AMTRAK AT FIFTY?

There's a lengthy article on the prospects for Amtrak at Railway Age.

The author is longtime Passenger Rail advocate D. P. Alan.

There's still too much uncertainty about the shape of the tourism industry, let alone business travel, in the immediate future.

Let's concentrate, for a few moments, though, on the Amtrak map in the beginning of 1978.

National Association of Railroad Passengers map retrieved from Railway Age.

Not much has changed in the intervening forty years.  The Southern Crescent is now an Amtrak train, the Empire Builder the sole service across the northern tier, the Pioneer through Idaho is long gone, and the National Limited through Columbus and Indianapolis is not even possible any more.

Whether there will be any additions to the map, or increases in frequencies, any time soon, remains to be seen.

WHAT IS MISSING FROM THIS DISCUSSION?

Here's a scary headline. "US West prepares for possible 1st water shortage declaration."  Read the article, dear reader, and tell me what word you will not see.  (If you guessed along these lines, congratulations.)

That was this Sunday's sin of omission.  The article also offers a sin of commission.  "The hydropower [from Hoover Dam] costs [subscribers] substantially less than the energy sold on the wholesale electricity market because the government charges customers only for the cost of producing it and maintaining the dam."

And that, dear reader, is how the infrastructure crumbles.

CALL THE ROLL OF THE PRIVILEGE HOARDERS.

Meet the senior administration and the trustees of Columbia University, where the graduate students are on strike.  "This makes it all the more necessary to break the isolation of the strike imposed by the UAW and other city unions and fight for the maximum mobilization of the working class to back the striking students against the powerful Wall Street and Democratic Party operatives who run Columbia University."  It's a socialist tract, which means you get the usual adjectives.  "The president of Columbia University is Lee Bollinger, former president of the University of Michigan (1996–2002). His annual salary is a staggering $4.7 million." "Staggering" is always relative to a frame of reference. By university president standards, that might be a lot. In sports or big finance, not so much.

But look at the company he keeps.

Adam Pritzker is a fourth-generation member of the Pritzker family, son of John Pritzker and grandson of Jay Pritzker. His uncle, Thomas Pritzker, is the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation. The family is number nine on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Families 2020 with a net worth of $32.5 billion. Adam Pritzker is also related to Penny Pritzker, Obama’s Secretary of Commerce and her brother JB Pritzker, the current billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois who was once referred to as “Chicago’s second mayor” by Chicago magazine.

You won't get much disagreement from Illinoisans outside Greater Chicago, but I digress.

What's rich about the whole graduate students going on strike phenomenon is that the Ivies might be selling false hopes to those aspiring Ph.D.s, and the phenomenon has been present for going on fifty years.  (A professor who became a mentor alerted me to it when I started applying to graduate schools.  I persisted, and somehow survived.)

Indeed, in my more cynical moments I wonder whether what is going on in the evergreen disciplines these days, with the proliferation of junk theory, isn't a Brezhnevite version of the glass bead game, in which the universities pretend to pay their adjunct faculty, and the adjunct faculty pretend to publish.

You don't have to look at that list for too long before you see something else that the fever swamps called attention to.  "Cursory research done by National Justice finds a crisis of nepotism at our Ivy League schools. Seven out of eight presidents of these universities are Jewish, despite being a miniscule 2% of the national population."  It continues. "These trustees are disproportionately Jewish. Discounting ethnocentrism and shared ethnic interests as playing a role in their decisions when a clear pattern is present would be irrational and unscientific."  Fairly standard Protocols of the Learned Elders stuff, nothing really new there.

What is new is a different kind of fever swamp these days.  "American Jews are now part of the ownership class. What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it."  That's Randi Weingarten, teachers' union president, but somehow she isn't going to lose her platform.  "Weingarten combines two contemporary progressive doctrines, class and race struggle, to level her smear. There is not a single person who has even a mild acquaintance with American Jewry that would believe they are trying to take away 'the ladder of opportunity' from others."

These days, though, the privilege hoarders engage in ever more convoluted reasoning to do anything other than recommend that everyone ought be offered comparable intellectual challenges.

