I'M JUST AN ARBITRARY TRANSVESTITE FROM TRANSGRESSIVE PENNSYLVANIA.

Kurt Schlichter lives in California, and, not surprisingly, most of the action in his series of too-prefigurative novels about the collapse of the blue social model are set there.

But then you see the self-appointed dictators of Pennsylvania, and you wonder where else the insanity will surface.

Joe Hermitt photograph retrieved from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

That's Commonwealth Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, a male-to-female crosser, announcing some unconstitutional diktat or other while governor Tom Wolf, and isn't he the very model of a Silent Generation college administrator in over his head, looks on.  Your Glorious Progressive Future, right?  Wrong, I wrote unconstitutional for a reason.

In a measured opinion, U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV declared restrictions on gathering sizes, business closures and the stay-at-home order to have been unlawful infringements under the First and 14th amendments .

He’s right to acknowledge that state officials were acting in good faith to protect the public and that this isn’t the first time the government has infringed upon individual liberties during an emergency.

However, the indefinite length of the restrictions and lack of an exit strategy are critical factors: “It is now September and the record makes clear that Defendants have no anticipated end-date to their emergency interventions,” Mr. Stickman wrote.

Put another way, what began as a way to protect citizens has evolved into an inconsistent application of penalties and punishments.

Of course this is unconstitutional.

The governor is still resisting the logic of "limited in scope and duration," but sic semper tyrannis.  The people are the principals, the legislators are the agents, and the governor has only a veto power and limited and enumerated emergency powers.  The end of the arbitrary ukases cannot come too soon.

The fact that hundreds of small businesses have been forced to close and thousands of Pennsylvanians have been forced to sign up for unemployment is not a conspiracy. The heartbreak of families kept apart and elderly relatives passing away alone in nursing homes while mass public funerals continue to be held for public figures is immoral. And legally, the restrictions can be reinitiated any time the state determines that the virus is spreading too quickly.

Enough.

Most Americans support commonsense safety measures like masking and social distancing, but the time for devastating and draconian exercises of state authority is long past. America’s commitment to individual liberty does not account for Mr. Wolf’s “new normal,” and constitutional principles are not fair-weather propositions.

Perhaps the past six months of fifteen days to slow the spread have made clear exactly how scary "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" really is.

What you're experiencing is the Democrats' belief that government through experts creates bureaucracies that know better than you do about what's important to you.  In a nutshell, that's the progressive Democrats' prime selling point and has been since Woodrow Wilson: we're the experts, and we know better.  Most of the time, though, bureaucrats don't know better.

I've long felt that we need most government regulations only when people cannot easily or reasonably acquire important information on their own.

Even there, it's useful to have the simplest and most transparent regulations, as the people with local knowledge are going to anticipate many of the adverse consequences better than a lawyer drafting rules consistent with the enabling legislation.  If the China virus leads to a broader skepticism of Governance by Wise Experts, that has to count as a good thing.

I'll give Reason's J. D. Tuccille the final word, and the deep word.  "[N]ot just the constitutionality but the effectiveness of lockdowns is up for debate."  The lawsuits proliferate, as does the collateral damage.  There's going to be more to come, but the internet is slow and it's suppertime.

THEY'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THE NEW RULES.

 It's been de rigueur, ever since George Floyd overdosed while resisting arrest, for university presidents to see in what might have been a restraint technique gone badly wrong a Symptom of Greater Social Ills.  Like this.  "Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber went through the woke 'anti-racist' rite of confession: he published a letter confessing the ongoing racism at his university under his leadership." His entire statistics faculty should have issued a vote of no confidence, as his statement takes any divergence of Princeton population from some broader population as evidence of malign intent.

Now he's got a more serious problem on his hands. “Based on its admitted racism, the U.S. Department of Education is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false."

