NOTHING IS WORKING TO GET THE PEOPLE TO OBEY.

I alluded to popular discontent with the overweening governors and their ineffective and arbitrary executive orders last week; and my documentation of popular discontent with those policies has been a regular feature.

MOVIN' ON UP.

The new commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference will be Jim Phillips.

The [conference] announced [current commissioner John] Swofford’s retirement in June, though he was to continue in the job until a successor was named and to aid the transition.

The 72-year-old Swofford became commissioner in 1997 of a very different [conference], which had only nine members at the time and remained basketball-focused.

Swofford eventually led [it] through multiple waves of expansion to form a 15-team conference stretching along nearly the entire Eastern Seaboard and west into Kentucky and Indiana.

Perhaps instead of the four conferences of sixteen teams that I have envisioned as supplanting the current basketball tournament with their entirely in-house tournament (and football playoffs) there might be five conferences of sixteen teams, which means there will be some teams that fail to qualify.  Or perhaps there will be enough of a shakeout of redundant universities, say, Marquette or Gonzaga or Virginia Tech, that there will be only 64 serious basketball or football programs left standing in another ten years.  But if the Atlantic Coast have further expansion on their mind, it might help to have as a commissioner somebody who knows something about building the amenities to be competitive in that sort of arms race.

Phillips has been Northwestern’s [athletic director] since 2008, leading the athletic department through a period of success in competition and growth in facilities. He oversaw the funding of Northwestern’s $270 million Walter Athletics Center and Ryan Fieldhouse indoor practice facility located on Lake Michigan’s shores.

Apparently, to be competitive with Ohio State, Northwestern must have the kind of practice facility an Oregon would be proud of.  Whether that is the right sort of look for universities in an era of declining birth-rates and macroeconomic torpor abetted by arbitrary coronavirus lockdowns and the second coming of Hope and Change remains to be seen.  But Mr Phillips might be as well placed as anyone to carry that off.  The article doesn't mention that he oversaw the funding of similar sorts of practice facilities during his tenure at Northern Illinois.  Plus he picked up an advanced degree of some kind (I once knew what that was, even had a chance to congratulate him and wish him well at the Post Office, of all places) during that time: should sports broadcasters extend to Dr. Phillips the same courtesy one Jill Biden, Ed.D. seems to insist on?

But on current tendencies, what is going to happen to the Mid-American Conference as a developmental league for coaches and directors as athletics?

THE AXE WILL BE CONTESTED IN MADISON.

The longest continuously scheduled college football tilt will take place.

Big Ten officials announced Sunday that the contest that was called off last month due to concern over COVID-19 cases within the Gophers program is scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison.

It would be the 130th meeting between the teams, which is the longest-running uninterrupted series in Football Bowl Subdivision history and is the most-played rivalry in FBS history.

Well, good. There was enough flexibility in the quarantine-style college football schedule to make such a game possible, in this case as a sort of curtain-raiser for the Big Ten title game that will take place later that evening in Indianapolis.  There is also enough flexibility in the quarantine-style professional football game to have the [North] Carolina Panthers at Packers game take place that same Saturday (!) evening.

THE MARQUETTE FACULTY SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD.

Evidently, being a pretty good basketball school isn't the most important selling point.  Between the women having no more children and the parents of the children they did have now paying a lot of money for glorified Skype, things are tough at Marquette University, and check out the first talkin point from the Faculty Council.

If Marquette does not remain in the top 100 schools in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, it may not be able to weather the storm of demographic transition. We are currently ranked at #88. Class-sizes, student debt ratio, and educational expenditures are all variables in USNWR rankings. USNWR has announced that it will increase the weight of the student debt ratio in factoring future rankings. Harm to this standing may take more than a decade to recover, and may further threaten the financial well-being of the university.

Oh, there is a diversity talking point as well. Sixth out of six on the list.  No recommendation to spend less on deanlets and deanlings there.

There are market tests in higher education, even if the people in charge don't like it, and it's amusing how much use people within the enterprise make of those U.S. News rankings while scorning them.

