I'M GOING TO WANT MORE POPCORN.

The corporatist on communist fratricide in the Democrat coalition continues to be epic.  Next up, Ralph Nader (probably still being beat up by the corporatists for daring to run for president in 2000) with "Where is the outcry among Democratic politicians to reverse completely the corporate takeover of Medicare?"  Generating rents and seeking campaign contributions, I suppose.

Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as The New York Times reported. There are no price restraints on the gouging insurance premiums or loophole-ridden policies. That is why giant corporate socialist insurers love the “American Rescue Plan,” which gives them socialist cash on the barrelhead. The law lets insurers decide how and whether they pay healthcare bills with co-pays, deductibles, or grant waivers. All these anti-consumer details are buried in the endless and inscrutable fine print.

That's not quite an argument by which Trumpian populists can make common cause with intersectional socialists, but there are possibilities.

Tweaking Obamacare does little to stem the relentless surge in healthcare prices and profits in our country, which is unique for not placing billing ceilings on medical procedures and drugs. This “get whatever you can” behavior by the vendors is so uncontrolled that healthcare billing fraud and abuse is costing people one billion dollars A DAY! Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud amounts to at least ten percent of all healthcare expenses each year.

Obamacare does nothing to limit the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system that includes unnecessary operations, over-diagnosis, and over-prescribing all of which increase the risks of preventable casualties.

What's the fundamental problem, Ralph? No price discovery and third-party payments? Monopsonistic reimbursement rates? Insurance review panels before the insurer authorizes coverage for a test or an operation?

Maybe the best thing for the government to do is govern less.  You're not likely to hear that from Ralph Nader, or from Congressional Democrats.

CHARLIE SYKES, RELAPSING LIBERAL?

Read his recent riposte to the populists reacting to the coot's Thursday night maunder.  "Something about Biden is upsetting them. Could it be…. success?"  It's a pretty modest definition of success to aim at small family gatherings by Independence Day, which was what a lot of people were doing a year ago Independence Day, and what appears to be going on during championship weekend, judging by what I observed in the neighborhood.

It gets better.

Biden was supposed to be President “Houseplant,” but last night he came out and was an honest to God actual, sentient, competent empathetic president. What are you going believe? Your stinking eyes, or a twitter meme?

I didn't know defining sentient down was a thing, but there it is. And empathetic? Faking empathy is second nature to a career politician, it's easier to do that than to fake a burp at a Middle Eastern feast.

In the Relapsing Liberal world of Charlie Sykes, though, if a television talker says the Fourth of July is not the president's to give, that's "performative outrage." Consent of the governed, just a pose?

IT IS NOT YOURS TO GIVE.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg has the correct response to any issuer of ukases "granting permission" for people to go about their business.  "The phrase – which has been popping up in mainstream media with nauseating regularity – is an obscenity that must be fumigated from the American vocabulary."  Indeed.  Governments derive their powers from the Confent of the Governed.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

The posts in this theme have recently focused on the front of the train.  Today we'll look at work on providing a proper conclusion to the train.

I never apologize for bargain-hunting and buying fixer-uppers, and that includes a few cabooses.  (If the plural of moose is moose, why isn't the plural of caboose caboose?  You could hold a meeting of a lodge of moose in a caboose, right?)

For some reason, a previous owner of this brass Northeastern style buggy decided to remove the roof walk and started sanding off the non-skid tread.  In the transition era, the roof walk would still be in place.

As long as the rest of it is brass, the roof walk will have brass saddles and brass planking.

There was a little extra brass tubing around to improvise the rain guard and smoke deflector in order that the stove would work to keep the coffee hot.  With modern electronics, how hard would it be to improvise a circuit that would make the sound of a metal coffee pot crashing to the floor if the engineer started the train too roughly?

Another project came from a hobby shop.  This is one of the first Japanese imports in brass from after the War.

That's in the form I got it from the hobby shop.  That brake wheel would be more at home being spun by Snidely Whiplash shutting off the water for non-payment, or perhaps controlling the flow at the mill-race.  The previous owner had some ladders that were not yet installed.

Now the ladders are on, as are horizontal-axis brake wheels at either end.

The assembly at the short end of the car wasn't so visible in the side shot, but it's there.  It's a small detail, but having a standard arrangement for brake wheels (horizontal axis) and placement (at both ends of the buggy) makes life a little easier in an emergency, when the brakeman or conductor doesn't have to remember which end of the car the hand brake is, and how it is dogged down or released.