That's right, the Secretary of Education is treating Mr Eisgruber's statement as a confession to receiving federal funds under false pretenses.  It's pitch-perfect trolling. "Eisgruber did not intend to confess to violating federal discrimination law. He meant to signal his virtue and convince people that America is institutionally racist in order to further his own political and ideological goals. That makes the Department of Education’s response brilliant — perhaps even hilarious."  Discriminating for equality has never been a good idea.  Trolling stuffy Ivy League administrators, pitch-perfect.  Here's Rod Dreher. "If mandarins like Chris Eisgruber really believed their cant about systemic racism, they would resign tomorrow to renounce their privilege. But these powerful white people never do. These fortunate sons and daughters just want to make less powerful white people, and their children, pay the cost of bearing their own liberal guilt."  Go check out his column, and enjoy some of the comments.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also approves.

Princeton is given 21 “calendar days” (includes weekends) to comply. That ought to keep Mr. Eisgruber’s subalterns in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion quite busy in the weeks ahead, a monumental Chinese fire drill that can only end badly for the university. Either they have to come up with proof that Mr. Eisgruber’s asseverations are true — that Princeton is indeed, and has been for a long time, a racist school — or that Mr. Eisgruber and his administrative colleagues have constructed a false narrative to please and mollify the “social justice” mob among its own faculty and student body. In the first case, they are strictly evil; in the second, they are lying cowards.

I lean toward the "lying cowards" explanation. One meets a lot of careerists and conformists in 35 years of labor in higher education.

VIRTUAL RAILWAY ARCHAEOLOGY.

Some years ago, I documented traces of the Chicago Great Western railroad, whose right of way is intertwined with the course of the Black Hawk War.

Modern farming methods obliterate hard-packed roadbeds, and if you build an airport on the site of an interchange, you can even hide the fact that two railroads crossed at different levels.

Once upon a time, the Chicago Great Western interchange office, and passenger station, should anybody want to detrain for Freeport and get a lift into town, looked like this.

Unattributed photograph purchased from Joiner Historical Collection, Sycamore Public Library.

That clump of trees has gotten bigger over the years, hasn't it?

To the west, the Chicago Great Western also jumped over The Milwaukee Road and Illinois Highway 26.

When I took that picture, I noticed the remnants of pilings in the creek and guessed that the two railroads crossed at grade.  In reality, the Chicago Great Western was on a pile trestle.  Recently, a commenter asked about an interchange with The Milwaukee Road at that location.  Look closely at this map, there clearly is a connecting track in the southeast quadrant of the intersecting railroads.  The comment also recommends an aerial photograph, there's a trace of the connecting track alongside the Chicago Great Western but that's mostly gone near the highway.

Unattributed photograph purchased from Joiner Historical Collection, Sycamore Public Library.

That's The Milwaukee Road in the foreground, facing southwest (fitting as it's the Racine and Southwestern line) with Highway 26 crossing the railroad and the creek, then the trestle.  That might be traces of the grade of the interchange track visible (change in color of the grass) on the other side of the trestle.

The mind boggles, though, at six-unit lashups of F units with over 100 cars going over that trestle once or twice a day.

PEAK 2020 IN SPORTS.

The Milwaukee Brewers had an opportunity to take the quarantine-shortened season series from the Cubs, and gain some ground toward making the playoffs.

They committed three errors, gave up twelve runs, and got themselves no-hit by "Alec Mills, who entered the game with a 4.74 earned run average."  That's after a Saturday night game where they took a two run lead into the ninth inning and Cub hitters solved closer Josh Hader.

In the Cities, the Packers gave up six points on two-point conversions.  Fortunately, both offensive platoons were sharper than the defenses (perhaps there is some value to those exhibition games) and the Packers won 43-34 (is garbage time in the fourth quarter now a thing?)  "Green Bay will play its home opener next Sunday against Detroit, which blew a big lead in a 27-23 loss to Chicago."

It could always be worse in Detroit, I suppose, after getting smacked 19-0 by the Brewers a few days ago, the Tigers gave up another fourteen runs or so to the White Sox.

Meanwhile, the poobahs of the Big Ten are looking for ways to start football sometime in October.

YES, DOUBLE DOWN ON THE AUTHENTICITY.