LIBERTY OVER MANDATES.

Independent Institute contributor Randall G. Holcombe counts the ways Florida governor Ron DeSantis understood the tradeoffs of excessive executive action.

In Florida, schools are open, restaurants are open, bars are open, gyms are open, hair salons are open, churches are open–everything is open. People who think it is too risky to go to those places don’t have to go, but Floridians have the freedom to make those decisions themselves rather than have the nanny state make their decisions for them.

Governor DeSantis recognizes that mandates and lockdowns violate individual rights. Freedom only exists when people are free to make choices that others view as poor choices. Governor DeSantis has demonstrated his commitment to preserve individual rights, as should anyone who holds a position in a government dedicated to the preservation of liberty.
,br>I see clear value in wearing masks, social distancing, and avoiding indoor locations with many people. But just because something is a good idea does not mean it should be legally required. In a free country, people should be able to choose the level of risk they want to bear, especially when the alternative deprives them of their economic right to earn a living.

There is a trade-off involved in protecting individual rights and imposing mandates to slow the spread of the virus. Science can inform individuals as to what appears to be prudent behavior, but the appropriate government policy cannot be determined by science, as I noted in a previous post. Take the example of speed limits for motor vehicles. Science can tell us that higher speed limits will result in more fatalities, but it cannot weigh the value of more rapid transportation against the risk of accidental death.

The same is true with regard to government policies in response to the virus. There are clear short-term economic costs to the mandates that have been imposed, but there are also long-term costs in that precedents have been set that governments can suspend individuals’ rights to earn a living if officials view it as in the public interest.

And Florida never became the kind of Wuhan coronavirus charnel house that New York was, or that Illinois and California are.  Heck, the Pritzker family have a compound in Florida, that they made use of while their subjects have remained under house arrest.

THE ELECTORS ARE MEETING.

Reason's Christian Britschgi offers words of advice.  "Hopefully, with the Electoral College's vote on Monday, we can move beyond this 'Stop the Steal' nonsense, and get on with hating the forthcoming Biden administration." Totally.

Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden suggests the internal squabbles among people who voted for the coot are going to be entertaining.  "Most of the other November 2020 Biden supporters are destined to be on a collision course, and they will soon enough realize that their differences are much stronger than what united them and that they were taken for fools. None will be disappointed more than the so-called ‘Progressives’."

As if guided by an invisible hand, here is Common Dreams contributor Norman Solomon, who appears to be offering an elegy to Bernie Sanders.  "While Sanders is ill-positioned and uninclined to push back very hard against the evident trajectory of Biden's decisions, many progressives are starting to throw down gauntlets against the corporate and militaristic aspects of the incoming presidency."

I've stocked up on popcorn and beer.

WHEN THE BEARS DON'T SUCK, THAT SUCKS.

Let Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Morrissey explain.  "A blowout over a bad team doesn’t mean Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy should keep their jobs."  I wish the people who write editorials for that paper would learn to be as harsh about the state's political class as their sports staff are about the Bears, who still suck.

In the past ten years: seven division titles for the Packers.  Those don't matter as much as the fact that the one Super Bowl appearance came eleven seasons ago.  For the record, the other division titles in that span are two for the Vikings and one for the Bears.  If you're really feeling schadenfreudelicious, that Packer trip to the Super Bowl came in a year the Bears also won the division, with Lovie Smith, who just got fired by Illinois, then coaching the Bears.

ANOTHER CONTAGION THE EPIDEMIOLOGISTS DON'T SEE.

There's a scene in the 1965 version of Doctor Zhivago where the young doctor tells a bureaucrat, "That's another disease we don't have in Moscow.  Starvation."  Our public health officials aren't willfully not seeing what is in front of them; rather, their expertise is so blinkered that they're not capable of coping with the evidence.  "More Americans are shoplifting food as aid runs out during the pandemic."  That headline is a deflection.  Yes, Congressional Democrats delayed action on additional relief under the theory that if it was worse for Our President, it was worth the suffering.  But the anecdotes in the article come from a few places.

