STUDENT CAREER SUCCESS BEGINS ON THE HARDWOOD.

The season might have ended unambiguously for the Northern Illinois women's basketball team (any team still active in conference tournaments when basketball led the way on social distancing can think of itself as a champion, right?) and yet two of the senior honor students will continue to play, this time for pay.  "Former Northern Illinois University women's basketball student-athletes Courtney Woods and Ninni Salmi have signed professional contracts to play overseas in Australia and Sweden respectively." That gets both players closer to their home towns of Brisbane, Queensland; and Kauhajoki, Finland. Well done.

TIME TO RESTORE A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

Let's start with some risible nonsense from the aptly-named Derisa Grant, who has enough special ed credentials to be a regular advise columnist for Inside Higher Ed.  Wade through a lot of the usual stuff about identities, and the continuing obsession with cultural competence, until you hit peak foolishness.

For example, in my conversations with STEM faculty members, I often hear that their disciplines are evidence-based and identity-free. But when prodded, those same instructors might admit to not assigning readings with women as the lead authors, to assuming a level of prior knowledge in introductory classes that favors students from upper-middle-class high schools or to having group projects in which female students often assume a housekeeping role (e.g., note taker). In other words, these instructors eventually admit that underrepresented students do not introduce identity into the classroom, but rather identity is always present in the classroom. Identity is enacted through readings, assignments, classroom structures and classroom norms -- choices made and identities prioritized by faculty members.

Why the chromosomal makeup of the lead authors of readings matters so much I've never understood.  That a good professor might help an inquisitive student of any ancestry irrespective of who is writing the articles or chapters is simply proper practice.  The real crime, though, is in the failure of the common schools to inculcate the proper habits of mind in neighborhoods that aren't upper-middle-class in attitude (it not being hard to find well-to-do-neighborhoods with as little respect for learning as the author apparently senses in those nontraditional students: is anybody else as impatient as I am with this easy equation of first-generation-nontraditional and unprepared?)  The essay gets even sillier from there, finally cancelling that lead author argument thusly.  "[Properly conditioned faculty] wouldn’t just believe, for example, that including a sole Toni Morrison text to represent Black writers in a literature class or asking gender pronouns in a science class will make these courses more inclusive."

Minding the Campus's Robert Weissberg spells out the path toward repair.

Today’s political brainwashing must be replaced with good, solid, plain instruction. The kind with an emphasis on discipline and hard work, which were once standard motherhood and apple-pie virtues in American schools. Teach American history without a litany of identity politics grievances. Teach grammatically correct English without the drivel about it being a form of white oppression. Our schools should teach literacy and numeracy, not wokeness.

While the status quo is not good for American K-12 education, it does, however, present opportunities for hundreds of financially troubled colleges and universities. They can create an alternative universe of traditional schools of education whose clear-thinking graduates will be snatched up by those school districts whose parents are tired of, for example, third graders “discussing” their personal pronouns in anticipation of gender transition.

That's hyperbolic, and yet, there's likely a marketing opportunity for colleges of education and for school districts, that is, if they can break the tyranny of the accreditation cartels. But in a world of teacher shortages, which Mr Weissberg suggests is the current reality, perhaps colleges of education that aren't pushing potted political economy, and school districts that aren't enabling disruptive behavior and calling it equity, might have hiring advantages.

HOW LITTLE THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

Power Line's Scott Johnson suggests "President Trump has taken the side of the United States."  Pray that V. D. Hanson is correct when he speculates, "So each day, ill-defined groups of Americans silently drift into the 'I can’t take this insanity anymore' camp."

That appears to be implicit in Mr Johnson's thinking.  "We can infer several things: 1) Trump was effective. 2) 'Dark' means he spoke about things the Left would prefer that voters not focus on. 3) The Left thinks it will lose the culture war."

But, as Steven Hayward notes in a separate Power Line post,  "The elite intelligentsia of the country are turning against the country—in science, in politics, in the fundaments of patriotism. How can we not pay for this?"

Blunt is not incorrect.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH ADMINISTRATIVE USURPATIONS.

Tenure is dead, according to John Warner.

Tenure as policy is primarily a byproduct of the corporatized university, but in my view it is also the consequence of generations (literally) of tenured faculty failing to exercise their tenured muscles by resisting policies -- such as administration arbitrarily classifying some instructional jobs as ineligible for the supposedly necessary protections of tenure -- in a way that asserted their power and checked the growth of the corporatized university.