New York's Times gives a Mychal Denzel Smith a platform to grouse, "A Biden Win Won’t Cure My Trump-Era Depression." Sounds like he's a real fun guy, lets his mental state be defined by elections.  "I had to ask myself what it meant to live in a system that allowed for a proudly racist and sexist representative of the capitalist class to seize presidential power. I mourned for the younger version of myself that had cast his first vote for the first Black presidential candidate on a major party ticket and had his cynicism challenged when that candidate actually won."  But does he reflect on how the hopey-changey stuff didn't really work out so well, and that's how a guy who publicly pushed a theory that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii then succeeded him as president?  ("As if anyone in 1961 would have faked a Hawaiian birth certificate for a young man named Barack Hussein Obama with the hopes of making him eligible for the presidency.")

But he's not optimistic about the election, even if Uncle Sam says, "Donald, you're fired!"  Get a load of why.

No, I never assumed that in my lifetime we would defeat the entrenched forces of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. But I had come around to believing that a slow, frustrating but ultimately sustainable victory and all the jubilation that would come along with it was something my friends’ children might someday experience.

That sense of possibility has largely dissipated. I am afraid every single day — of wildfires in California, of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, of the police and ICE, of going to the grocery store in a pandemic, of Electoral College math.

Just once, I'd like to see some experimental prefigurative community of transformation modelling, in microcosm, modes of living that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters and disrupting that white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism, but in six decades I just haven't seen it.

Perhaps, though, he's really warning all and sundry that a change of families in the White House does not mean an end to the chaos in the cities.

I know I can’t rely on a President Biden to cure my Trump-era depression. If he wins, it will simply represent a return to the normalcy favored by Democrats and the lie of American unity. A Biden presidency would not bring with it the same level of incompetence-meets-evil that we have suffered under the Trump administration. But without an agenda aimed at radically transforming (or in some cases eliminating altogether) the institutions that have caused so much harm, the best we can hope for is four years of bipartisan compromises that leave us facing the same challenges. Electing Mr. Biden is, at this point, a necessary measure to beat back the worst of the Trump era, but it is hardly a balm in and of itself.

Read between the lines in his essay, dear reader: the "radical transformation" is that of the so-called progressive wing of the Democrats.  Sorry, I want no part of it, too bad there's no provision in government as we understand it to volunteer for a control group.

ROME'S GLADIATORS WERE NOT CITIZENS. FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE.

The 2020 National Football League season got under way Thursday evening.  No preseason games, just the Chiefs back to their old tricks of letting the opponents score first then going on a run.

Before kickoff, Rush Limbaugh, in the course of lamenting the in-your-face wokeness that he views as antagonizing the fans, recognized that without players, there's no game.  "[T]hey have destroyed the connection that a majority of their fans had with the teams. They’ve just destroyed it with all of this politicized social justice protesting — and the teams, the franchises have kind of been forced into it because without their players, they don’t have games."  Exactly, and if the labor pool is not the same labor pool as the general population, that's a problem.

The formalities before the game included some nods to the civil rights movements, past and present.  Those formalities did not sit well with some of the fans, Kansas City allowing parties of six to attend in their own clusters.

The booing means that some fans are sick of players displaying anything but their athletic skills during game time and just before. Players should have the right to try to do so, at least before the games starts, but fans have a right to show the players what they think of it.

The booing showed that. It probably presages a decline in NFL viewership if the players keep expressing themselves about the state of America.

In Friday's commentary, Rush Limbaugh again noted the political economy of the pro football labor market.

[Fans] want to watch greatness transpire before their eyes. They want their teams to win. They want their fantasy teams to excel. They don’t care about the politicization. They actively oppose it. How hard this to understand? And yet National Football League teams themselves — forget the sponsors for a moment. The National Football League teams themselves don’t seem to understand this.

Or if they do understand it, they have decided that it’s worth the risk because they’ve got a problem. Their players are 75% African-American, and without the players there is no National Football League, and so they’ve gotta keep the players happy. And if the players think that politicizing the game is something that has to happen or else they’re not gonna play, then the owners are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

So they have to make it look like they support what the players support. And they have to do it but hopefully in a way that’s gonna be as least damaging to their business as possible. But I don’t even see that taking place. I just… I’m literally amazed that the people in charge of understanding who the fan base is, who’s the audience…

This is the United States. Big Time Sports has to offer terms of employment that are acceptable to the players, and a level of play that is acceptable to the fans. There is no Scipio Africanus to bring fresh captives back from the latest pacification campaign in the territories.