DEAN WORMER SAYS FACULTY CAN'T ACKNOWLEDGE THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ASTERISK.

It exists, and two Georgetown Law faculty members committed a Kinsley gaffe on an open online conference.  "The two adjunct professors, Sandra A. Sellers and David C. Batson, seemed to be unaware they were being recorded, according to a roughly 40-second clip of their conversation that generated widespread outrage after it was shared online."  You never say anything around a computer, or send an electronic mail, that you'd be ashamed to show your mother.

"You know what? I hate to say this," Ms. Sellers said on the video. "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks — happens almost every semester. And it's like, 'Oh, come on.' You know? You get some really good ones. But there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy."

As she spoke, Mr. Batson murmured, "Mm-hmm," but did not challenge her remarks.

That's a firing offense.  But it puts me in mind of Private Nyetnyev being sent to the gulag for 25 years and two weeks for calling his colonel an idiot: two weeks for insubordination, and the rest for revealing a state secret.

in any event the phenomenon of a disproportionate number of black students being near the bottom of the class at many law schools appears to be real. (This is of course an average effect; the actual grades differ by student and by school. Schools that don't have race-based admissions preferences, or that have smaller race-based preferences, might lack such an effect, or have a much smaller effect. My own [University of California] campuses, for instance, are forbidden by law from offering race-based preferences; to the extent such a prohibition is complied with, one would expect both black students' predictors and their grades there to be much closer to the overall class median. I don't know what the actual statistics are for UC law schools, or for my UCLA law school in particular; to my knowledge, such numbers are generally not publicized.)

The local Dean Wormer, Bill Treanor, responded in the predictable way.

As I wrote to you last night, I am appalled that two members of our faculty engaged in a conversation that included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students. I have further reviewed the incident and have now spoken to Professor Sellers and Professor Batson, giving each the opportunity to provide any additional context. I informed Professor Sellers that I was terminating her relationship with Georgetown Law effective immediately. During our conversation, she told me that she had intended to resign. As a result of my decision, Professor Sellers is no longer affiliated with Georgetown Law. Professor Batson has been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, the results of which will inform our next steps. Until the completion of the investigation, Professor Batson will have no further involvement with the course in which the incident arose.

"Appalled" is standard academic-speak, you'll hear it when somebody hears about a governor groping a secretary, but a few thousand dead people in rest homes is business as usual.

The disaggregation of  predictors and performance in law schools is not public in the California system, nor is it public at Georgetown.  "Georgetown Law has not claimed Sandra Sellers incorrectly characterized the academic performance of her black students."  Off to adjunct gulag for revealing a state secret you go!

LET'S TEST A FEW HYPOTHESES.

It's spring break, and as surely as the swallows flock to Capistrano, the buzzards to Hinckley, and the students to the beach, the corona fear-mongers will flock to their chicken coops.

Just as public health officials and city leaders feared, South Beach has become inundated with bare-faced, care-free spring breakers over the last month. The virus is still spreading, but young party-goers from all parts of the U.S. are mingling without observing social distancing, and mostly without masks.

That threatens to prolong the pandemic at a time when daily cases are gradually decreasing statewide and bigger sections of the population are getting vaccinated, said University of Florida infectious disease professor Dr. J. Glenn Morris, Jr.

Let's revisit this story in about three weeks, shall we?

Florida’s warm weather and relatively lax COVID rules have made Miami Beach an inviting destination for young people who have felt bottled up during the year-long pandemic. With March expected to bring the largest crowds South Beach has seen in more than a year, sidewalk cafes, bars and hookah lounges now fill up on the weekends — increasing the likelihood that tourists will spread COVID-19 in Miami-Dade or catch it on vacation and carry it back home.

While we're at it, let's see how Expert the Leading Infectious Disease Expert is.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said there’s a “big possibility” this week’s Bike Week motorcycle rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, could become a coronavirus superspreader event.

The 10-day rally, expected to attract 300,000 people, is “really ill-advised” and could lead to a major COVID-19 outbreak, like the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in August, the nation’s top infectious disease expert said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Footage of motorcycle enthusiasts attending the Florida rally “gave me chills just looking at it,” Fauci added.