School boards and policy makers have recently begun categorizing Asians as “white-adjacent” because of their outsized academic success. Selective schools, public and private, have increasingly adopted official and unofficial quotas limiting the number of Asian admits in favor of other minority groups. This is a problem. The idea that Asians are too “successful” to be considered “persons of color” relies on the racist assumption that success is a “white” trait.

Once you have decided that idiocy is a form of intellect, there are no limits to how silly things can get.  Never mind that the "Asian" category in the rubric of identity politics includes the Chinese, the Indians, the residents of the various 'stans, and don't get me started on the slightly more specific "Pacific Islander" lumped in with that category.  But never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined "As a Jew, I understand that my perspective comes from a position of privilege."

Today's price theory refresher: as long as resources are scarce, there are always opportunities, and there is no such thing as control of the ladder of opportunity.

SYMBIOTIC RATHER THAN PARASITIC.

Regular readers know that riff about the proper scope of government.  Here is Cato's Meir Kohn (via Arnold Kling) elaborating on the same point.

Government is an organization created to deploy force, either to engage in predation (predatory government) or to protect a population against predation (associational government). In preindustrial Europe, the governments of kings and princes were predatory governments; think the Norman conquest of England. The governments of commercial cities were associational governments. In general, associational governments were hospitable to economic progress, while predatory governments were not.

Associational government, however, had a problem: it did not scale up very well. As the territory and population under an associational government grew, it became increasingly difficult for the population to exercise effective control over its government. This enabled the government to engage in predation: associational government turned into predatory government. Fortunately, a new form of associational government emerged, largely by chance, that solved this problem. When the provinces of the Netherlands won their war of independence from Spain, they created a national government that was an association of associational governments — a federal government.

Unfortunately, the national governments, even of federations, have this annoying habit of thinking of the associational units as operating divisions of the national government.

THE REPLAY REVIEW DETRACTS FROM THE GAME.

It makes the referees less accurate and it annoys the fans.  Time for college basketball to do less of it?  Lexington, Kentucky sports scribe Mark Story shares my judgement.  "While I have no way to prove this other than the eyeball test, I believe the reliance on replay has led to a decline in the quality of officiating across sports."  He might not have heard of the Peltzman Effect.  I have.

College basketball poobahs might want to simplify the men's game by awarding the defense the ball on a held ball (alternating possessions after the opening tip only) and eliminating the five- and ten-second violations.  They also want to go to four quarters the way the women have, without going to four quarters.  It's also odd that the poobahs want to limit times out under two minutes.  In the women's game, a time out in the last minute of the game sometimes gives the offense an out-of-bounds play at mid-court.  Read the rules yourself.  Thus, you often see coaches conserving their times out so as to be able to call a play for the half-court with the outcome in doubt.

Let's see what takes effect come November.

CONTEMPLATING LONGEVITY.

At the beginning of "Social" "Security" the eligibility age for benefits was sixty-five, which, conveniently, was the age at which approximately half the potential pensioners were ... dead.  Thus the lucky surviving half could enjoy a few years of more-or-less-leisure without breaking the so-called trust fund.

In the past going on a century, medical science and dietitians and purveyors of model railroads have done wonders in extending productive life spans, which makes putting enough resources away to enjoy a retirement that in many cases might last as long as one's working life more challenging, and it's essentially impossible for governments to manage that.

How, then, take advantage of the increased longevity and continued lucidity of older workers, whilst not foreclosing the career ladders of younger workers?  There are limits to extending adolescence, and a person entering the work force at 35 might not be able to put enough resources away to retire at 60 or 65.

In microcosm, the British royal family illustrates the challenge.  The current queen will soon turn 95, and she's still doing the boxes each morning.  The crown prince is in his early seventies.  The presumptive next crown prince is pushing 40, with yet another presumptive crown prince almost a tween.  The names of the monarchs for the rest of the 21st century are known, if not yet their terms.  I submit, though, that an employment model in which commoners wait until their former retirement age to take their first jobs is not going to work too well.

(As an aside, I concur with Daily Mail columnist Dan Wootton that "forcing the fully-vaccinated Queen to [sit in a separate pew] in a dehumanising mask without anyone by her side as support [during her husband's funeral] was unnecessarily cruel.")