Whether anyone in the sports establishment or sports policy recognizes that a better environment in the neighborhoods where the players grow up is the ultimate objective (the harsh policing of the slums being a symptom, not a cause, of the currently lousy environment) and that fans, players, and politically minded people of almost all persuasions might be able to come to some sort of understanding of what that environment might look like and how best to bring it about remains to be seen.  Successful athletes understand how to pass up a shot because a team-mate has a better look, or how not to jump off-side on a hard count.  That sort of self-discipline is something they learn, as are the same sorts of self discipline required for success in other ventures.

AN END TO THE PHONY AUTHENTICITY?

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill reacts to the fakery of Jessica Krug, playacting in various protected status games, with "All identity politics is arguably fake."

There is a symbiotic relationship, surely, between what the academy and the cultural elites expect of black or Latino intellectuals today and how Krug performed. She was able to get into woke publishing circles and to win the praise of privileged students because she gave them what they wanted: a performance of authenticity, a denunciation of whiteness, a marshalling of her identity (in this case a fake identity) to the end of titillating a cultural elite that now loves nothing more than to be told how foul and destructive whiteness and the West have been by people who have apparently experienced their ‘structural oppressions’. Krug played the game; the more important question is: who invented the game?

The invention is probably emergent, even with vanguardists of various types urging it along, and its organizing theme is "my transgressiveness is OK, yours is not."  It's not going to end well.  A bad outcome is more likely, the longer the practitioners of critical race theory (two lies for the price of one) keep racializing practices that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters.  What good does it do to "decolonize" education if students leave grade school without a grasp of counting, or of subject-verb agreement?

Perhaps the Krug episode (which is one of several recent attempts academicians have made to pass as a protected class) will get the gatekeepers of culture studies to act responsibly.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan found a statement from a Duke University Press editor who is angry.  "I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon."  It's often the case that the most recent converts are the most zealous congregants.  More importantly, though, those "gross racial stereotypes" are the very "authenticity" and "transgressiveness" that are OK when carried off by somebody with the right heredity.  It's instructive to note how easily that authenticity becomes ... the propaganda of centuries of white supremacy.

There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes. There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who labored to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.

Many of us who promoted her work in one way or another have also struggled in trying to consider the relationship between Krug’s scholarship and her wrongdoing. There are times when a scholar does harm that can be seen as unrelated to their scholarship. In this case, Krug leveraged her deception to enable and promote her work, in ways that are not quantifiable or always specific. As others have pointed out, Krug’s scholarship may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.

Ah, the zero-sum nature of set-asides: affirmative action, or the Klan, are two manifestations of the same error. Where Jim Crow rules, people will attempt to pass as white. Where diversity and inclusion rule, people will attempt to pass as whatever bundle of "as a ..." is currently being funded.  And turning a lack of impulse control, or restraint, into a status marker is a good way to lose the argument.

Stop the particularism.  Stop the set-asides.  Stop funding the epistemic closure.  When success in higher education involves "cultural and linguistic code-switching because of the dominant culture within the university" that's a feature.  Higher education is receptive to anyone who adopts the discourse practices and methods of inquiry.  If it is not, it will be displaced by other institutional arrangements that do.  Thus far, I haven't seen any promising developments along those lines.

NINETEEN YEARS AGO.

 

BUILD BACK BETTER IS SUCH A WEAK SLOGAN.

Oh, that's right, MAKE AMERICA GREAT(ER) AGAIN was already taken.

Perhaps the Biden campaign's weak slogan is one more manifestation of the Long Emergency.  "[Democrats] are finally so miserably contemptible that they just want to end it all."

That might be so, but their Illinois tax increase must be voted down first.

WHY SHOULD THE CONTINENT'S NARRATIVE BE SET ON AN ISLAND?

I asked this question back in April, when it was becoming clear that locking down the entire country because Democrat politicians in New York mishandled the initial outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus was causing unnecessary disruption.  Subsequently, though, the premature quarantines in places where there was not yet much community spread probably killed any chance of local restrictions when the contagion arrived, as local patience, and the local businesses' margins of safety, were already exhausted.