“I mean, I understand people want to get out and enjoy themselves and get back to what would have been normal a couple of years ago but we really just got to hang on a bit longer,” said Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.

No, we're not going to let that Silent Generation relic move any more goal posts.  I'm holding the "under" on "mostly open by Easter," remember?  That's three weeks from now, or, sufficient time for any blips in infections from motorcycle rally-goers or spring-breakers to materialize in the several States.  The palace-guard media will do whatever they can to call attention to any spike in infections, whether it's valid or not.  If you hear crickets, draw your own conclusion.

That Sturgis rally?

When snarky bobbleheads with tin “reporter” badges uncritically regurgitated garbage “science” tying every single case in the upper midwest to the Sturgis rally? That made the headlines. The clarification – it was more like 80 cases in Minnesota – got Section C page 16.

Be prudent, and respect the wishes of businesses that would prefer customers taking precautions. But keep in mind that the prolonged shutdowns, and the coot's executive orders, are more about increasing the number of welfare dependents than about shortening the pandemic.

THE PERVERTED PRIORITIES OF PANDEMIC POLITICS.

At the beginning of the coronavirus tyranny, New York governor Andrew "thug with a speech impediment" Cuomo was a media darling.  Then the truth about the carnage in New York's care homes came out.

Now, New York legislators and other public officials who never acted in a constitutional way to rein in his autocratic impulses would like him to step out of line and disappear.  Not, though, for contributing to some fifteen thousand preventable deaths.

Democratic members of the state legislature — the only body with the authority to remove the governor — held their fire until the sexual-harassment claims emerged.

In other words, progressives clearly consider crimes relating to life and death secondary to those involving sleazy come-ons.

As candidate and as president, Donald Trump said a great many foolish things. "We are being governed by really stupid people" was not one of them.

WHY SUCH A RIGID FRAME TRUCK?

The first built-completely-of-Russian-components diesel locomotives will come from a works in Yekaterinburg.

Sinara - Transportnye mashiny (STM) and RZD signed an agreement on cooperation in the development, production, supply, testing and maintenance of the new Class 2ES6A electric locomotives and Class 2TE35A diesel locomotives, both for the main line service and with asynchronous traction equipment.

The future Class 2TE35As are to be the 16-axle locomotives, to be able to haul trains weighing of up to 9,000 tonnes. They are to be fitted with two 3,650 kW Type DM-185 engines, to be produced by UDMZ (Uralsky dizel-motorny zavod) of Yekaterinburg. Their traction equipment will be manufactured by Tyagovye komponenty (Traction components) of Yekaterinburg, both companies belonging to the STM.

The traction motors are to be of the Type ATD1000 (a 1,000 kW output), i. e. the same as in the Class 2ES6A locomotives, and will be manufactured by Russkie elektricheskie dvigateli (Russian electric motors), Chelyabinsk.

The Russians still like their back-to-back single-cab units, in the fashion devotees of the transition era can appreciate.

Image retrieved from Railvolution.

I wonder if the Russians are still building for light axle loadings.  They're not carrying the weight of multiple prime movers in the fashion of the Centipede or the Centennial on those bogies.

THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS, ONLY TRADEOFFS.

I could probably use that title on every post, but I'm trading off economy of expression for variety in composition.  The coronavirus-related version of that theme appeared early in the shutdowns, and it's a message that requires reinforcement.  Benjamin Powell respects Texas's eased mitigations accordingly.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to eliminate the state’s mask mandate and capacity restrictions on businesses, effective March 10, was condemned by critics as reckless. But the governor’s rollback better aligns Texas policy with science: economic science that is.

Epidemiologists don’t have a monopoly on advice regarding how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, epidemiology has nothing to say about how humans should evaluate the trade-offs between various activities they value and the level of health risk they’re willing to accept to engage in those activities. Economic science is the discipline that studies these competing values.

If it's not infectious in the sense of Fauci, it's not something Fauci and his ilk consider.

Economists have long appreciated that most tradeoffs are best left for individuals to make for themselves. Individuals know their personal preferences better than anyone else and usually bear the burden of bad choices and reap the reward of good choices. The presence of COVID-19 doesn’t alter this basic insight.

The economic case for government mask mandates and business-occupancy limitations hinges on virus transmission “externalities,” or spillover effects. Such externalities occur when people weigh their own health risks against the benefits of engaging in desirable, even risky, activities without accounting for how their actions might affect others—in this case, infecting them with COVID-19.

