A KINDER, GENTLER BAMLAG.

The relief line for the Trans-Siberian Railway runs north of Lake Baikal, further out of range of Chinese artillery.  The railroad took a long time from conception to completion, and now heavy maintenance is necessary.  Apparently, there's a shortage of construction labor in Siberia.  "Amid labor shortages Russian government officials have discussed plans to use prison labor for major construction projects but they insist there are no plans to revive the Stalin-era Gulag practice."

Tsar Vladimir's ministers are also "considering whether to mobilise convicts to clean up pollution in the Arctic."

INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES BECAUSE THE INCENTIVES ARE TO BUILD UNSUSTAINABLE PROJECTS.

That's been a Cold Spring Shops argument, probably informed by reading a lot of Strong Towns stuff, for the past few years.  It's also an argument that Our Political Masters seem bent on ignoring.  It's not just the subsidizing of car ownership, particularly in the form of taxpayer supported "free" parking and the roads that move the commuters around, either.  Although National Review's Dominic Pino has a few Passenger Rail projects in mind in his objection to the current Federal shopping lists, he's on point with a general principle: "When the federal government is just throwing money at the states for projects they don’t really need, there’s not going to be any urgency to spend the money in a way that benefits taxpayers."

There, dear reader, is the first reason the infrastructure crumbles.  The usual complaint is that Members of Congress and state and local politicians love the photo-ops when the new projects get started, but nobody is interested in helping turn on the maintenance machines.  The deeper problem, as we shall see, is that the initial grants don't bring in train the resources to maintain the projects, whether those resources come from subsequent operating support or the farebox or toll booth.  It's not, as National Review contributors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox suggest, simply that the Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations put money up for inclusive infrastructure, while the current Democrat plans are giveaways to the cities. "The New Deal, whatever one thinks of it, was about improving the material quality of life for most Americans, such as by spreading the benefits of homeownership to an ever-broader part of the population. In contrast, the Biden plan focuses on permanent redistribution through ever more entitlements and dependency — something Roosevelt opposed. It is likely to reduce our competitiveness by boosting energy and regulatory costs as well as taxes."  Those greenbelt communities with their tract houses, and the Levittowns that followed, relied on public provision of water mains, sanitary and storm sewers, and roads that were never placed on a financially sound basis, and the property tax revolts that began in the late 1970s were the first symptom of unsoundness.

THE WHALE PUT JONAH DOWN THE HATCH.

But coughed him up, because he scratched.  "[T]he whale swam to the surface to spew him out."

THANKS, TAXPAYERS.

The latest Medicare statement of outpatient claims includes some interesting stuff.  A dose of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine (billing code 91301) is a service not approved by Medicare, although the facility bills Medicare for $0.01 per stick.  The administration of the shots is a separate service, the first dose has billing code 0011A, and the facility charges $125, out of which Medicare pays $15.95.  The second dose has a separate billing code, 0012A, but Medicare pays $26.23 out of that $125.  All of that might come out of my pocket anyway, as Irma A says I'm doing pretty well in retirement.

Where, though, is the market test that comes up with that $125 or that actuarial calculation, or whatever, that reimburses the first dose at $15.95 and the second at $26.23?

THE LATTER DAY TRACKLESS TROLLEY.

Milwaukee will be getting a new bus rapid transit line.

The Federal Transit Administration is supposed to pick up most of the tab for the project.

[The transit authority] said in a statement Thursday that riders will be able to enter the buses through either the front or back entrances due to wider aisles and level boarding.

The buses are able to operate 247 miles on a single charge. During the winter months, diesel-powered heaters will be installed to keep the passenger department comfortable.

I wonder if there will be Hamburg-style recharging installations at the ends of the line, where the buses lay over.

Work on those reserved lanes and safety islands is now under way.

Expected to be operational by October of 2022, battery-powered electric buses will connect Milwaukee's lakefront, Marquette University, Milwaukee's near west side, Wauwatosa, Froedtert, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Children's Wisconsin. It will also link people to areas like Fiserv Forum, the Art Museum, American Family Field, and Milwaukee County Zoo.