Perhaps the question also applies to other supposedly National Affairs.  Dear readers, I give you Montana-based Charlie Warzel, a remote columnist for New York's Times.

Since I moved West, I’ve been preoccupied with this question: Would Americans feel a greater sense of alarm about our rapidly warming planet and the disastrous, perhaps irreversible effects of climate change if everyone could experience a fire season in person? Would cable news hosts devote the same nonstop coverage to fires as they do for hurricanes if more of their executives woke up each morning to falling ash? Would more lawmakers care if it looked like this outside the Capitol at high noon?

The American West does not have a monopoly on climate-related disasters. Hurricane seasons grow worse each year and devastating earthquakes loom. The flooding in the Midwest and storms like the recent derecho in Iowa are calamities that deserve equal attention. They’re also urgent alarm bells.

In the columnist's view, the "alarm bells" are for Climate Change (which they might be, or they might not be: did the road to Going-to-the-Sun Mountain ever open this summer?)

That noted, it is salutary for people in the Official Region to understand that if they don't see it from a first-class window of the Acela doesn't mean it didn't happen, whether it's the burning of forests where no brush-cutting has taken place in years, or the flattening of a lot of Iowa and Illinois corn.

HOW SEVERE IS THE INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION?

Severe enough that ... people passing themselves off as meriting a protected status they really don't have is a thing.  "Conversations about [George Washington historian and fake Caribbean black Jessica] Krug have resurrected other stories about faking racial identities in the academy."  It's a small sample.  It's also a sample in which all the fakery is adopting an identity that would be subject to a lot of opprobrium, should racism of the more conventional kind be as common as the High Priests of the Church of Intersectionality would have us believe.

A LITTLE UPSCALE PRIVILEGE IN MANHATTAN.

The New York metropolitan area is in economic collapse, with the productive people leaving, but even so, Good Intentions manifested as housing street people in vacant hotels turns out badly.  N.Y. Will Move Homeless Men From Liberal Neighborhood After Backlash.

No matter how many times I tell you, there's always somebody screws it up.

When people get tired of things being broken, they seek to restore a state of good repair.

The "backlash" language is simply the usual posturing among the usual suspects, some of whom understand that their neighborhood has become more like Scat Francisco, Good Intentions notwithstanding, whilst others are shocked and appalled at the deplorable attitudes of neighbors they Expected More of.  "The move disappointed many in the community, who said the men’s presence was not disruptive and the concerns had been largely overstated."

That's the same mind-set that sugar-coats a riot as a mostly peaceful protest.

A MISLEADING PITCH FOR RAISING THE STATE INCOME TAX.

There's one state referendum in Illinois this November, to amend section 3 of article IX of the Illinois constitution.

The General Assembly shall provide by law for the rate or rates of any tax on or measured by income imposed by the State.  A tax on or measured by income shall be at a non-graduated rate.  At any one time there may be no more than one such tax imposed by the State for State purposes on individuals and one such tax imposed on corporations.  In any such tax imposed on corporations the highest rate shall not exceed the highest rate imposed on individuals by more than a ratio of 8 to 5.

The underlined text will replace the struck text, with the second sentence allowing for high levels of corporate income to be taxed at rates higher than the highest levels of personal income, with a graduated income tax replacing the current proportional tax.

The amendment is, as you would suspect, the brainchild of long-serving legislative speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) and current governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Chicago).

By law, the state shall issue an explanation of the referendum, with arguments for and against its adoption.  Among the explanations we see the following two paragraphs.

Because of the way our current tax system is set up, the bottom fifth of Illinois taxpayers (those making below $21,800) contribute 14.4% of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 7.4% for the top 1 percent of Illinois taxpayers.

If this Amendment passes, the State has already enacted a new graduated tax structure where 97% of taxpayers will pay the same or less.

Note the conjuring tricks, dear reader.   The first paragraph rolls state sales taxes (and Illinois is one of the few states that taxes food: if you buy cheese in Wisconsin to eat in Illinois, the treasurer wants you to declare it in April and pay the 1% use tax on it) and local sales and property taxes, which is to say, taxes long understood to be regressive, with the proportional state income tax.