Most of California is now under strict stay-at-home orders, for example, while states including Nevada, Maryland and Pennsylvania have issued new indoor occupancy limits. Such orders tend to hit already vulnerable workers in low-wage service jobs in restaurants, retail and bars the hardest.

Nice of them to discover what I've been reporting for months.

Here's an extended excerpt, from Chicago, subject to the double whammy of ineffective state lockdowns and an idiot mayor.

Alex graduated with a master’s degree in May and was immediately in a bind: no job, no money and, with much of the country still shut down, little hope that anything would change.

She’d spent most of her $1,200 stimulus check on rent, and used what little she had left to buy groceries. Everything else — vitamins, moisturizer, body wash — she said she shoplifted from a Whole Foods Market a few miles from her apartment in Chicago.

“It was like, I could spend $10 and get a couple of vegetables or I could spend $10 on just a box of tampons,” said Alex, 27, who asked to be identified by her middle name to speak candidly. She has a job now, earning $15 an hour, but still struggles to make ends meet. She says she continues to shoplift — something she’d never done before the pandemic — every few weeks.

She says she moves through the store mostly unnoticed. Usually, she said, she picks up a few bulky vegetables — a bunch of kale, maybe, or a few avocados — to disguise the pricier items she slips into her bag at the self checkout.

“I don’t feel much guilt about it,” she said. “It’s been very frustrating to be part of a class of people who is losing so much right now. And then to have another class who is profiting from the pandemic — well, let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth.” (Bezos is the founder and chief executive of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods. He also owns The Washington Post.)

Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment.

The article also reports on Les Miserables manifestations at the dollar stores, which acknowledge the shrinkage and their enhanced security efforts.

Meanwhile, the boffins fret about families getting together for Christmas.  Is that what being stupid about being smart looks like?

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 7,825.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

Sweden recently changed their approach to the virus, exhorting people to avoid crowds and go out less.  Illinois has been under some sort of mitigation since mid-March.

The latest report from Sweden counts 320,098 infections and 7,514 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 848,904 infections and 15,339 deaths.

Last week, the governor trailed by 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

III. ADVENT.

It's unlikely that there will be snow in time for a White Christmas, at least on current weather forecasts.  The houses near Cold Spring Shops headquarters are pretty blinged out this year.

After two different Japanese maples failed to make it through a polar vortex, I put in a dwarf Alberta spruce that I hope is a sturdy kind of tree that doesn't mind the snow.  Here's a household hint for any readers with small children: if space permits, as each one becomes old enough to grasp the concept of Christmas and a Christmas tree, plant a small tree like this and see whether the child or the tree gets taller faster.  At maturity the tree will be taller than most humans.

IT'S CALLED HARVESTING THE GAINS FROM TRADE.

From time to time, opportunities for populists of the left and the right have opportunities to make common cause, if only they could agree on what the cause is.  Consider a rally (judge for yourself whether these participants are engaging in proper prophylactic protocols) in New York City, as described by Common Dreams's Abby Zimet.

Because we needed yet more proof of the unconscionable wealth inequity devastating what was once proudly deemed the land of equal opportunity for all, Wednesday saw the release of new research showing America's 651 billionaire pandemic profiteers have raked in so much wealth - as in, over $1 trillion - during these last, grim, nine months that they could easily give $3,000 stimulus checks to every suffering American and "still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches." Even as Congress not only fails to provide vital COVID relief but incomprehensibly threatens to let paid sick and family leave expire, the collective worth of several hundred U.S. billionaires soars past $4 trillion, or nearly double the combined wealth of the bottom half of America's tired, poor and huddled masses. These discrepancies are perhaps most glaring in New York City, home to arguably the most billionaires in the world and to a growing movement, echoing a global one, to make the rich  pay their fair share of taxes and the cost of our dauntingly hard times. So it was that Wednesday, in a snowstorm, hundreds of activists gathered in Central Park to unfurl a three-block-long, 700-foot scroll condemning their own fat cats' obscene profits and demanding Cuomo and his cronies #MakeBillionairesPay to support over a million workers struggling to get by - after which, it was noted, they would still be ahead of the rapacious game.