Does anyone else have memories of the Wells-Wauwatosa car line of long ago?  The last remnants of that line, from near Cathedral Square to Hoyt Park in Wauwatosa and Allis-Chalmers in West Allis, with direct access to County Stadium, quit running in March 1958.

One reason the Wells cars kept running as long as they did was Milwaukee's city engineers wondered about converting the Wells Street streetcar-only viaduct to a busway.

Wells Street Viaduct postcard courtesy
Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society.

That conversion proved not to make sense, and city officials of the era thought extra-fare "Freeway Flyer" buses running on the new expressways to park and ride lots at the outer parts of the county were the way to go.  Up to a point, but not so much, and even in Milwaukee there are a lot of days when the expressway isn't expressing.

The new trackless trolleys will use a reservation on the Wisconsin Avenue viaduct just to the south of Wells.  Whether road-ragey motorists on the Avenue will put up with their stroad being put on a road diet for the use by buses that city officials envision as enhancing service to transit-dependent populations remains to be seen.

As part of the lead-up to the project commencing, one guest on that Milwaukee radio station indulged in some wishes for a light rail service from the Summerfest grounds past the baseball stadium and the fairgrounds, and on to Waukesha.  Um, there's an expressway where that used to be.

IS THERE AN AGGREGATION PROBLEM IN GOVERNANCE?

A Real Clear Public Affairs essay by Hillsdale political philosopher Ronald J. Pestritto concludes with an observation about limited government, "[R]ights-based theories of government limit the state’s sphere of action, thus limiting the ability of the people to implement their collective will and consequently representing something less than a real democracy."  You know, dear reader, where I'm going to go with this.  The key is in Mr Pestritto's characterization of Wilsonian-style political thought, a few paragraphs earlier.  "While early American conceptions of national government had carefully cir­cumscribed its power due to the perceived threat to individual liberties, progressives argued that history had brought about an improvement in the human condition, such that the will of the people was no longer in danger of becoming factious."  As. If.  Now we have the disciples of the Church of Intersectionality, for whom factiousness is a feature, and improvements in the human condition require the rooting out of wrongthink.

Now might be a particularly bad time for people to equate a national policy with a "collective will."

Americans are not only further divided by the performative policies of cynical officials, they're made poorer by them. Lockdowns imposed by officials who often ignored their own rules crippled businesses, economists point out. And the government "stimulus" spending sold as a replacement for normal economic activity threatens to hobble Americans for years to come.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that, with contradictory and manipulative dictates to the public, officialdom shed its credibility in wholesale lots. Public figures tailored policies and messages with seemingly less regard for the evidence than for herding the population into desired behavior. It's unlikely they'll command sufficient good will to pull such stunts again anytime soon.

Thus, now is a particularly good time to object to one-size-fits-all policies pushed through by bare majorities in Washington, such as standard election rules.

Democrats aren't mad because they know that support for their agenda will build over time — they are mad because they know that it won't, and absent [West Virginia senator Joe] Manchin and other recalcitrant Senate Democrats getting on board right away, they will miss their tiny window to get their way through brute legislative force prior to losing one or both chambers of Congress.

They have convinced themselves that GOP state legislatures are destroying democracy with new voting laws rolling back pandemic-driven innovations and tightening up security, a fevered myth that also won't stand the test of time.

As for HR1, it is a constitutionally dubious monstrosity that would trample on state voting laws in an enormous step toward the federalization of American elections. Machin was right to say in his op-Ed that it is telling that not one Republican, whether Susan Collins or Mitt Romney, is supporting this partisan power grab.

That's not how some academicians, not all of whom are court intellectuals for the Democrats, see it.

State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

Those state legislatures are acting as agents for their constituents. Are none of the complaints of their constituents valid, because a few academicians take some Democrat talking points as truth, rather than Democrats telling their truth?  Think about how these Concerned Types (whenever you see "concern" or its variants, dear reader, expect thinly veiled "We want to order you about because we're so much smarter than you are") call for those national standards.  "The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections."  Be careful what you ask for: once there are federal standards, it is easy enough for a subsequent Congress, with a different governing majority, to determine that tighter voter identification standards or more careful vetting of driving license applications accompanying simultaneous voter registration or more comprehensive review of voting rolls or signature verification are in the National Interest.  Different governing majority, different aggregation problem.  Here's Rich Lowry.