The second tax refers to a proposed change in state tax rates that has been rubber-stamped out of the Springfield Soviet, er, the Democrat-controlled legislature, with the assent of the governor, and "pay the same or less" refers to the lower brackets of the graduated income tax.  There's no property tax relief, or lowering of the sales taxes, contemplated.

I suspect there is a strong overlap between people who intend to vote NO on this amendment and Trump voters.  We'll see what the effect on turnout is in another two months.

A TRUMP FLAG AT A DOCK OF THE BAY?

There's a Republican Party chapter in California's Marin County, and at the end of August, they showed the flag under the Golden Gate Bridge, at the same time that some marchers on foot were headed into the lair of Lord Mayor London Breed and Princess Nancy Antoinette.  The video, which is heavy-handed in places, does not embed.  Go there and watch if you wish. 

KAREN CROW?

You'd expect madness out of Ann Arbor, but apparently it spreads easily enough to the branch campus at Dearborn. There's a "Non-POC (People of Color) Cafe" for "students who do not identify as persons of color to gather and to discuss their experience as students on campus and as non-POC in the world."

Twitchy writers are framing the story as if it's a segregated physical space, in the manner of the cool kids' table in high school or the black students' table in the food court.  It's more accurate to think of these virtual sessions as yet more Zooming, and the deanlets and deanlings of Morale Conditioning issued a clarification.

UM-Dearborn sincerely regrets the terms used to describe the "cafe" events held on September 8. The terms used to describe these virtual events and the descriptions themselves were not clear and not reflective of the university’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

University of Michigan-Dearborn is committed to fostering and maintaining an inclusive campus environment and encourages ongoing dialogue amongst our students, faculty and staff on challenging issues. As campus activities continue to operate in a predominantly remote capacity due to COVID-19, our Center for Social Justice and Inclusion has looked to develop virtual spaces that allow for these important conversations to continue.

The “cafes” were virtual open conversations developed to allow students the opportunity to connect to process current events, share their experiences related to race, share knowledge and resources and brainstorm solutions. The original intent was to provide students from marginalized communities a space that allowed for them to exist freely without having to normalize their lives and experiences, while also providing students that do not identify as persons of color the opportunity to deepen their understanding of race and racism without harming or relying on students of color to educate them.

To ensure that these spaces were kept safe and respectful, the “cafes” had a faculty/staff member as a facilitator.

The events were never intended to be exclusive or exclusionary for individuals of a certain race. Both events were open to all members of the UM-Dearborn campus community.

Love me some double-speak just before supper.  These were not physically segregated spaces with assigned seating.  These were virtually segregated spaces in which people who did not identify as the type named could look in.  But the People of Color space was a virtual safe space to vent (presumably a non-POC observer could quietly observe) whilst the non-POC space was a virtual hectoring space where the re-education was done by the facilitator.  Got it?

PEOPLE WILL ONLY TOLERATE THE LOCKDOWNS FOR SO LONG.

I wrote that last April, by which time "fifteen days to slow the spread" had already gone on for at least two additional weeks.  Antony Davies and James Harrigan correctly describe the catastrophe that has followed.

It has been five months since the American people were told they would be under house arrest for three weeks to “flatten the curve.” Under the guise of protecting us from Covid-19, America’s politicians completed one of the greatest nonviolent power grabs in US history, pushing the lockdowns well beyond the initial three-week prediction, thereby taking control of 330 million lives.

To justify this, they shifted the goal posts from flattening the curve, to halting transmission of the coronavirus entirely. Some even talked about maintaining lockdowns, at least in part, until a vaccine is developed. That could take years.

Yes, that last is a serious policy posture with some people.

Ron Adair photograph retrieved from Reason.

It is past time to kick some tail and take some names, particularly of elected officials who couldn't say, "well done, people, now we'll ease off," let alone, "sorry, we screwed up."

They didn’t because politicians invariably feel the need to “do something.” Despite volumes of evidence from disparate fields like economics, social work, ecology, and medicine, it never seems to occur to politicians that sometimes doing less, or even doing nothing, is by far the better approach. Why should it occur to them? When politicians act and their actions do more harm than good, they always say the same thing: “Imagine how bad it would have been had we not acted.”

