandalism of a summer ago continues.

There will be a few Christmas trains to report on before year's end.  Last year, the local efforts sold out.

YOUR DRESSED BEEF IS A GIFT FROM PATRICK CUDAHY.

I'm borrowing a line from John Galt's speech, and, no doubt, Upton Sinclair would pour scorn upon me (and there are any number of onetime colleagues who would sputter, "How can you say that?")

Commerce, though, is the discovery and the division of gains from trade, and entrepreneurs, whether they are meat packers or retailers or information technology peddlers, build a large fortune out of a lot of little gains from trade from a lot of people.

Vincent Geloso elaborates.

A share of [the increased wealth of Gilded Age industrialists] did come from technological innovations that generated considerable profits that were captured by the inventors/entrepreneurs who adopted them. However, as William Nordhaus pointed out , the monetary profits from such gains are only a small share of the total gains. Indeed, the sum of all gains in welfare includes much more than just these monetary transfers. The welfare to consumers is a much more encompassing concept that speaks to utility and not income.

In fact, the fall in inequality on dimensions other than income confirms this point. The poorest were gaining on these other dimensions because they were willing to purchase the goods that made a few entrepreneurs exceptionally wealthy. Thus, a share of that increase in income inequality between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent is not at all worrisome because it speaks to a leveling on a more broadly defined conception of living standards.

However, there is a share of the increase that can be damned. It is the share that speaks to the role of the “robber barons” who got rich because of political machinations. Few are the historians who have labored to distinguish the wealthy of the late 19th century according to how they got rich. The recently deceased Richard Sutch made such an effort just before he died (unfortunately, his very promising work may have died with him). His work suggests that most of the great fortunes in 1870 were made from business rather than inheritance. In this, he echoed much of the pioneering work of Stanley Lebergott and more recent work that argues that extraordinary fortunes dwindle fast.

A complementary, but equally relevant, nuance is provided by Burton Folsom. In a frequently re-edited volume, The Myth of the Robber Barons, Folsom distinguished between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The distinction is made to highlight that fortunes can be built by serving customers or by catering to politicians. The former approach tends to generate fortunes that are less contentious and controversial. The latter generates fortunes that are acquired through rent-seeking. There were many such fortunes in the late 19th century: railway magnates that got rich from state subsidies, manufacturers that profited from trade tariffs, state-level bankers who were protected from out-of-state competitors, and so on. The unease about such “political fortunes” is understandable.

Yet, this latter nuance — which fits well with other findings in the fields of economic and social history — is nowhere to be found in The Triumph of Injustice. This is to be expected, as the answer to such a type of inequality is not a wealth tax, which would harm the deserving and the undeserving rich. Rather, the answer is a rolling back of the practices that create political fortunes. It entails constraining politicians in their ability to grant preferential treatments.

The invocation of the Gilded Age like a cheap political talking point is bad economics and bad economic history. A more careful study of economic history provides a clearer, more nuanced answer. It may be politically harder to sell such an answer. This, however, does not make it any less accurate or true.

As long as it's politically expedient to sell Governance by Wise Experts that doesn't involve the generation and dissipation of rents, it's going to be politically expedient to demagogue so-called Gilded Ages.

THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE WISE EXPERTS.

Here's Victor Hanson, making a point I've previously made numerous times.

These people should not be considered by any stretch of the imagination our “establishment” at least if there any positive sense left in the world. Yet they are typical, not aberrant of a habit of equating appearances, credentials, and demeanor of not necessarily talented people as proof of excellence and deserved authority. Where you live, what school branded you, what title, past and present, you can parlay, whom you know, and whom you married somehow have ended up far more important than what you actually have done. They remind one of played out “senators” from the last generations of the Roman Empire.

By their fruits shall ye know them.

What explains the bankruptcy of the elite?

We have confused credentials with merit—as we learned when Hollywood stars and rich people tried to bribe and buy their mostly lackadaisical children into named schools, eager for the cattle brand BAs and without a care whether their offspring would be well educated.