Writing in the Southern Economic Journal, economists Peter Leeson and Louis Rouanet of George Mason University found that the size of the COVID-19 transmission externality is much smaller than most people realize, largely due to the vigilance of business owners, who understand that increased transmission to customers and employees will cause further damage to their firms.

Mr Powell would rather have more economists advising public officials; that puts too much responsibility on an expert who might simply say "bet on emergence."  John Stossel gets it.  "When the pandemic ends, politicians will take credit, but the solution, as usual, began when politicians got out of the way."  Bet on emergence, forsooth.

THE DAY BASKETBALL ENDED.

A year ago, there were no Cold Spring Shops posts because it was time to get the layout ready for visitors attending the March Meet, which might have been one of the final social events of the spring in Illinois.  The plan was to finish tidying up the layout with coverage of the Mid-American conference basketball tournament as background entertainment.  But just before I expected that coverage to begin, the radio reported that the tournament had been cancelled, and the disaster that began as fifteen days to slow the spread of Wuhan coronavirus was under way.  A Northern Star reporter who was in Cleveland for the tournament has published a reminiscence of what he describes as "the day sports stopped."

Professional sports finished their seasons during the summer, and the collegiate tournaments are back, with limited spectators.  Life in these United States more generally is not so good.

What did those fifteen days turn into?  Was it a shift in public health goals, from protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed, which parts of New York City seemed close to being, to doing whatever it took to conquer the virus, which seems to be the focus of the vaccines?  Or, as I fear, was it a shift in policy goals, from containing contagion to doing whatever it took to turn the yeomanry into paupers?  I had my doubts about the lockdown regimes by late in March, and over the past year I came to see the second goal as the purpose, with Our Rulers having us mask up, shut up, and wait for the welfare checks.

A year into the shutdowns, it is time to recognize others who saw the tyranny for what it was, and said so.  We'll start with cartoonist Henry Payne.

That cartoon came out when petty-bourgeois elements were objecting to the destruction of their businesses by executive order.  It was OK for those businesses to be destroyed by lumpenproletarians of color.  That, though, is for another day.  Today we focus on Derek Hunter's Trenchant Observation, "It was a complete and total failure by the bureaucratic state."  His fear is that the failure might have been for naught.

Maybe enough data will have been gathered that some sense can be made of it, but it’s doubtful. Given how lockdowns didn’t work, yet persist, and masks haven’t worked, but mandates persist, no one in any position to take responsibility seems to have any interest in doing so. They’re just committed to what hasn’t worked until they’re not, then they act like it never happened as they move on to the next thing.

I hope somewhere out there useful, usable data exists in spite of the bureaucratic incompetence that has been captaining this ship for the last 12 months. Otherwise, we really would have gone through all of this and learned nothing.

I'll leave the heavy empirical research to others, but concentrate, below the jump, on documenting the case that the lockdown regime is about turning the yeomanry into paupers.

TRY A DIFFERENT MESSAGE.

A student strike at the University of Wisconsin, fifty years ago, sounds contemporary.

From the Black Student Strike of 1969 to the present-day social justice movement on campus, Black student protesters see their story at UW as one continuous fight that has shifted in form, but not cause.

As current students make a renewed call for the university to address the grievances of BIPOC students, protesters from 1969 and today reconcile their generational differences for that same cause — justice and equity for Black students on the UW campus.

I'm not sure what those "generational differences" are. It's the same sort of grievance mongering and tinkering with the curriculum.

Despite the shockwaves it created in Madison at the time, the Black Student Strike of 1969 is not a well-known event among UW students. Launched amid a growing Black Power movement in the year following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a group of students organized under the Black People’s Alliance to protest for a series of 13 demands.

The demands centered around recruitment of more minority students and faculty, the creation of a Black Studies department and other accountability initiatives for Black students to attain autonomy over matters relating to their UW experience and education.

You mean fifty years of investment in affinity centers and area studies departments and legions of diversity deanlets yielded ... nothing?

More than 50 years later, UW junior Juliana Bennett sat on a Zoom call with Dean of Students Christina Olstad. Along with several other members of the UW BIPOC Coalition and Associated Students of Madison student council, Bennett hoped to discuss the COVID-19 Student Relief Fund — a piece of ASM legislation designed to aid underrepresented students struggling financially due to the pandemic.