Given the strength and power of the forces aligned against faculty, I am sympathetic to the notion that it’s possible they couldn’t have done much to change the tide anyway, though it’d be awfully interesting to go back 30 or so years with the knowledge we have today and see if we could convince enough tenured folks to hold the line when there was still some hope.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find a cohort less disposed toward collective action than college professors. The work is almost literally done sprinting side by side, not always in competition, but definitely not in cooperation. Those who sacrifice for the greater good are those least likely to earn the perk of tenure. The incentives just don’t align.

That's one possibility.  Tenured faculty had an opportunity to hold the line fifteen years ago, but virtue signalling at the expense of education was the more popular course, as well as apparently harmonizing with this greater good.

DON'T BE A USEFUL IDIOT.

Brad Polumbo reminds readers that a policy position is not necessarily evil because people who might have evil intentions are among those advocating it.

Many conservatives insist Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-police, radical organization that wants to tear down America. Meanwhile, most liberals simply view Black Lives Matter as a heroic movement and powerful slogan signaling support for racial justice and opposition to police brutality.

Both are right. There is Black Lives Matter™️, and there is “black lives matter.”

Purity tests among true believers, or among people who spend lots of time in their social media silos, are probably not constructive.

It may well be true that in particular conservative circles, everyone is well aware of the obscure history of the Black Lives Matter founders’ Marxist roots. But the average person on the street and the average person who shares the hashtag are most certainly not. And the movement itself has become something much bigger, broader, and more benevolent than the original organization.

However, it’s by no means just conservatives who err in their approach to Black Lives Matter. For one, many on the Left fail to acknowledge at all the Marxist roots of the official Black Lives Matter organization, and thus, paint anyone who objects to the organization as racist, unthinkingly inveighing: “How could anyone not support black lives?” This kind of clever naming of a controversial movement, similar to “Antifa” supposedly standing for “anti-fascist,” makes it easy to baselessly paint critics as extreme and immoral. Yet this is a reductive oversimplification that serves only to divide.

So, too, much of the blame for the Black Lives Matter perception gap lies with liberals, Democrats, and others who support the movement for failing to adequately distance themselves from the radical organization.

Perhaps, though, the true believers, irrespective of faction, are behaving as if the disutility of policy differences from one's preferred policy portfolio is quadratic in distance.

YES, YOUR PERMANENT RECORD IS REAL.

The ledger in Sister Mary Hermann Göring's office served the temporal purpose of recording grades and demerits, and the Holy Purpose of reminding the possibly fractious students in her charge that Saint Peter was also compiling a list.

In real life, the Permanent Record is emergent, and anyone can read and interpret the entries, something that a foolish young lady called Claira Janover recently learned the hard way.  Not surprisingly, Twitchy is having a good wallow in "Make them play by their own rules."  Victory Girl Kim Hirsch discovers a teachable moment.

Janover will pay the price for the brainwashing she received at Harvard, if not during her previous schooling. She has learned to regard people with whom she doesn’t agree with contempt — in fact, she despises them. She thinks she’s better than they are, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to express their opinions.

Yes, Claira Janover is the one who will have to learn the repercussions of her actions — not the college professors who taught her to loathe America. Nor will the media who cheer on indoctrinated radicals like her. The question is — how long will it take for kids like her to learn that such actions often come with dire consequences?

There are limits to sheer entitled Harvardacity, and Ms Janover hasn't yet caught on, apparently preferring to blame conservative cancel culture for finding her post.  That's too much for Fox News columnist A. B. Stuckey, who is otherwise disposed to be forgiving.

The best outcome would be for Janover to learn a valuable lesson—don’t trivialize violence, and definitely don’t post about it online—and for her to move on with her life. We shouldn’t hope the worst for her. Everyone makes mistakes. Where leftist cancel culture refuses to offer grace, we should extend it.

Unfortunately, from what we can see, Janover isn’t interested in self-reflection. Her subsequent TikTok videos blaming Trump supporters for her woes demonstrate a stunning lack of self-awareness and an unwillingness to take responsibility for her words. In my view, she doesn’t owe the mob of faceless internet users an apology, but she would do well to show more respect to her former employer than to call them cowards. It’s hard to imagine that kind of attitude bodes well for future job prospects.

It seems Janover’s disposition is characteristic of many members of the elite left who believe even the most intensely aggressive speech is appropriate and without need of real-life accountability—as long as it’s for the “right” cause. Viral videos of predominantly female protesters screaming profanities in the faces of police officers show that many believe that the standards of decency and respectfulness don’t apply to people who take up the noble fight for wokeness.