But this time, we have evidence. We can compare what happened where politicians reacted with a heavy hand to what happened where they reacted with a light touch. And the evidence we have so far points to the same conclusion: Our politicians destroyed our economy unnecessarily.

This won’t stop our politicians from congratulating themselves, of course. Nothing ever does. When the next crisis comes along they will land on the same sorts of heavy-handed solutions they did this time. The only thing that will chasten them is the anger of the American people. Politicians did far more harm to Americans than Covid-19 did, and that’s what the American people need to remember next time our politicians start down the same pointless road.

Put not your trust in experts might be Michael Barone's recommendation.  "Governments can sometimes channel, but never entirely control, nature. There is no way to eliminate risk entirely. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns."

It would seem, though, that the return of some students to in person school and to residing on campus is leading public officials, with the cheerleading of people with a stake in continuing the status quo, to double down on ... that failed status quo.

Remember the goal of flattening the curve? Ensuring that hospitals weren’t overrun? Well, what do you call a scenario where thousands of cases result in zero hospitalizations? I’d call it the ultimate flat curve – or downright flat line. Yet rather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic for no good reason.

If we had in place the strict eligibility threshold for COVID-19 testing that we had in March when tests were scarce, we quite literally would not know the “epidemic” of mild and asymptomatic cases on college campus even exists. After being open for weeks, college campuses have no reported deaths or even hospitalizations that I can find. You might say that’s because they’ve done such an amazing job preventing cases. Nope: They have tons of reported cases.

The real contagion, notes author Daniel Horowitz, might be mass psychosis, not the Wuhan coronavirus.

GOVERNMENT IS THE INSTITUTION THAT HAS A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE.

That monopoly ought have limited and enumerated powers, particularly when people who probably never read Critique of Pure Tolerance have the same sorts of repressive ideas.  "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, these conservatives say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices."  Sorry, no, forbidding something might be the hardest way to change minds.  Let people foul their own nests and limit the coercion to protecting people who don't want their nests fouled.

In the last few years, a major fault line has opened up on the American political right: Call it the Great Liberalism Schism. On one side are those of us who remain committed to classical liberal norms and values such as due process, free trade, and religious freedom. On the other side is an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us.

These "post-liberals" believe it's time for a conservative politics that stops worrying about protecting individual liberty and starts worrying about attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing "strong rule" by a government tasked, among other things, with "enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources," as the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it in a March essay for The Atlantic.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the common good. It's just that the self-named Common-Good Conservatives don't have a monopoly on the idea.

Just as there are many competing visions of the good life at an individual level, people frequently disagree about what a good society would look like. Most political leftists believe religiously affiliated employers should be required to pay for their workers' birth control—and the language they use in defense of that position and others like it is nothing if not moral. Yet most people on the political right see that understanding of the common good as utterly mistaken. In a democratic society, how do you ensure that only the correct vision is coercively enforced?

Put more simply, there is no such thing as the (singular noun) common good, although there might be overlapping areas of mutual interest, as well as areas where overlap is undesirable.

At a sufficiently high level, we can all agree the concept is tied to human flourishing. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily." The dispute, then, is about how to help people thrive. For many of us, protecting individual liberty is crucial as both a component of and a requirement for achieving that goal.

A free society is in itself a good thing. That doesn't mean freedom is the only good or even the highest good. But it is a good that must be included in any final accounting of the common good. To deny someone control over his own life is to assert your supremacy over him, violating his innate dignity as a person. The more coercion exercised, the greater the violation.

I suppose in that "sum total of social conditions" we have an instance of 1 + 1 ≠ 2: as there is no meaningful aggregation of your happiness with my happiness and the happiness of John Rawls or Thomas Hobbes. The devil (or perhaps that's the choir of angels) is in that "either as groups or as individuals."

Pretend that such an aggregation is possible, and you have the picking of ideas that have to be repressed in order that others be tolerated.

[W]hat would the Will-to-Power Conservatives do with state control once acquired? The specifics vary from person to person, but the policy agenda can be characterized as right-wing on social issues (blue laws; crackdowns on pornography) and left-wing on economics (industrial subsidies; generous unemployment insurance). At the nexus of the two are proposals to use the tax code to encourage larger families, in which women preferably work less outside the home.