Olstad told Bennett and the others present that they were “disgraceful,”claiming their efforts were misleading students. Despite a strained admin-student relationship, the battle over financial aid persists along with the fight for other BIPOC student demands made in the wake of the reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement in Madison.

Might part of the problem be that the diversity, inclusion, and equity deanlets are recruiting for show, rather than for building human capital?

Bennett said she felt isolated within her first few hours at the university as a freshman. As one of 60 students of color in the business school, Bennett said it was a “huge culture shock” to be a student of color in a sea of white faces.

When Bennett and other students of color in the Business Emerging Leaders Program — dedicated to bringing people of diverse backgrounds to the business school — were shuffled to the front of the class’s first group photo, she said her fears were realized.

“That was my first introduction to what it means to be a student of color here,” Bennett said. “It doesn’t matter if we feel welcomed, if we feel safe — it just matters that our faces are there to pretend that we’re being diverse.”

[Current student Jordan] Kennedy said years of advocacy and controversy led to the current climate. In the fall of 2019, UW came under fire due to a Homecoming video that did not feature any students of color. The controversy caused campus-wide pushback, attracted national coverage and ignited the formation of the Student Inclusion Coalition, an organization dedicated to racial justice on campus. Still, Kennedy and Bennett said this summer’s protests revealed a glaring hole at UW that had not been filled.

What is a Morale Conditioner to do?  Put together candid shots of collegians enjoying homecoming and take stick because he didn't come across a suitably mixed party?  Or ask a suitably mixed batch of collegians to act like they're doing homecoming and take stick for creating Potemkin diversity?

Apparently removing the statue of Abraham Lincoln from Bascom Hill is now one of the non-negotiable demands.  Whether any of the students currently protesting will make a name with opinion television or the national magazines or go on to a competent middle-class adulthood remains to be seen.

IT IS LONG PAST TIME TO REOPEN ILLINOIS.

The ukases of absentee governor J. B. Pritzker and his compliant, Chicago Soviet legislature have driven productive people out of Illinois while producing a public health disaster.

John Foley submits additional Facts to a candid World.

Illinois has a December 2020 unemployment rate of 8%.  For comparative purposes, Wisconsin has an unemployment rate of 4% and Indiana an unemployment rate of 4.6%.

Why all the data?  Information makes the sale.  It is time for Illinois to open up, leaving the decision to the individual/entity.  The public knows who the vulnerable population is.  Hospital capacity (the root of the lockdown) has not been overwhelmed.  Daily death counts have dropped dramatically.  We have a very impressive vaccination rate.  We know what we need to do to protect our health.  Too many children received a woefully inadequate education this school year.  Too many high school and college students are struggling to find employment this summer.  Too many people have had their emotional health compromised.

Chicago is a convention destination with 25–30,000 union hospitality jobs.  We are losing convention opportunities to other destinations.  In Evanston, the vaunted Orrington Hotel has declared bankruptcy due to COVID.  Our higher unemployment rate compared to our neighboring states is driven by our inability to open up our entertainment/hospitality/convention industries and society as a whole.

He also proposes a timeline for reopening.

Watch the Texas reopening.  If the Texan health care system is not overwhelmed by the end of March, we should follow its lead and remove all Illinois government restrictions on private enterprise.  If Texas is successful, we have the information and the vaccinations to responsibly reopen in early April.  There isn't a better place in the world than Chicago in the summer.  Good luck to Texas so that we can have a wonderful, thriving Chicago summer.  We are the city of broad shoulders.

Illinoisans will have a chance to remove the rookie governor and send him back to his real estate ventures in another year. The clock is running.

ROGER RABBIT DIDN'T INVESTIGATE THE GOVERNMENT.

The legend lives on from the cartoonists on down of the National City Lines conspiracy.

The story will never be given up for dead, when Kurt Hofer hops on the trolley.

In 2003 a long defunct rail line was rebuilt, connecting Pasadena, California, to Downtown Los Angeles. Like many Angelenos, I traveled on it a few times and patted myself on the back for relieving freeway congestion while not, in any meaningful way, integrating public transit into my day-to-day life. If you live in a Los Angeles suburb and take the light rail every once in a while—to go to a restaurant, or a Lakers game, for instance—you almost view it as a benevolent act of public service. You briefly imagine yourself sitting in solidarity with brash New Yorkers jostling to get to work or, better yet, you envision LA’s own paradise lost: the Edenic days of the streetcar. If only the streetcars hadn’t been torn up, you tell yourself, this could have been your way of life, just like the more refined urbanites back East.