The common cause is in the rent seeking. Here's Pajamas Media's Jeff Reynolds.  "As we head into a new round of severe lockdowns, and more small businesses shutter across the nation, America’s [information technology] billionaires seem poised for even more spectacular growth in wealth. The Democrat politicians ordering these lockdowns once again prove they are more beholden to the ultra-wealthy, in direct contrast to the image they spin."  That essay obtains similar information about the technology billionaires's gains from such communistic sources as Forbes, Business Week, and Fortune.  But those Democrats are unwilling to tax or regulate the technology companies.  That could be interesting.

THE SHAKEOUT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME COMING.

The Wuhan coronavirus has exposed the weaknesses in higher education that have been visible for a long time.  Most of those posts, though, involved institutions that might not have been visible in the usual league tables.  Now, though, Power Line's Steven Hayward has called attention to University of Colorado at Boulder effectively replacing tenured faculty with contingent faculty, while the University of Vermont intend to drop three departments and twelve major concentrations.  Today, he noted that the Gods of the Copybook Headings have come for Marquette University.  (But hey, their basketball team just beat Wisconsin's!)

The worse, the better.

SCIENCE IS A PROCESS.

The current coronavirus lockdowns are simply the latest manifestation of ideological politics dressed up with equations, regression analysis, and self-serving consensus.  That's a charge that I could level at much of economics and public administration, it's probably true in environmental studies and climatology, and in the weird world of culture studies, that's probably why people work in those fields in the first place.

It's probably a good thing to see an essay in Scientific American, which likes to serve up some metrofexual sensitivities and wokeness along with investigations of the netherworld and the far galaxies, with the headline, "Shutting down scientific debate is hurting the public health."  The first step in correcting the rottenness in the intellectual enterprise, dear reader, is recognizing that it is rotten.

The net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences. There is little doubt that as the world faces second and third waves of COVID-19, public health measures such as the various forms of lockdown can both save lives and cause deaths.

The problem, as the authors note, is that the various camps of experts are each looking at that part of the puzzle that they understand. Because depression and addiction are not contagious in the sense of Fauci, they might as well not happen, and they don't teach civics any more, which lets him get away with scoffing at civil liberties.

That means there will still be a need for reasonable and effective public health measures for many months to come. An exhausted public is now fed up with conflicting messaging from the Trump White House and public health experts, as well as isolation and loss of income. People are becoming increasingly resistant to the prospect of more public health measures that restrict their lives. Silencing any science-based viewpoint that would lift some of the most oppressive aspects of controlling the spread of the virus could leave the public even more resistant to public health measures.

Unfortunately, public health is part of a different kind of process, politics, and that doesn't bode well for the future.

It is critical that [incoming president^(*)] Biden’s task force avoid creating a majoritarian echo chamber and instead continues the approach pursued by the experts who convened for the Johns Hopkins debate. Only by entertaining a broader, scientifically informed view of what might work will the next phase of COVID-19 control be acceptable to a deeply divided public.

By then, it might be too late to persuade the public to go along.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It has been over a year since we last viewed any heavy construction on the Gloucester Branch, and the clutter of building had to be tidied up in time for the March Meet that might have been the last social gathering of model railroaders for who knows how many multiples of fifteen days will pass until the authorities decide to let us out of house arrest.

There's a fresh bundle of lumber down cellar, as well as detailing supplies to bring some of the layout to a scenicked state.  Let's start topside, in the town of Zudnokhovsk.  We've come a long way from laying out a grid of screen wire over a wooden frame covered with papier-mache.  (It's now possible to buy pre-mixed papier-mache, just add water and slap it in place, as well as plaster-infused cloth of the sort once associated with broken limbs.  We'll turn to those things in the future.)