So long as they aren't actually disenfranchising people (which no one is), states should be able to adopt the mix of voting rules that their democratically elected officeholders deem appropriate and that suit their particular political cultures.

If the goal is to increase confidence in the electoral system, by the way, having Congress by the slimmest of partisan majorities make it harder for states to maintain clean, up-to-date voter rolls (as H.R. 1 does) at the same time it wipes out ID requirements is emphatically not the way to do it.

Precisely because that slim Congressional margin implies and is impled by an aggregation problem that works like this:  if, as some critics of pure democracy suggest, three wolves and two sheep voting on menus is consistent with pure democracy, aren't some safeguards on the individual liberties of sheep and of wolves still useful?  Don't the boffins see this? "Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections."  Maybe they ought think about how best devolve powers, so that people don't get herded about as if they were sheep, no matter what the Congressional majorities look like?

I want to distinguish that aggregation problem, which I suspect people who have thought about voting have worked on, from a separate problem, which is that neither major party seems interested in expanding its appeal.  That's for a different post.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Another shortish list of posts whose contents can be summarized in a pithy way.

1.  The argumentam ad Donohue adds hectoring or condescension. "Because these liberals have no practice arguing, they very often get flustered by opposition and employ a variety of dumb tactics to rule the argument itself out of bounds. Most common are the straw-man argument ('Oh, so, you think all the poor people should just die?') and the ad hominem argument ('I won’t listen to a lecture from a racist troglodyte like you.')."  The best response, dear reader, might be something like "sophomoric false dilemma."  Know them by their fruits. "Democrats govern solely by emotion, and we are seeing the disastrous effects of that writ large right now."

2.  Reality bats last.  [Middle school sexual license becomes] "the start of a cruel journey we set women up for: turn their focus to career and sexual autonomy, only for them to realize too late in life that they actually wanted to have children – and actual, fruitful love." It's an old message, maybe reality is urging the traditionalists to rethink their position?

3.  You're no Phil Donahue.  "[T]hese people are killjoys at the parties. Who would want to speak with someone who is in constant misery about being…an American?"

4.  Marxism is the opiate of the woke.  "Bearded prophet of a false religion," indeed.

5.  Bring the smack, Matt Taibbi.  "From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of 'noble lies' like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic mainstream isn’t just elitist and authoritarian, it’s almost laughably off-putting."  They never learned how not to be stupid about being smart, did they?

6.  Circumlocutions fail to have the desired effect.  "Locals, in turn, hear the deliberate cadence of cosmopolitan elites, which often carries no dialect, and find that it lacks character and contains too many words to make a point."

7.  Robby Soave's reminder that science is a process.  "Being pro-science does not mean parroting the talking points of the government's chosen spokesperson. Robust debate and challenge are part of the scientific process."

8.  Worse than a bucket of warm spit?  "Kamala Harris is playing a historic role in 2021: the nation’s first black, Asian, female vice president to serve as a sacrificial lamb."

9.  If you're so smart, do you have to peddle influence to get rich?  "Biden and his party are Mr. Microphone of centralized government and Washington experts."  Who, in addition to making those Georgetown parties boring, generally don't improve things.

10.  Nemesis comes for Hubris.  "For among the things that policy makers don't know and have consistently refused to let themselves learn is how little they know."

11.  At least the alliance with Prussia is not at stake.  "[T]his new controversy will do little to encourage the view that the birth of the Sussexes’ second child will lead to a new era of harmonious relations between Montecito and London."  Marie Antoinette was Maria Theresa's daughter.

12.  An armed society is a polite society.  "Presumably, blue militias know that if they campaigned in rural or even suburban America they would be met by a well-armed citizenry."  Enough so, in fact, that participants in a protest against police brutality will thank the police.

13.  Bizarre, indeed. "Harris' flippant response casts serious doubt on her commitment to her role."

14.  [Federal law enforcement] did not deign to create a photo op for President Trump.