In higher education and electoral politics, I have long been tired of people who will not step aside and let the youngsters develop. "It is difficult not to conclude that for at least several decades, the Silent and Baby Boom generations have sat atop the rest of society like a monstrous stone idol that demands worshipping."  Yes, and the corona tyranny might be their final act.

It is not, though, the persistence of the Watergate class in Congress or the last of the got-tenure-relatively-easily crowd in higher education that alone is hobbling our dynamism.  "[Anthony] Fauci and [his boss, Francis] Collins have several decades of federal employment during which they amassed considerable political influence on both sides of the aisle with members of Congress."  Where is the Cromwell who will say, "You have sat there far too long.  In the name of all that is holy, go?"

The challenge, though, will be in the emergence of future career ladders, in order that people don't delay their entry into the work force in a suboptimal way, or remain suboptimally long in work, foreclosing promotion opportunities to their juniors.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

Tom Death of Expertise Nichols probably doesn't read Cold Spring Shops.  "Democrats have this conceit, going back to at least Franklin Roosevelt's brains trust, that somehow Credentialed Elites plus Presidential Power plus Tax and Spend ... work."

Too bad, reality just bit him in the ass.  "Tom Nichols gets reminders after saying Dems’ radical agenda could help Republicans win back Congress."

ON MY WORKBENCH.

I have the control modules and batteries installed in the first and second units of what will ultimately be an A-B-A set.

There's still some fine-tuning to do on the works, and a lot of detail parts still to be added.  The second A unit should be functional much more quickly, given what I've learned getting the first one working.

THE TAX DAY MUDDLE.

Our Political Masters have consented to give us another month to get our taxes in order, because of Wuhan coronavirus or something.

We note the skill of Jeff MacNelly in calling attention to the muddle that is the tax form, this long ago.

That's a simplification of the "short form" of years ago.  I'm not sure what he'd make of some of the schedules for figuring capital gains taxes these days.

CONTINUED MIDDLING MEDIOCRITY IN THE MOST MID-MAJORISH MID-AMERICAN.

While the Northern Illinois men's basketball team had the off-the court drama, the women's team went from a good start to conference play and some heady talk early in February of a high seed in the conference tournament to a run of one win, two close losses, two blowout losses, and  19 point lead surrendered to Central Michigan culminating in a seventh seed against Central Michigan, and the end of the season.  Central Michigan, on the other hand, won the conference tournament only to be excused quickly in the basketball tournament not trademarked as March Madness.

You'd think the Mid-American in general, and Northern Illinois in particular, could come up with a value proposition to recruit stronger players.  On one hand, there isn't the same sort of jockeying to become lottery picks in pro basketball that infects the men's game.  On the other, did anybody notice that the Ivy League did not participate in either basketball tournament?  Does anybody really want to argue that Baylor's academics are that much stronger than Miami of Ohio's, or Northern Illinois's compare unfavorably with Connecticut's?

Why, then, do Mid-American fans and followers have to make do with the occasional rising of a Ball State to take the legends out, or to the rare occasions when the conference gets two bids (and a little notice?)

LESSONS UNLEARNED.

The following is Contemporary Relevance, isn't it? "Commonly sparked by repressive and violent police actions, urban uprisings were political acts of self-defense and racial liberation on a mass, public scale. Legislative successes at the federal level with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were not reflected in the daily lives of African-Americans facing police misconduct, economic inequality, segregated housing, and inferior educations."

But that's from a 2018 Smithsonian article by Alice George, about the apparently-forgotten Kerner Commission report on urban unrest.  Unfortunately, the commission's report sought to fix things without the agency of the people it was supposed to be helping.

Newsweek interviewed a city planner who believed the answer lay in regimented integration. Under his plan, only a certain number of blacks would be re-located in each suburb so that whites would never feel threatened by their black neighbors. This would a create an integrated society, but would integration be right if it was achieved by once again limiting black options? As [museum curator William] Pretzer suggests, the magazine’s exploration of radical change somehow still managed to treat African-Americans more like chess pieces than human beings, who might want to choose where they lived.