Rod Dreher would also like to extend Christian charity.

Mostly, I don’t care. She is a typical bully: she can dish it out, and didn’t care if the lives of others — Wrongthinkers — were ruined, but when her methods are turned on her, she sobs her eyes out. She says that she feels sorry that Deloitte could not tolerate some like her, who “is going to make an indelible change in the world, who is going to have an impact.” What self-righteous hooey. You might be able to get away with that rot on Harvard Yard, but the real world is not college, for once.

I must say, though, how much I hate cancel culture. This horrible brat did not deserve the foul language and threats of violence she received. Nor did she deserve to lose her job over her idiotic, racist TikTok. I don’t believe that most other people on the other side do either, though. I think we’re better off learning to tolerate as much garbage social media as we can, because there will be no end to the trench warfare if we don’t. But as long as these Social Justice Warrior monsters use their power to ruin the lives of others, I support pressure to hold them to the same standards that they inflict on others. You can tell that it never, ever occurred to this privileged Ivy League snowflake that she might face accountability for her vicious, violent, racist rhetoric.

They're not going to like the new rules, indeed.  Mr Dreher concludes, "Can you imagine what the office would have been like with this toxic person in it?"

Sister Mary maintained that ledger to spare the fractious students in her charge a nastier comeuppance in adulthood.

THE MISEDUCATION OF TONY NORMAN.

He's a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist still grappling with the persistence of Dixie iconography.  He starts with a song most famously covered by Joan Baez and maunders into melancholy.  "How many times does the Confederacy have to fall before everyone agrees it was a lost cause? How many times must Lee go down to defeat before the bugle sounds?"  Virgil, look, come see, there goes the Robert E. Lee (the first of which was commissioned a year after they drove old Dixie down).

It's what he doesn't see that is particularly sad.  "Where are the statues of the abolitionists?"  There was one of Hans Christian Heg in Madison, Wisconsin, until recently, when some of the people who would probably agree with much of what Mr Norman is arguing, decided to toss it into Lake Monona.  Abraham Lincoln can no longer urge freedmen to kneel only to God, as that is the latest thing to be banned in Boston.

You won't see an Acela nosing into Boston and Providence's Park Square terminus behind, as the five platform tracks proved inadequate, within ten years, for the growing commuter traffic.

That's not all he missed.  "Where are the tributes to the Black Union soldiers who helped turn the tide of war?"  The 54th Massachusetts memorial in Boston was also a casualty of the wilding.

Perhaps he and I could make common cause on the proposition, Howard Zinn is crap.  "Why can’t we find honest accounts of slavery chiseled in stone instead of banished to unread chapters of high school history books?"  Or, perhaps on the proposition that controversial topics are controversial for a reason.  It's fifty years since the release of Time on the Cross, and researching pirates is probably safer than researching slavery.

HER POWER DERIVES FROM THE CONTINUED MISERY OF HER BASE.

So it always is with ward-heeler politicians.  "A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits."  Stephen Miller notes the ward-heelers have willing accomplices.  "Renaming a plaza in Washington DC or painting giant yellow letters down 5th Avenue in New York outside Trump Tower is the perfect kind of shiny object for the media to focus on. Just keep ignoring the Democrat politicians who have failed these communities over and over again."

On the front lines, Second City Cop sees rookie Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, true to form.  "When you can't defend the behavior of your voting base, blame the inanimate object [a pistol] and not the morally-bereft person wielding it."

Can't have the lakefront liberals turning on her, can she?

MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE.

Proclaim Liberty unto the land, and all the Inhabitants thereof.

Badger Battery, Baron DeKalb Volunteer Light Artillery, salute the 245^th Year of American Independence.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE.

Because there can never be too many video visits to Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland.

The clip concludes with the viewer having a choice of four more specific areas of the exhibit to view. Enjoy.

AN APPEAL TO RELUCTANT CONSERVATIVES.

Daniel Pipes makes the case for keeping Donald Trump in office.  "His policies in the areas of education, taxes, deregulation, and the environment have been bolder than Ronald Reagan's."