15.  "[Lockdowns] were a ruling-class policy that implicitly foisted the burden of exposure and subsequent immunity on the other."  Exactly as people who have had the ability to avoid the plague have always behaved: staying at home is a privilege.

FINDING THOSE MISSING MARKETS?

Branko Milanovic returns to one of the eternal questions.  "Democracy or dictatorship: which works better?"

When I arrived in the United States, coming from the worker-management world of Titoist Yugoslavia, I was somewhat surprised how Americans took the strongly hierarchical, quasi dictatorial relations in the business world as fully “normal”. I was half expecting that workers would have a say in the choice of their “managers” (actually, for a long time, I could not even figure out who exactly is a “manager”) but of course they did not. The promotions were made by cooption or even direct appointment of lower echelons by the higher echelons. And of course, the management was selected by the owners themselves. So the system was entirely top-down: the top selected the down it liked to have.

Read the post through, and search in vain for any distinction between routine and idiosyncratic transactions.  Shorter version: if the consumers don't buy what the top pushes, the top gets fired.  It doesn't work that way with governments.

Formally speaking, American companies were organized like the Communist Party. In both cases, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht, the leadership selected their employees, or their citizens. In one case the dictatorship was in the social sphere, in another in the work sphere.

Democracy that in the US existed in the social sphere (with lower levels electing their own political “managers”) was replicated in the Titoist Yugoslavia in the workplace with workers electing their own workers councils and those electing directors (except in enterprises that were seen of special importance where the top-down system of Communist Party appointment held).

If I had a survey of political economy course to teach, I could have a lot of fun with that! The leadership might select from among the consumers who gets hired, but the totality of the consumers hires the leadership.  If Mr Milanovic understood that, he might not have written this.

One of them won, another lost. The one that lost, lost because organizing the work sphere according to democratic principles is not efficient. When you do so, an enormous amount of time is spent on negotiating minutest details of work, pay, holidays, sick leave, right to take leave when a family member is not well, payment of overtime, cleaning of bathrooms, supplies of papers etc. etc. Academic departments in the US are what comes closest to labor management as existed in the socialist Yugoslavia. And hardly anyone would argue the academic department are organized in an efficient way. People who in such an organizational context win and become successful are those who are not really interested in working at all, but debating every issue until everybody gets exhausted and gives up. They have the patience to outsit and outlast everybody else in interminable discussions and negotiations. No issue is small enough that they would not discuss it ad nauseam. Obviously, hardly anything ever gets done under such circumstances.

Wouldn't it be simpler to suggest that, where individuals can disagree over the terms of employment, the ordinary higgling and dickering of the labor market determines a lot of that minutiae? On the other hand, that tedium in the academic departments is one part dictatorship of the sociable, one part seeking Platonic perfection in things that can be perfected, whilst neglecting that which cannot.

Meanwhile, the universities are self-destructing, and sooner or later, the technocrats in the political sphere will also come croppers.

This is where more technocratic political capitalism of the Chinese or Singaporean variety comes to mind. What it tells you is that the same efficient and dictatorial way in which the production of cell phones is organized ought to be extended to the political sphere. It argues that the two spheres are essentially the same. In both efficiency is reached by clear goal-directed activities which are technical in nature and which should not be subject to the constant approval by workers or citizens.

If these societies continue to consistently outperform societies where the social sphere is organized in a democratic fashion, there is, I think, little doubt that their appeal will be such that, in a hundred years, it may seem to those who are around so very quaint that people thought that in a complex society decisions should taken by democratic vote. The same as it seems to us today so very quaint to believe that people once thought that a decision about what a company should produce was supposed to be made by the majority vote of shop-floor workers.

The knowledge problems he compares in that final sentence are very different, which renders me dubious of his argument.  In any event, Tieboutian competition, which we ordinarily understand as among small jurisdictions over sometimes small differences in bundles of government services, works on larger scales as well.

DRAFT AND DEVELOP.