That's no accident, dear reader, as the urban structure today took its form along the car lines of over a century ago.  "You could even take the rail system all the way to a tavern and hotel atop the San Gabriel Mountains via the historic Mount Lowe Railway. The unique features of Southern California’s geography and climate, from temperate beaches to orange groves and snow-capped mountains, were all within a day’s reach via the Pacific Electric red cars."

MONDAY MEDITATIONS.

Each of the following is what I view as the money quote from a longer essay.  Follow each link for context and elaboration.

1.  The madness of crowds might be the downside of expertise, or of emergence.  "When a free society collectively agrees to the surrender of its freedoms, it is clearly in the grip of a cognitive fiasco of the first magnitude." 

2..  It is long past time to say No to any policy beyond "don't stress the hospitals."  "No one signed up for living in lockdown indefinitely."

3.  Once you've had your shots, live free.  "Don't hold out for the [Center for Disease Control's] blessing: Get the vaccine and get back to normal."

4.  No optimal tax and transfer policy survives the journey from blackboard to legislation.  "Efficiency-improving market failure corrections often look like an obvious and tidy solution on paper. When it comes to implementation however, they become Public Choice quagmires."

5.  No courage in higher education.  "Faculty members of many universities, America’s centers for critical thinking, have overtly intimidated views contrary to their own, likely out of political reasons, leaving many afraid to speak up."

6,  There is no substitute for victory.  "The government has been wasting our time and money for decades, and the War on Covid is only the second most expensive war our government has waged (World War II being the third)."  The Wuhan coronavirus might succumb to vaccine and mutations that make it more symbiotic with its host.  Poverty remains the natural order of things.

7.  Clarity on International Women's Day.  "Switching to using the term “gender earnings gap” broadens the concept of earnings differentials by gender, and more accurately allows for the reality that women are usually making the same hourly (or weekly) wage as men doing the exact same job."

8.  Optimism in the face of popular delusion?  "First, the pandemic is real, and it calls for a real response. And second, the most important part of that response, the part that will matter when it's all over, will be the part that we did voluntarily."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,017

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.

The latest report from Sweden counts 684,961 infections and 13,003 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,119,517 infections and 23,020 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the cows come home, I will.

Sunday evening's local news coronavirus countdown noted over three million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.

Last week, the governor trailed by 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 9,623.

As of 1 February, 9,662.

As of 25 January, 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 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.

A MOTORCAR CAN CROSS THE COUNTRY WITHOUT CHANGING TRAINS.

Union Pacific participate in the resurgence of the motorcar business.  "Let’s take a look at a brand new car’s journey and how it arrives safely at a dealership in mint condition, ready for you to take it for a spin."  If you have access to the 1962 volume of Trains, dear reader, you'll find a story of the same sort of shipment, back before the special flatcars had to be enclosed against vandals and locked against stowaways.

If your car has a long distance to travel from the U.S. plant where it was manufactured or the port in which it was received, it most likely will be delivered to an automotive facility managed by a railroad to continue its journey to the dealership. Most railroads’ auto ramps are located in large metro areas, near auto manufacturing plants and major distribution centers. For example, Union Pacific operates or accesses more than 40 vehicle distribution centers across its network.

You might be surprised to learn that shipping new vehicles by rail is pretty common. According to the American Association of Railroads [c.q.] (better known as the AAR), each year, freight rail moves nearly 75% of the new cars and light trucks purchased in the U.S. Plus, they serve most of the 70-plus automobile manufacturing plants across North America, including those in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Texas.

The flatcars on Amtrak's Auto-Train are passenger-compatible versions of the freight cars used to move your next set of wheels.  The railroads have come a long way since the fifty foot box cars that could haul four flivvers.

ARE THE PATRIOT MILITIAS REALLY SCARIER THAN THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA?

The palace-guard press had us believing that there were actionable threats against the Federal Capitol, connected with the historic Fourth of March inauguration date. until there weren't.

Washington looked on Thursday morning much the way it has for the past two months.

National Guard members armed with M4 rifles braced for rebellion that never came. Razor wire lined miles of steel fencing that went unbreached. [Former president Donald] Trump remained in Florida, where it was 70 degrees and sunny.