There's more at the link.  Consider also this.  "Slowly but inexorably over the past three years, my approval of the policies has outbalanced my distaste for the person. Finally, knowing that Joe Biden will represent the radicalized Democrats in November, I conclude that I will do my small part to help Trump get re-elected by writing, giving, and voting."  Yes, a fair number of establishment Republicans and guardians of the Established Order are on record as supporting Mr Biden in the hopes that they can restore some semblance of those days of Process and Consensus where the Outline of Compromise emerges from a curated panel on the Sunday shows, and conference committees put together Comprehensive Reforms in The [c.q.] National Interest.  Unfortunately, Mr Biden's election will depend on a lot of votes from people who argue a lot with Democrats, before ultimately voting for them, and there's no guarantee the street democracy theater will end with the general election.

For my part, Illinois's electoral votes are probably predetermined, freeing me to cast a protest vote at the top of the ticket, and for the state's delegations to Washington City, we shall see.

BOW WOW, BOW WOW, BULLDOG, BULLDOG, #CANCEL YALE.

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball thinks it's a good idea.

By all means, cancel Yale. Remove the horrid name from clothing and other merchandise. But replace it with a more honorable name: Dummer. Dummer University. The Dummer School of Law. The Dummer School of Art. A Dummer degree. The name, as Gwendolen Fairfax said in a different context, produces agreeable vibrations.

That's actually a reference to a long-ago rain-maker who pried loose the donations making Yale possible.  It might also be a reference to what Yale and the other Ivies make their matriculants.

But as long as the regional comprehensives, the mid-majors, the land-grants refuse to act as if they are in the same business as the Ivies, the Ivy premium, inflated though it likely is, will continue.

Unfortunately, the Wuhan coronavirus is not exactly concentrating minds among the people whose responsibilities include recognizing that they are in the same business as the Ivies.  "College leaders surveyed included presidents, provosts, student affairs professionals and others. They identified government funding, student mental health, diversity and inclusion, and affordability as the biggest challenges facing public higher education, in that order."

Government funding?  What's that Insta Pundit quote about blaming anti-intellectualism when the public tires of funding epistemic closure?

Student mental health?  Appeal to the social set with a party atmosphere, and provide safe spaces and comfort dogs at exam time, and then act troubled because nobody has any inner strength any more?

Diversity and inclusion?  Perhaps all that money being spent on Student Affairs indoctrination morale conditioning is being unproductively spent, given all the invocations of systemic racism lately?  If it's not working, does it really pay to put more resources into it, without rethinking the approaches first?

Affordability?  When nobody pays list price, in part because there's a lot of federal money at work?

Four self-inflicted problems that the salaries of university officials whether at the system, campus, or division head level depend on them not properly engaging.

A COP, A RELEASED FELON, AND TWO JUDGES DEAL CARDS.

Politico's Tim Alberta goes to a picnic in Grosse Pointe Woods.  He meets more than a few leading lights of Southeast Michigan's current political extablishment.

What I learned over the next six hours was as captivating, and surprising, as any reporting assignment I had ever been on. While some of my initial observations were correct—this was the upper crust of Black Detroit, these were elites in business and government who planned to vote no matter what—my expectations of what I would hear from them were very wrong. These were not Black citizens removed from the fury, dispiritedness and contempt for the establishment that [state representative Sherry] Gay-Dagnogo had described. If anything, they explained to me that afternoon, they felt this disillusionment all the more acutely; they knew institutional racism all the more intimately. They had given up on the system not for a lack of political power but because of their proximity to it.

Once upon a time, Grosse Pointe Woods was one of the cluster of sundown suburbs to the north of Detroit.  These days, though, the Michigan economy is not strong enough to support upscale segregation, and there are bargains to be had.  Up to a point, that is.

Grosse Pointe, they explained, had traditionally been an exclusive enclave of the wealthy white upper-class. Only after the Great Recession of 2008 was there an opportunity for Black families to move in. Taking advantage of the foreclosure market, they migrated from the rugged east side of Detroit to idyllic neighborhoods that were just miles away but might as well have existed on another planet.

The transition was difficult, Andre Moore explained. After he closed the purchase of his new house on Severn Road, he swung by to examine the building’s exterior before heading to the hardware store for supplies. A white neighbor called the cops. Because his license didn’t yet match the new address, Moore couldn’t convince the officers that this was, in fact, his home. It was a tense and humiliating standoff. Moore said most of his white neighbors have been welcoming—including, he noted with a smile, the ones he suspects called the police in the first place.