That's 1" insulating foam.  It doesn't matter what color it is, because it will be covered over with one or another sort of ground cover or structures.  Those Norfolk Southern gons are a long way from home, but just parked out of the way for now.  Anybody have any leads on Stalin-era antiaircraft guns in O Scale?  A bridge that large would have its own defensive detail posted.

Part of the craft of building a layout on several levels is getting those sections of track that will subsequently be hard to get at to a more-or-less finished state before they get covered over by track, let alone track and ground cover above.  In the distance you see the two tracks of the Eastern Route Main Line converging into a lead for staging that represents Ipswich and points north.  The dasher boards are in place along the tracks (there's nothing quite so annoying as something derailing and then going to the floor) and the ballast is in place and dressed so that wheels don't trip over a rock somewhere.  I'm hoping the Tortoise powering the switch will stay reliable, maybe a little more testing before the upper works continues.  The Gloucester Branch carries out a reverse curve here in order to vault over the staging lead and turn the corner at the southwest side of the train room.

Looking the other way, here is the ramp to the throat of the staging yard.  That, too, will require some dressing up before Manchester-by-the-Sea takes shape above.  As long as there's no place to go, watch the show, watch the show, watch the show.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE.

Apparently, the people who are running the institutions of higher education are WINOs (Woke In Name Only.)  "The supports that make life in academe possible for so many of us -- especially those marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality and disability -- are being revoked."

Because this is Montana, there are few, if any, nearby towns, cities or suburbs with cheaper or more available housing. For university faculty and staff, subsidized faculty housing has been essential.

And now? Faculty and staff members who reside in the university’s Family and Graduate Housing -- a group that includes many Black, Indigenous and people of color -- are being evicted. Confidential sources report this from personal experience and observation; the university’s housing office will not release demographic information on its residents. Originally, the evictions were scheduled for winter. The Faculty Senate has managed to change the eviction date to June 2021. Regardless of season, these evictions are imminent, in a town with no available rental housing, no affordable housing beyond the boardinghouses run by slumlords and pitched at students, and no homeless shelters. Faculty and staff may be sleeping in their cars at Walmart in sleeping bags they themselves donated.

Housing is a human right, but for many university employees, it becomes a privilege. Right now, some of my colleagues are facing eviction from the university housing. This housing, although never part of a formal contract, was central to their ability to move to a fully saturated housing market like Bozeman. Especially for faculty and staff relocating from out of state or internationally, with heavy student loan or other debt, and no nearby family or support networks, the subsidized housing universities offer is a lifeline. They are often the only reason people are able to relocate to take jobs. For many faculty members, the soft promise of university housing is essential.

A right? Provided by whom? Blank-out. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples' money.

Soft promises, like soft money, can be withdrawn at any time. And that’s what’s happening now, as the looming eviction crisis meets COVID-19 and the seemingly imminent collapse of the neoliberal university. COVID is accelerating the financialization of the university. The MSU example sits at the intersection of the pandemic, economic collapse, the housing crisis and the neoliberalization of academe, all of which can push institutions to put profits before people, remove safety nets and then blame people for structural failures.

For faculty and staff across higher education, the losses are staggering. Some people are furloughed. The historic protections of tenure are being weakened, if not revoked. Salary reductions are common. And the soft promises that make life in academe possible for so many of us, especially those of us marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality and disability? Those are being revoked. The results are devastating.

We could file this report under "get woke, go broke," or under "higher education bubble update." The university's response suggests it's the latter.

As a land-grant university, the mission of Montana State University is to serve the sons and daughters of working families. As difficult as it may be for faculty and staff to find housing -- faculty and staff who are employed, receive a salary plus benefits and in some cases have lived in these below-market units for up to eight years -- it is orders of magnitude more difficult for our students.

Our students are the most vulnerable part of the equation: they are trying to get a start on their lives and they are paying tuition. Some of them arrive as single parents seeking family housing. Many come from other countries or other parts of Montana and the United States and they know little to nothing about the city. At MSU, we have called these units “Family and Graduate Housing,” because the units are intended for graduate students and for undergraduate students with children, including single parents, who may be first in their family to pursue a college education -- they could be … if the units were not being used by employees.