No report on whether the former president played golf, or hit on a starlet.

[O]n Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol Police announced it had identified a potential plot by a militant group to breach the Capitol, as hundreds of insurrectionists did on Jan. 6. The threat apparently was credible enough for the House to suspend a Thursday session, though the Senate still convened. And it came just before the Capitol Police sought to extend the Guard’s mission by two more months.

Why do I keep thinking about the terrorist "chatter" years ago, which led to periodic extensions of "yellow" terror alerts or upgrades to "orange," and nothing happened for so long that the security theater types finally abandoned those colored alert levels?  Yes, it took a long time, and air travellers are still taking shoes off at the airport, and the same sort of demoralizing security theater accompanies both the continued garrisoning of Fortress Pelosi, and the continuing alarms about mutations to the Wuhan coronavirus.  Wouldn't a serious plot be something we don't hear about until people are arraigned in court?

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff has had enough.

Why are the troops still here? Why will they remain after yesterday’s false alarm?

One explanation is that Capitol police force officials and others with a say want them here. They don’t want to tolerate any risk, however small, of another January 6. It doesn’t matter to them whether Capitol Hill is oppressively militarized. That’s not their concern.

Another explanation is that some officials want to promote the view that Trump supporters pose an ongoing threat to the Capitol. They want to get all the mileage they can from January 6.

Whatever the true explanation — and both of the two above can be true — I think the oppressive security measures on Capitol Hill are a disgrace.

In the same way that Anthony Fauci keeps moving the goalposts on reopening the country as the vaccines and hormesis do their thing, the political class keeps moving the goalposts on reopening Capitol Hill.

Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at right-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America, showcased the growing skepticism among QAnon influencers in an ongoing Twitter thread. The thread included screenshots of their posts to various chat platforms, such as Telegram, describing March 4 as a "false flag" constructed by mainstream news organizations and internal double agents to deceive true QAnon proponents.

"Can't help but get the feeling that these 'March 4 true inauguration' stories are planned disinfo being peddled by the [injected] anons to dupe people into spreading probably nonsense theories that make the whole movement look dumb," one QAnon influencer wrote in an online forum early last month, according to a screenshot that Kaplan shared to Twitter on February 10.

That's not well written. Media Matters exist to keep an eye on "right wing" media; they are not a "right wing" organization on the lookout for leftist biases.

Here, though, is what passes for actionable intelligence these days.

Late Thursday, a Telegram subscriber wrote on a popular QAnon channel that people shouldn't be "disappointed" because "the race is not run yet and I have reason to believe March 20 is also possible," according to Business Insider. Another message said "we still have 16 days" and "lots can happen between now and then."

The upcoming date will mark the 167th anniversary of the Republican Party's founding. Former members of the Whig Party are said to have technically established the GOP during a meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854.

What next: Tax Day, April 15? V-E Day, May 8? Independence Day itself?

Between the social media companies acting so aggressively to fact-check inconvenient dissent, and Washington Democrats continuing the security theater and concealing the president^* from unscripted moments, I'm not seeing a lot of confidence on the part of what passes for the current establishment.

THE SHAKEOUT OF HIGHER EDUCATION CONTINUES.

Cleveland's John Carroll University, one of the few Jesuit institutions not better known for a basketball team, might be giving up on being competitive in the academic job market hereafter.

Whereas financial exigency means a budget crisis that threatens an institution’s survival, John Carroll now says it can fire individual tenured faculty members without cause in cases of “budgetary hardship.” This is defined as a projected -- not final -- annual budget deficit of 6 percent, plus two more years of foreseen challenges.

At the same time, John Carroll is denying faculty members the right to appeal these terminations.  Faculty members still have certain protections under the more dire concept of financial exigency.

Even more ironically, at least to faculty members, is that John Carroll’s Board of Directors says it’s taking these steps to protect and strengthen tenure. It’s said so in numerous campus communications and in a public statement about the recent changes, which are now codified in the Faculty Handbook.

Is anybody surprised that the language of sugar-coating a reduction in services as an improvement in services has made its way into higher education, particularly where the governing board has the corporate sounding "Directors" rather than the "Regents" or "Trustees" or "Visitors" of traditional practice?

On the other hand, might a Pajamas Media "get woke, go broke" moment be at hand?