That has always been the way of technocrats, Adam Smith had them diagnosed a quarter-millennium ago; and in some ways "inclusive" education is again depriving the people it intends to include of agency.

But the legend lives on.  "Ultimately, going to the moon was far easier than solving the nation’s racial issues. Politically, spending billions on space travel was more saleable than striving to correct racial inequality."  I remember the canard, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can ..."  Sorry, no.  Building a launch vehicle capable of sending a payload to the moon with enough fuel and life support to get back is a problem in applied mathematics, with relatively straightforward equations of motion.  Complex adaptive systems, which is to say, the class of systems including those of human interaction, are not so easily modelled or managed.

SHOULD WE BE ASTONISHED THAT THE TURNOUT WAS AS HIGH AS IT WAS?

DeKalb Chronicle writer Kelsey Rettke offers the usual post-local-election lament.  "Tuesday’s local election voter turnout less than a fourth of voters who showed up in November."  There was a presidency on the line, as well as a referendum authorizing tax increases whenever it suited Springfield politicians in November.  This time around, there was a local referendum on whether residents living within city limits could keep chickens.  It failed, almost by landslide proportions.  Apart from that, there was a contested election for mayor (by law, it's non-partisan) and a number of other offices that only offered one choice.

Ms Rettke appears to be of the opinion that the failure to show up is on the voters.  "If we don’t attempt to contribute to change, change will never happen."  That relatively few people put themselves forward as candidates (and many of them, you can see a lot in 35 years, are the usual suspects) suggests that change for its own sake isn't that urgent a thing.

LET'S MAKE THEM TEST THEIR THEORIES.

At Minding The Campus, W. Alexander Bell wonders whether woke theory might be reinforcing any Tuskegee effects on the slow diffusion of vaccination in black communities.

Different strains of this critical theory have gained significant momentum on campuses and over social media, and they all promote very cynical views of Western society, science, and enlightenment thinking in general.

For example, both CRT and Intersectionality (a closely related ideology that combines different identities to form a gradient of oppression) teach that racism is the status quo, and that the scientific method is just a white, Western, male way of knowing. They also reject the possibility of attaining objective knowledge and put emphasis on lived experience and “counter narratives” instead. Over the years, the disciples of these theories have called for the “decolonization” of the sciences, and most recently, have even advocated for a more “equitable” (thus less white supremacist) form of mathematics that would put emphasis on effort rather than accuracy. 2 + 2 = 5? Why not?

But if accurate math is racist and the scientific method is just a “product of Western modernity,” then wouldn’t it stand to reason that anything produced using math or science might also be racist? Following this line of thinking, why would any person of color allow a chemical concoction in their body that was created using the so-called master’s tools?

I'm not sure whether the flap over "inclusive" mathematics is relevant, although it's likely we'd be at such a pass, at least in the workshops and common rooms, as soon as Sondra Harding went after Principia Mathematica as a rape manual.  That such nonsense has gotten into popular use is depressing, although the sooner the population, viewed generally, sees that incoherence comes in the train of denying coherent beliefs (which is what this reification of "narrative" without respect to observed reality is), the sooner the madness will pass.

WILL THE SEPARATION PAYOUTS CHANGE ACCORDINGLY?

In January, we noted the mid-season termination of Northern Illinois men's basketball coach Mark Montgomery, whose contract was to run out at the end of the fiscal year in June.

There was a method to his boss, athletics director Sean Frazier, taking that action.

Frazier said he felt a lot of firings were coming in the college basketball world, so letting Montgomery go midseason gave the program a jump on finding his replacement.

He also said various rules would have kept the school for looking for a coach while Montgomery was still in charge. So Frazier made the change in the middle of the season.

Usually, the firings take place at the end of the regular season, or sometimes, as soon as a team fails to advance in a tournament.  Then come the job meetings, er, the Final Four, which is ordinarily where all the coaches and athletics directors go to fill those vacancies.  So Mr Frazier got a jump on all that by acting in January and completing his search before the conference tournaments, such as they were, got under way.