For eight years and more, a tiny minority of the university’s employees have lived in below-market rate housing that is only made possible by the fees students pay into the overall university housing enterprise. The other thousands of the university’s employees have never enjoyed such largess, nor have the more than 78 students who could have been living in those units. It is worth noting, the university gave this group of 78 employees nine months advance notice.

That's rich, the administration telling those contingent employees to check their privilege.

How many times, dear reader, must I tell you that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people?

A CARTER ADMINISTRATION HOPEFUL RESURFACES.

Once upon a time, I worked with Professor Charles J. Cicchetti, who had some environmental economics chops and some hopes of being tapped to help out with the Peanuts Gang.  He recently resurfaced, as a participant in the presidential election fallout.

The analysis comes from Dr. Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D, a member of Pacific Economics Group, a senior advisor to Pacific Economics Group Research, and a professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. Justin Grimmer, a professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, says the claim “is based on an embarrassing and basic error in statistical reasoning.”

Specifically,  "If Biden got more support than Clinton had, or if late-counted ballots were more heavily Biden-leaning than early ballots, that’s treated as evidence of fraud. And the statistical tests are incredibly emphatic that these differences are real — one a quadrillion! — because of the enormous sample sizes, including millions of ballots."  Bizarre.

WHEN DID NAVIGATORS FIRST FIGURE OUT THE GREAT CIRCLE?

I watch "The Curse of Oak Island," although I'm getting more than a little frustrated at the producers' attempts to make first committee meetings, and, more recently, Zoom conferences, look interesting.  But the way with which new hypotheses come up to displace old hypotheses, with no attempt to take stock, or to compare and contrast, goes beyond entertaining to distracting.  Consider, for instance, the possibility that a complex of walkways on the Versailles grounds lies along an arc that goes through Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the Oak Island swamp.  It's hard to square a movement back in time (Knights Templar clearing swag out of Jerusalem during the Crusades) with a movement forward in time (having a good enough chronometer to work out your longitude, which might have been a British military secret for some time).  So it goes, but at least all sorts of obscure academicians are getting their fifteen minutes of fame.  Did you know that with a good enough Geographic Information System you might be able to find a specific rock in a field of rocks?

THE DEMOCRATS' TROUBLES ARE ONLY BEGINNING.

Columnist S. E. Cupp takes stock of the presidential election, and, perhaps, she seeks to get her libertarian credentials in order.

Many of the small towns and rural communities between the coasts where Republicans have built their fortress have been battered and depleted by the same economic change that has benefited burgeoning metropolitan areas, where Democrats have prospered electorally.

Trump's anti-trade, anti-immigrant, anti-environmental, law-and-order jeremiads have found an audience in these communities, exploiting and inflaming a sense that Democrats are disdainful of their values and alien to their economic interests.

If Democrats are seen only as a coalition of economic and cultural elites and minorities -- with little connection to the rest of the country -- the party may still win narrow national victories, as they did in 2020, but will struggle to win and maintain governing majorities.

Democrats need an expansive, authentic economic message for these changing times that speaks to the experience of tens of millions of Americans, rural and urban, who feel that the system devised over time by experts from Wall Street to Washington DC is rigged against them. Biden's emphasis on boosting jobs and wages, reducing inequality and undergirding the middle class is a step in the right direction.

Somehow, a hundred days of additional lockdowns, and continued looking the other way at urban unrest, doesn't strike me as turning out so well.

For Democrats, that task now falls to Biden, who will take over amid a raging pandemic that has wreaked havoc on our economy in a country whose trust in institutions has been shaken to the core.

With divided government, Biden will have to deal not only with implacable Republicans but his own fractious coalition, mediating between a left averse to compromise, minorities demanding their rightful place at the table and suburban moderates who are an increasingly important element of the Democratic base.

Buckle in. The faction fight among Democrats is only getting started, and the coot does not deserve a honeymoon.

WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER TO TURN MARK ZUCKERBERG INTO A MONEY PUMP?