The surprise, though, is that Mr Alberta's interlocutors are in the difficult position of generally arguing with, then voting for, Democrats, despite Democrats, including Barack Obama Himself, making promises they have no intent of fulfilling.  "No matter whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat sitting in that White House, we stay chasing that so-called American dream."

Instructive reading.  Thanks to Power Line for adding the column among their rolling recommended links, earlier in the week.

IT'S WORSE THAN DENYING COHERENT BELIEFS.

That's long been my formulation.

George Will has a bigger platform than I, and he suggests I'm an optimist. "A significant portion of the intelligentsia that is churned out by higher education does not acknowledge exacting standards of inquiry that could tug them toward tentativeness and constructive dissatisfaction with themselves. Rather, they come from campuses, cloaked in complacency."

"Lumpen intelligentsia," though, is a felicitous turn of phrase.  Go, read, understand.

FIFTY YEARS OF FAILURE.

The culture studies types have poisoned the political environment for a long time.  Tear down the guardrails, then fret about incivility or what have you.  "Perhaps that adversarial culture might earn more respect if it produced any work of great insight, but you'll have to look elsewhere to find it.  There may be a reason scholars of a certain inclination assert the existence of multiple oppressions of Race, Class, and Gender, or revert to dog-whistle words about "issues of ...".  Dig deeper, and there's no there there."

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal wrote that "No Guardrails" essay, and he's back, noting that nobody was listening.

A primary claim made repeatedly this week is that the U.S., which means the American people, are guilty of perpetual “systemic racism.”

It is evident from the coverage that most of the demonstrators were born after 1990. By then, the Great Society programs had been in place for 25 years, and now it is 55 years. Annual budget appropriations totaling multiple trillions of dollars on Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, public housing, rent subsidies and federal aid to public schools have produced . . . what?

Since the 1960s, essentially little has changed in the neighborhoods at the center of those long-ago urban riots. By current telling, they are about as poor, as crime-ridden, as under-educated and in poor health as they were when LBJ said he would change them. That means five decades of stasis and stagnation in America’s most marginalized places, virtually all of it under Democratic—now “progressive”—political control.

The failure of the liberal model is by now so embarrassing that the current owners of that model have created an alternative universe of explanations, such as blaming it on American settlers in the early 17th century or the nonexistence of “justice.”

This is worse than 1968, because the political system is now engaged in a systemic act of forgetting. Let’s forget that this policy failure has happened or why.

Hat tip:  Steven Hayward at Power Line.

The extension to higher education is straightforward: is doubling down on the Student Affairs rhetoric about diversity, inclusion, and equity, which we have been hearing for the past thirty years, apparently to little effect, the best approach?  Maybe not.

[T]hose among us who see education as the one true lever for societal change are called upon now to incorporate a more holistic and fully representative narrative in the degree programs offered at our colleges and universities. That would begin with fully acknowledging that not everyone embraces the discourse on privilege and systemic discrimination. Many Americans do not wholeheartedly subscribe to the dominant narrative of racism as the key determinant of all matters related to equality and justice, as it is repeated verbatim in every article and conference paper or social media post. There are other voices, and not just those who are attracted by white supremacist thought or who continue to hold fast to the idea of American exceptionalism. In and out of academe, many Americans want to grasp what it means to live in a pluralistic and equal society, one that also remains firmly based in capitalism and ideas of individual freedom.

Put another way, there are controversies, and the role of people in higher education, whether on faculty, or within the administration (read that article in full, dear reader, it is another administrative power grab, e.g. "Higher education professionals want to take the lead now and engage more deliberately and jointly in revising our programs so that they are intellectually inclusive, skills focused and fully transferable, thereby moving significantly forward to achieving true equity not only in access but also in outcome for all students.")

AN ARMED SOCIETY IS A POLITE SOCIETY.

In Crown Point, Indiana, the local residents kept the protests peaceful.  There's a video at the link.

Indiana is a licensed open carry state, so everything you're seeing here is legal. Still, it's pretty menacing -- you see the protesters walking by with their signs out, but not chanting or even speaking. The group of older adults along the fence were also dead silent as they eyeballed the BLM group.

At the end of the video, you'll hear one of the marchers thanking the local police for keeping watch.

The concluding comment says more about the people who write for TMZ than it does about the residents of this neighborhood.  "Tough young'ns, no doubt ... and a stark reminder not everyone in the country's ready for change."  Translation: it's easier to deplorable-shame armed Normals in the abstract, than it is to persuade movement heavies in the concrete.  No looting, no vandalism, no call for a local show of force.