Thus, though, my title question.  Contracts between coaches and athletics departments include all sorts of bonds being committed to.  Generally, these diminish in value as time passes and wins and losses accumulate, with neither the coach nor the university owing a payout in the final year of the contract.

But if athletics directors see an advantage in getting a jump on the coaching carroussel by terminating coaches they might want to terminate anyway (something that might have been on Mr Frazier's mind: "I just felt like from an overall program trajectory standpoint, we needed to get better there") will agents for coaches start negotiating termination payouts for any termination by the university before the absolute end of the contract?

KEEPING THE RAILROADS FLUID.

Union Pacific offer a primer on train dispatching.  Kindly be guided by the possibility that the description is pollyannish.  "Train priorities are determined by the train type. For instance, passenger trains are typically given highest priority and manifest trains (trains with various car types destined for various customers) the lowest."  We wouldn't have the ongoing scraps between Amtrak and the freight railroads if that weren't so often honored in the breach.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Here comes this week's collection of interesting posts that caught my attention.  Follow the links for elaboration.

1.  Anthony Fauci is Anti-Science.  (He has no respect for the Constitution he's sworn to defend, but that's a different short take.)

2.  Karol Markowicz, "When Fauci tells you he wouldn’t dine indoors even after vaccination, that’s his problem, his psychosis."

3.  A warning from Kurt Schlichter.  "Think Jimmy Carter in 1980, but without the competence and a lot more anti-Americanism."

4.  Miranda Devine, "[W]e’ve been reimagining police for almost a year and the result is soaring crime, with black neighborhoods the worst hit."

5.  Another question Anthony Fauci won't answer.  "If the vaccinations prove to be so effective, why do restrictions need to stay in place?"

6.  Why technocracy fails.  "Autocratic systems do lack the type of direct feedback and local empowerment that makes good use of resources, but this is true of all centralized systems, not merely autocratic ones."

7.  Don't Californicate the United States.

8.  We live in a web of social conventions.  (Deconstruct them at your peril.)

9.  Let not your heart be troubled.  "Once this new (progressive) approach to policy begins to fail—as all policies eventually do, even successful ones—the pendulum will swing back to those who emphasize the importance of opportunity cost and incentives."

10.  Bet on emergence.  "[L]ife is going to resume whether the ruling class wants it to or not."

11.  We do not consent to surrendering our liberties. "The willing surrender of fundamental freedoms by millions of people was perhaps one of the most remarkable occurrences in an extraordinary year."

A FALLEN WARRIOR.

For years, we have followed the battles of John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams, who has called attention to the follies of virtue signalling among Marquette's administration, gotten himself in trouble for speaking his mind, with latter-day inquisitors offering him the opportunity to recant, or be excommunicated, and he's long been a thorn in the side of the careerists in charge of that basketball school, as well as occasionally linking to our stuff.

Marquette announces his passing. with his "The Logic of Social Inquiry: The Kennedy Assassination" still in progress.  Right Wisconsin's James Wigderson offers recollections.

What we’ll remember most about McAdams during this fight is how Marquette University blocked him from the classroom, his students, and his office. Banned from campus, McAdams wasn’t able to continue his scholarly work. His one desire was to return to the classroom and teach students again. Over and over again, McAdams would emphasize his desire to return to the students.

Even before the blog post controversy, McAdams was not a favorite of the Marquette Administration. His blog was named after the former nickname for the school’s athletic teams, The Warriors. The blog name was a poke at the political correctness of Marquette which had decided to abandon the name because of fears of upsetting Native Americans.

McAdams kept up the blog, even during his fight with Marquette over his employment.

RIP.

A HIGH-END HIGHER ED COMMODITY IS STILL A COMMODITY.

Texas historian Steven Mintz has thoughts about David Kirp's recent proposal that the Ivies clone themselves.  The simplest thing to do might be for his own University of Texas, which has a few academic chops to go with their dislike of Texas A&M, to implement some of his suggestions.  "Instead of intensifying higher education’s stratification, let’s consider lifting up all nonprofit institutions. It’s far easier to elevate an existing institution than to construct a wholly new one -- unless one can count on substantial contributions from a foreign government." It's something he, and his colleagues, could do, whether at lunch, or in department meetings, or in the shared governance committees, that is, if the administrators even pay attention to shared governance. "Those of us fortunate to teach at the more selective, better-resourced institutions have a moral duty to look beyond our 40 acres and serve those who aren’t so lucky. Our universities benefit extraordinarily from government support. It’s time to give back."