Under that approach, though, trust-busters and grandstanding attorneys general can't justify their fat salaries.

The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook Wednesday, accusing it of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social network’s Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.

The landmark antitrust lawsuits, announced by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James, mark the second major government offensive this year against seemingly untouchable tech behemoths. The Justice Department sued Google in October for abusing its dominance in online search and advertising — the government’s most significant attempt to buttress competition since its historic case against Microsoft two decades ago. Amazon and Apple also have been under investigation in Congress and by federal authorities for alleged anticompetitive conduct.

James noted at a press conference that “it’s really critically important that we block this predatory acquisition of companies and that we restore confidence to the market.”

What, precisely, is that predatory acquisition?

The [Federal Trade Commission] said Facebook has engaged in a “a systematic strategy” to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. James echoed that in her press conference, saying Facebook “used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.”

Those allegations echo monopolization cases of years ago, in which the Standard Oil Trust took advantage of improvements in packaging and logistics to undersell rivals and the Tobacco Trust had the capability of rolling more cigarettes than the adult male population of the time could smoke.  Facebook, on the other hand, aren't closing those other platforms down, they are making those services available, and if there is any control of a bottleneck facility, it might be in the form of the new server complex they're building south of DeKalb.  As long as the information superhighway is some sort of open-access facility, though, it's going to be hard to suppress competition.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who was on the executive committee of attorneys general conducting the investigation, said the litigation has the potential to alter the communications landscape the way the breakup of AT&T’s local phone service monopoly in the early 1980s did.

“Our hope is to restructure the social networking marketplace in the United States, and right now there’s one player,” Stein told reporters. James said the coalition worked collaboratively with the FTC but noted the attorneys general conducted their investigation separately.

Only one player?  At the moment, a new social networking service called Parler might carry some ideological baggage, as it has become a way for people who don't like the biased fact-checking of Facebook and Twitter to communicate with each other.  "Parler hardly stands alone on the right and far right, joining 4chan, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, Bit Chute and Rumble, for instance, but none have managed much more than a fringe presence on the social media landscape."  There's a price theory problem in there somewhere: does a network monopoly raise its prices until people start substituting, or does it price in such a way as to keep the upstarts out on the fringes?

The incoming administration has enough salt-water antitrust hawks, though, that this case is unlikely to go away.

Joe Biden has said the breakup of Big Tech giants should be seriously considered. He has singled out Facebook’s Zuckerberg for scorn, calling him “a real problem.”

Instagram and WhatsApp are among some 70 companies that Facebook has acquired over the past 15 years. But they are the ones most frequently held up by Facebook critics as properties that should be split off.

Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram, bolstering the social network’s business a month before its stock went public. At the time, the photo-sharing app had about 30 million users and wasn’t producing any revenue. A few years later, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service, for $19 billion.

Zuckerberg vowed both companies would be run independently, but over the years the services have become increasingly integrated. Users are now able to link accounts and share content across the platforms. Instagram now has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Such integration could make it more difficult to break off the companies.

That is, the big server complex in DeKalb is the same sort of thing as Fisher Body and GM Assembly, making it harder to divest Pontiac from Chevrolet. But couldn't the Biden family deal with Facebook more directly, say, by hunting up some Chinese investors to set up a competing social networking enterprise?

THE DIVERSITY WEENIES HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR FAT SALARIES.

Northern Illinois University has been spending a lot of money on what they call diversity efforts, but there's something not-so-inclusive about a program they made available earlier today, which was the first day of Hanukkah.  (Coincidence, or deliberate?  You decide.)

Social Justice Town Hall: Religion and Oppression

This town hall series will highlight how religious institutions have historically upheld systems of oppression and provide suggestions on ways to challenge that oppression in modern religious practice.

I didn't dip in, so I can't tell you whether it focuses on Judeo-Christian traditions, or if Sharia gets a free pass, or if the "ways to challenge that oppression" include a planned gathering for the winter solstice.  More woke-scolds who get to have a nice day during the Festive Season.