Dianna Taylor, professor of philosophy and vice president of the campus AAUP chapter, said, “One of the most objectionable things about this is that violates a lot of the principles of Catholic pedagogy around issues of social justice and academic freedom and our ability to teach students as whole persons, as we are supposed to do.”

John Carroll’s holistic approach to education is why so many professors wanted to teach there in the first place, she said, as it means appealing to students beyond their intellect and sense of reason. It means asking them to think about their role in the world and “interrogate” -- not necessarily change -- long-held beliefs and values.

Taylor, for instance, teaches courses that involve discussions of love, sex and gender. Students are generally receptive; sometimes former students contact her years later to say that the ideas she’d presented finally make sense.

But it will be impossible to teach this way moving forward, she said, absent academic freedom.

“This is horrible for the faculty and it’s horrible for the students,” Taylor said. “It’s not fair to them. This flies in the face of the values this institution says it holds.”

The board said in its statement that six months ago, it proposed three amendments to the university’s Faculty Handbook “as one of several strategies aimed at helping JCU operate and compete more effectively in the fast changing and increasingly competitive world of higher education.”

There's that stupid "interrogate" again, which might be woke word-noise where "cultivating lifelong learning" or "no final say" might suffice; and it's clashing with that corporate-speak in the form of "fast changing and increasingly competitive."

TRIMMING THE LOSERS AND MAKING IT LOOK VIRTUOUS?

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg proposes a simple explanation for the Seuss estate ceasing production of six titles.

I get what they’re trying to do: keep the Seuss money machine humming away. It’s called capitalism. Every company refreshes the product line by ditching old models and adopting new ones. Books go out of print every day.

So far, so sensible. Then he steps in it.

[T]he Seuss estate, like any large corporation, reads the room, sees the whole multicultural thing manifesting itself more and more, and is battening down the hatches to survive the cultural storm. Why endanger the huge sales of “The Lorax” to keep a third-rater like “If I Ran the Zoo” in stock?

The standard corporate response is to note that some products, or some divisions, are underachieving relative to other divisions, or relative to management's targets for return on investment, and they will accordingly be discontinued when sold out.  Mr Steinberg appears to be conceding that there are people who will not buy "The Lorax" as long as "Ran the Zoo" with its archaic art is still in production. That's close to conceding that the cancel culture argument is real.  Make the relevant substitutions, dear reader, in the following passage, and see.

And in an oddly parallel way, cancel culture does the same thing, confining the gatekeeper in a strait jacket of indignation. Those ready to banish Abe Lincoln because of something he said on the stump in 1858 would negate a key part of the American experience, operating on the naive notion that the world is divided between good, non-racist people, who get to stay, and bad, racist folks whom we can identify through their failures and banish.

That "multicultural thing" is a "strait jacket of indignation." A few illustrations in a Seuss book suffice, in the minds of the sufficiently woke, to have the entire Seuss enterprise closed down.

AN ACCIDENTAL INSTITUTION.

Spring training is in progress, with a few spectators watching the games (and chasing home runs on the grass outside the fence) and Bob Uecker is again calling the plays.

A Milwaukee native who played for the Braves -- seriously, Uecker was a bona fide big leaguer, no matter what he’s told you over the years. He joined the fledgling Brewers as a scout, but soon fell out of favor with GM Frank Lane when reports arrived smothered in mashed potatoes and gravy. That’s a true story.

He began stopping by the radio booth that summer of ’71 to provide some color for broadcasters Merle Harmon and Tom Collins, meaning that sometime this year -- Uecker and the club aren’t exactly sure of the precise date -- Uecker will celebrate his 50th anniversary on the air for the Brewers.

By ’72 it was a regular gig, and Uecker called play-by-play in the fifth inning. One day at Yankee Stadium, Harmon and Collins abruptly stood up and left the booth. Uecker held down the cough button and begged them to come back. Eventually, he was forced to start talking.

Brewer players have voted him a share of the playoff money each of the past three post-seasons, and does any other broadcaster have his home run call in lights?

Milwaukee's corona tyrants have consented to allow attendance at Brewer games, but they continue to demonstrate who is lord protector by prohibiting tailgate parties.  "If the vaccine program progresses and the pandemic eases throughout the season, the Brewers hope they will be allowed to increase their capacity."   What's the over-under on spontaneous games of catch or beanbag by Memorial Day?

Welcome back, Bob Uecker.