The state flagship institutions could start by setting an example.  If, as he (correctly) notes, "Talented faculty are now omnipresent across the higher educational landscape," isn't there a way to offer a value proposition that would recruit strong faculty and talented students?  "The institution would not have to lower its standards, because the best and brightest would queue for admission. Professors with glittering résumés would jump at the opportunity to teach there."  And the Spielberg effect, dear reader, is still there.  If only the Texases and Wisconsins and the like can instill an ethos in students and faculty of looking the Ivies in the eye and telling them to go to hell.  "Buy a prestige degree, maybe you're good enough; or maybe you're no better than the person who got the less well-regarded degree, apart from having paid more to find out."

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed, whose younger kid just got an invitation to apply from Harvard (color her skeptical) has related thoughts.

The easiest way to prove me wrong would be for exclusive schools to expand their capacity significantly and take far more qualified applicants. That way, they could spread their excellence around; only their relative exclusivity would suffer. In the U.S., that generally has not been happening. (Rice University is an apparent exception. [Sheer serendipity -- Ed.]) Instead, acceptance rates have hit all-time lows this year. As the father of a 16-year-old daughter for whom the college admissions process is scary and real, I can attest that the applicant’s-eye view [that Harvard are gundecking their rejection rates to appear more selective] is very much what I conveyed last week.

Note, I use the expression "buying and selling" without apology.  Professor Mintz might bridle. "Exclusivity is part of these institutions’ appeal and self-image; expanding a luxury brand risks reducing it to a commodity."  As does positioning a previously ordinary brand as luxury.  Sometimes that works, consider high-end Volkswagens.  Sometimes that doesn't, consider how Miller went from "the champagne of bottled beers" to Miller Time.  But it's a commodity all the same.  Yes, there's a vulgar Marxist use of the term as a pejorative, but any good or service produced for the purpose of exchange is a commodity.  It doesn't matter whether you picked up that notion from the opening chapters of Capital or from a grounding in UCLA price theory.

IT IS BETTER TO HOLD THE CLIPBOARD IN GREEN BAY THAN TO START IN CHICAGO.

The late Zeke Bratkowski, who won a ring with the Bears, won three more as backup (which in those days could mean emergency replacement) to Bart Starr.

The very much alive Jim McMahon, who won a ring with the Bears, won another as backup to Brett Favre.  Despite once being handled rather roughly by Charles Martin, he had this to say about the ongoing quarterback controversy in Chicago.  "Packers are the best organization I played for, Bears are where QBs go to die."  He also noted that the Bears emphasized defense and the running game, which might have crowded out any effort to develop quarterbacks.  Perhaps if they worked on that dimension of their team, the Bears would suck less, and that might help the Packers.

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF.

Another week, another seemingly mundane police investigation goes wrong, and again the punditry retreat to their predictable quarters.

Scott McKay notes that the absence of the success sequence early in life sets young men up for trouble.

Daunte Wright dropped out of high school, then fathered a child out of wedlock he couldn’t support with minimum-wage jobs and petty drug dealing. He had borrowed $50 from his parents to take his car to a car wash and had his girlfriend in the car with him, with expired license tags. He was stopped by the police, resisted arrest, and then attempted to drive away — which raised the likelihood that he would expose his girlfriend to bodily harm. She was apparently injured when, as he bled out following being shot by Officer Potter, he crashed the car attempting a getaway.

In other words, this is someone who chose to be a penny-ante John Dillinger. He ended up with the full ante.

It's possible that there's a lot more law enforcement activity, and a lot more by way of the petty stuff that goes on in the more distressed neighborhoods, but Mr McKay isn't done.

Great kids don’t fight with and then flee the cops. Great kids don’t bring the police around because they’re waving guns. Great kids aren’t arrested for aggravated robbery or for dealing drugs.