Graduating from today’s Yale or Harvard law school is not necessarily a sign of achievement, much less legal expertise. Mostly, entrance into heralded schools is a reminder of past good prep school grades and test scores winning admittance—or using some sort of old-boy, networking, athletic, or affirmative action pull.

Being a “senior” official at some alphabet government agency also means little any more outside of the nomenklatura. Academia, the media, and entertainment industries are likewise supposedly meritocratic without being based on demonstrable worth. Otherwise, why would college graduates know so little, the media so often report fantasies as truth, and Hollywood focus on poor remakes? Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced or diminished such inheritances?

He summarizes, "ruined our institutions and branded all that success." Sadly, no.

The pushback spreads.  Here's J. H. "Clusterf**k Nation" Kunstler, calling out the woke scolds.

I’m forced to repeat something that these New Age Jacobins seem unable to process: you don’t have to be a Trump cheerleader to be revolted by the behavior of his antagonists, which is a stunning spectacle of bad faith, dishonesty, incompetence, and malice — and is surely way more toxic to the American project than anything the president has done. Every time I entertain the complaints of these angry auditors, I’m forced to remind myself that these are the same people who think that “inclusion” means shutting down free speech, who believe that the US should not have borders, who promote transsexual reading hours in the grammar schools, and who fiercely desire to start a war with Russia.

That’s not a polity I want to be associated with and until it screws its head back on, I will remain the enemy of it.

Some of those people are of the Credentialed Establishment, and some of them of the Angry Resistance, and none of them impress the Hermit of Saratoga Springs.  Entertainer Nick Cave, himself of the Transgressive Artistic persuasion, is likewise displeased.  "Some of us…are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left's ever-expanding ideological junk pile."

Reason's Nick Gillespie extends.

One of the most amazing things about the current moment is the rapidity with which hard-fought battles to clear a space for free speech have been forgotten and replaced by a new censoriousness. It was only 50 years ago that we really won the right to talk and speak freely about all sorts of topics and ideas. Do we really want to return to an older time when speech and culture were constipated?

It's so easy to undermine the Woke Scolds with mockery, is anybody surprised that they hide behind the arguments recited in Critique of Pure Tolerance?

IT'S CALLED DEVELOPING YOUR POWERS OF CONCENTRATION.

That's easier, when you are concentrating on something that interests you.

The other day, I read an article about how children with obsessions, described as “intense interests” (which is a strong interest in a specific topic) are actually smarter.  These children are problem solvers, they seek more knowledge, and they often carry what they learn throughout their lives.

It's not necessarily smarter in the sense of, oh, being able to calculate a thousand digits of π, or conjugating irregular verbs or any of the other things that get the good grades on school days.  But sometimes the skills young people develop in the course of their intense interests (I'll let the achievement-resenting mediocrities call them "obsessions") carry over into those more traditional areas.

A 2008 study found that sustained intense interests, particularly in a conceptual domain like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and more in-depth information-processing skills.

When looking into the reasons for this, it all made perfect sense.  These kids are always researching the topic; they are continually seeking more knowledge about it; they are always asking questions.  In short, they make the children better learners, which makes them smarter kids.

The article notes that the intense interests don't always carry over into adulthood, although there's an intriguing reference to a "hobby gene." The mind-management skills, though, do.

These children learn new ways to learn.  They dig into their topic so deeply, figuring out new ways to learn about their interest.  They then take these problem-solving strategies with them into their lives.

They learn what questions to ask, how to learn more, how to dive into topics, etc…
It is almost like they are teaching themselves how to study and how to dig deeper into everything that they learn.

Instead of just learning “for a test” or “For the moment” and instead of memorizing, these kids learn how to figure out WHY this works the way it does.  They want to deepen their knowledge about subjects and topics.   They are connecting the dots and finding the relationships between things.

That's even when those intense interests appear to be crowding out the more responsible things.  Is there no parent who has ever chided such a child, "If you spend half as much time on [something required] as you did {mastering the nomenclature of dinosaurs, identifying the spotting features on diesels, recognizing the flight style of birds} you'd be an A student."  Thus the article might invert the direction of causation: it's not so much the interest waning as the external pressures to conform crowding them out.  That can wait, dear reader, it can wait.