Herbert Marcuse might disagree with the ends, but he cannot object to the means. "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, they say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices. In place of equal rights under the law, it's error has no rights."  Stephanie Slade concludes, "This is no way to achieve the common good."

I repeat: there is no such thing as the, singular noun, common good.  I submit, though, that letting emergence do its thing is likely to produce a less intolerable ordering of things than anything structured by a vanguard, whether the vanguard is working off Rosseau or the Letters of Paul.

SHOTS FIRED AT A SOCIALLY DISTANCED PARTY.

I'm not sure how much in-class instruction is going on at Northern Illinois University.  There are enough members of the marching band back in town to, weather permitting (we went from late summer to late fall in about a week over the weekend) conduct outdoor practices.  There are also enough students with time on their hands remaining on hand during the long weekend to ... get into a fight.

[University spokesman] Joe King responded to police investigating shots fired outside Grant Residence Hall.

“At about midnight Sunday, Sept. 6, NIU Police were in Parking Lot O breaking up a fight and dispersing a crowd when an apparent gun shot was heard. There is no evidence that anyone was injured by the gun shot. NIU Police continue to investigate the matter,” King said.

The NIU Police Department announced it is investigating a report of shots fired at 11:45 P.M. Saturday at NIU Parking Lot O outside of Grant Residence Hall, according to an alert sent by the NIU Safe app.

Prior to shots being fired, NIU Police Department and DeKalb Police Department were blocking entrances to New Hall and Grant parking lots in order to contain the amount [c.q.] of people and stop the entrance of more people joining the party happening in Parking Lot O.

The city's newspaper adds no additional information, asks people who might know something to call the tip line.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, MORE OR LESS.

I'm referring to Labor Day, 1990, which means this post is on the "more" side of history.  I had been sailing on Geneva Lake and hanging out with other sailors, and then had to head home to get squared away for the resumption of classes, Northern Illinois University having this perverse by-law that starts instruction on the fourth Monday of August, thus you start up for a week or two, then stand down for a long weekend.  At the time I was still listening to the university's public radio station for the long-hair music, their propensity occasionally to play excerpts rather than full works and too many soporific guitar pieces notwithstanding.  That meant I got home to All Things Considered.

To set the context, dear reader, understand that the summer and fall of 1989 featured a continuing drama called As Communism Crumbles: Hungarian border opened.  Genuine elections in Poland. A few days after the anniversary of the founding of East Germany, the Berlin Wall came down.  (Find yourself a video of the anniversary celebration, dear reader, and check out the VIPs at the show:  Yasir Arafat, Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, representatives from North Korea and Iraq, a regular rogue's gallery of lefty heroes.)  At Thanksgiving the Czechoslovakian communists threw in the towel.  The partition of the country into Czech and Slovak parts came a few years later.  There was coal in their stockings at Christmas for the ruling Ceaucescu clan of Romania.

Because All Things Considered presented itself as a news show, their correspondents had to cover those events.  You could hear the dejection in their voices.  It's so much more fun to run long, droning pieces with native music about communism in Central America, and those guys just got defunded.  Come Labor Day, though, there was a great opportunity to wallow in the past, signing off with Pete Seeger strumming the guitar and singing a less militaristic version of The Internationale.  "Letting Mr Seeger close the Labor Day broadcast epitomized denial. That's why radios come with tuners. Adios, All Things Considered."

I'm still not listening, and apparently public radio can still appease their internal Commie with riffs on "property is theft."  Somebody explain to me why public radio still is on the federal payroll.

COLD SPRING SHOPS GETS RESULTS.

Was it the end of August that I suggested the United States Senate would be more effective if Amendment XVII were repealed?

Look, it doesn't matter if Nebraska's senator Ben Sasse, an academic administrator who has been mugged by reality, didn't read me.  "He also recommended abolishing standing committees, requiring senators to show up for debates, implementing 12-year term limits, and requiring senators to live together in dorms when in Washington."

He'd also rather be rid of live television coverage of Congress.  Perhaps C-Span served a purpose getting political messages out, back in the day: with social media it's possible for politicians, career or otherwise, to bypass the Democrat operatives with bylines gatekeepers.