Or, in the community Daunte Wright came from, maybe they do. Maybe that’s great.

If so, that’s a lot bigger problem than the incompetence of the politicians and police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

But that isn’t something you’ll hear much about, is it?

You aren’t even allowed to talk about the fact that this 20-year-old kid had already messed up his life and may have been well on his way to becoming a career criminal. Daunte Wright had perpetuated the cycle of out-of-wedlock childbirth, academic failure, the inability to learn and deploy a marketable skill, and escalating criminal behavior that so horrifically afflicts the black community in this country.

If Daunte Wright’s life was “great” and not substandard, then we will never be rid of these tragedies. And they’re all fundamentally the same — career criminal on the fringe of society, a failure in life, involved in drugs (if not high at the time; we’ll know later what the toxicology report shows), likely faced with prolonged jail time upon arrest and resisting arrest.

How do you prevent deaths like Daunte Wright’s? You try to prevent young men from living lives like Daunte Wright’s.

But you aren’t allowed to say that.

I wonder if he'd be able to engage in a civil conversation with a local diversity officer.

Vernese Edghill-Walden, chief diversity officer for Northern Illinois University, said she doesn’t think incidents like what happened to Daunte Wright or George Floyd are anything new and are just becoming more visible.

“The world has seen that institutional racism exists, that it is not something that people of color made up and that it happens every day,” Edghill-Walden said.

I'm not sure of the chain of causation by which enforcement of licensure or counterfeiting or shoplifting laws in distressed neighborhoods becomes institutional racism, but that's where we are.

Corrine Wickens, a literacy professor at Northern Illinois University and DeKalb resident, said she is regularly asked whether DeKalb is safe.

Wickens said people usually ask the question after seeing safety bulletins about gunshots in the 800 block of Ridge Drive in the city. She said she wonders if it’s a messaging problem from the university, that it could be a dichotomy of Black drivers afraid of getting pulled over by police in the area, and an outside group which generalizes the area as being unsafe. She said she thinks it could be like predominantly white folks considering employment in the area but deterred from public safety alerts creating a reputation for the area.

The neighborhood the professor refers to is a cluster of apartment complexes and fraternity houses, and it might be where the Section 8 housing is.  It's a different neighborhood than the faculty ghetto closer to the university.  So it goes with zoning codes.

Edghill-Walden said crime will happen where there is poverty, food insecurity and unemployment. She said one of the purposes of the DeKalb Area Belonging Council, a community group expected to be created in the next month, is to help people understand it’s not a problem exclusive to DeKalb.

Edghill-Walden said she has found as an African-American woman in the community that crime is racialized, meaning residents sometimes associate crime or crime-prone areas to race.

“There’s crime in Sycamore,” Edghill-Walden said. “There’s crime everywhere. But when we racialize it and assume that it only happens in one community, it’s a problem. So an active solution would be that not only people of color but, more importantly, our white allies help to minimize that perception. So part of that is the work that we all have to do in helping our neighbors understand that.”

Alexander, who also lives in the 800 block of Ridge Drive in the Annie Glidden North neighborhood, said it was “disheartening” to hear people still generalize the area as unsafe without considering why the area is distressed.

“As somebody that’s very prominently in the 800 block, I see people at their best and their worst,” Alexander said. “I’ve gotten involved in several confrontations and I’ve stopped them. ... There was an incident of two people fighting with weapons and I stopped them from fighting. ... So knowing that a lot of the reasons that there’s so much anger is literally due to food insecurity, it’s due to having terrible landlords, to unsafe conditions. I mean, I know that I’m able to empathize with them on a way that other people aren’t necessarily able to do so. So hearing everything that I’ve heard today is a little jarring, to say the least.”

That strikes me as a research opportunity for somebody.  How often do arrests for what look like minor offenses in distressed communities with other population mixes turn sour?  Or might there be more aggressive policing in some communities than others, and is that pattern one that can be broken down on the basis of race or ethnicity?

Might be interesting to see, for instance, Mr McKay to do such reporting, perhaps rather than writing an apology when he's accused of blaming the victim (a phrase that, I submit, a lot of people throw around despite never having read the eponymous book.)