WHEN THE GLADIATORS STOP SIGNING UP FOR THE JOB?

In a Friday conversation, Rush Limbaugh thought he had an opportunity to demonstrate absurdity by being absurd.

RUSH: Dave in St. Louis. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. In St. Louis the powers that be had a Christopher Columbus statue removed from Tower Grove Park. They said that his visage reminded African-Americans present and former that they were slaves and always would be slaves. Well, I say we go the whole way and we remove the largest, the biggest, the meanest symbol of slavery in the entire world, and that is the National Football League.

RUSH: How’s that?

CALLER: Look at the stadiums they play in, Rush. They’re modeled after the Roman Colosseum. And what happened in the Roman Colosseum? Slaves were sent to battle to the death for the amusement of rich white Europeans. And then on TV, on ESPN, they have the NFL draft. I say no, that’s a slave auction. And then they sign the contracts and the owners can then trade or sell those contracts? Talk about sell you down the river. And even the college ranks that are often referred to as the farm teams of the professional ranks, how about saying it the right way — plantations.

I say Colin Kaepernick should never have to bow and scrape and accept a check from a racist organization ever again. Now, true, he might have to go to work at the local hardware store, but he never has to bow to slavers like the NFL again. You yourself even said the coaches were going to lead the kneeling for the national anthem. Coaches? They’re overseers. And every African-American player should walk away from the NFL and never again have to accept a check.

That might sound like an attempt to be funny, but with school districts going to seven man football with fewer kids going out for the sport, and upscale parents keeping their kids off the gridiron for fear of concussion, and with there being some reluctance among professional basketball players to resume the season in the midst of the protests of police brutality, it's just a matter of time before the penny drops for football players with African ancestry.

RUSH: In your organizational chart here, the coaches are the foremen of the plantation.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Yeah. And that’s as racist as you can be. Let’s go the whole way. Let’s eliminate all those —

RUSH: Folks, I don’t know how you’re reacting here to Dave in St. Louis. By the way, Dave, I don’t know if you know this or not, but there’s a movement to remove the gigantic statue of Louis IX, the namesake of St. Louis, in Forest Park in St. Louis. It’s happening right now, a movement to try to rip down the statue — every French king was named Louis. They were just the fourteenth, the twelfth, the tenth, whatever. And this would be Louis IX, I believe.

But I have drawn a similar analogy to yours regarding the NFL, not using the same verbiage but using the same philosophy as to what it is. Basically 70% of the employees are African-American. The owners are all white. They are putting their lives on the line. They are putting their bodies at risk all for what? The entertainment of the white billionaire owners and the people they convince to buy tickets to watch this stuff. And I said wait ’til somebody figures this out. Wait ’til somebody sees this analogy on the players union side. Anyway, there’s more to say, obviously, but we’re out of time

That sentiment is already present, and the league's attempt to conceal the parallels to Rome's gladiators by rewarding teams that diversify the coaches' room are futile.  Sometimes even an open line Friday attempt at being funny swerves into something that's really happening.

THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN SMOKEYS IS NO SMOKEYS.

Truck Drivers Say They Won’t Deliver To Cities with Defunded Police Departments.  It's a sampling of public comment from commercial drivers on an industry forum.

The railside produce terminals of years ago are long gone.

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE WEEK.

Richard Eskow, "Only an irrational hatred of Donald Trump could persuade anyone to turn to John Bolton."

HOW IS A VIRUS LIKE A GOVERNMENT?

The successful ones figure out how to be symbiotic with their hosts, rather than killing them.

Perhaps the Wuhan coronavirus is following that dynamic.  "Prof Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the Policlinico San Martino hospital in Italy, told The [London] Telegraph that Covid-19 has been losing its virulence in the last month and patients who would have previously died are now recovering."  Evolutionary time scales are slow, though, and the masks, hand washing, and physical distance measures are still prudent.

A month ago, Power Line's John Hinderaker observed that British experimenters were having trouble finding enough volunteers and enough contagion to conduct controlled trials of vaccines.  I haven't been keeping up with that study; I note, though, that parts of Pekin are closed down again (and those are the cases the Chinese are copping to.)  Note, though, his concluding observation.

Why do viruses die out? Epidemics follow a bell curve; they disappear long before they infect everyone in a population. Why? Am I the only one who feels like epidemiologists know less than I had always assumed?

The honest ones will grant that. "Settled science" is what people of faith say when they should be saying "hoc est corpus."