In the past two months, Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been forcing the issue of the succession in the course of a holdout over unspecified grievances.  Packer management have a reserve quarterback with playoff experience in camp on a short contract.  In addition, the quarterback the Packers drafted, which might be one of Mr Rodgers's grievances, or not, is getting practice opportunities with the first unit.  "All of a sudden, Rodgers has competition."

HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT ALL THE EXPERTS STINK?

That's Kurt Schlichter, calling attention to the failures of Our Intellectual Betters, and this time, it's a more generalized breach of faith than that afflicting higher education, although the status hierarchy in higher education is also the breeding ground for those failures.

We normals are now expected to defer and submit to the commands of unelected functionaries bossing us around for our own good, though this is only good for those said experts and their fellow travelers in the ruling class. Over about 250 years, America has gone from its leaders being selected on the basis of the divine right of kings to its leaders being selected by on the basis of the divine right of nerds with advanced degrees from Yale.

The Colonel is making a point that Our Intellectual Betters can often dismiss if it's only emanating from the populist right. "There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve."  Thus, they might claim Josh Hammer is simply issuing this week's talking point, which has been a right-populist talking point for at least fifty years, longer if you had read and understood The Road to Serfdom.

American politics is currently in the throes of a populist moment. That populist moment is characterized by widespread distrust of elites and a perceived ever-widening chasm between the ruling class’s prerogatives and the wishes of the American people at large. As we finally begin to emerge from COVID-19, that chasm will only grow wider. The ruling class has finally sullied itself one time too many.

Victory Girl Toni Williams?  "Elites in the United States have proven themselves morally bankrupt and politically corrupt. They hate us and we need to stop listening to them, like, yesterday. Not just the political leaders, but those with top tier educations and letters after their names in every profession."  Just another cheerleader, although you'll note, and we'll refer to, something she found in Manchester's Guardian.  That's an article rated entry 11 in last week's Short Takes, only the emergence of this don't-trust-the-experts all over the internet over the weekend requires elaboration.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,887.

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 1,078,062 infections and 14,485 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,385,489 infections and 25,372 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.   The full reopening of the state, subject to local mask mandates or businesses requesting customers to mask up, remains as scheduled for this Friday, 11 June.  People going about their business more or less normally has been the case everywhere I've gone since Memorial Day weekend.

We'll see about extending these posts after reopening.  Dr. Fauci is getting quite the slagging of late and whether he comes to his senses or not might be moot.  If the political opposition in Illinois cannot capitalize on the corona tyranny, the continued flight of productive people to other states, and the crime in Chicago, they deserve to lose.

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count is approaching twelve million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes around 9,000.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,810.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  The body count is growing faster than the variant count. The details for the past seven months are on page 2.

THE HOUR OF YOUR LIBERATION IS AT HAND.

Pointe du Hoc, April 2018.

CRITICAL THEORY IS THE CUCKOO IN THE ACADEMIC NEST.

I had originally tagged that for a Friday short take, although a few other columns came to my attention suggesting a reckoning is coming for the alleged credentialed elite.  Andrew Sullivan's elaboration of that provocative title statement continues,

Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth. It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves. If a cis white woman were to make an argument, a Latino trans man can dismiss it for no other reason than that a white cis woman is making it. Thus, identity trumps reason. Thus liberal society dies a little every time that dismissal sticks.

Every time a liberal institution hires or fires someone because of their group identity rather than their individual abilities, it is embracing a principle designed to undermine the liberal part of the institution.

That's the postmodern incarnation of the Critique of Pure Tolerance, in which the original argument that freely debating stuff means people whose intentions are oppressive get a platform takes an even more restrictive form, in which only people who have experienced the intersecting multiple oppressions get a platform to speak to those oppressions.  So much for supposedly educated people understanding the fallacy of hasty generalization.  Mr Sullivan gets that.

And every student who emerges from college who believes that what matters is whether you are on “the right side of history” rather than whether your ideas can be tested by the ruthless light of open debate is a student who does not have the ability to function as a citizen in a liberal society. The ability to respect and live peaceably alongside people with whom you vehemently disagree is a far harder skill than cheering on one of your own. And yet liberal institutions are openly demonstrating that it is precisely this kind of difficult toleration they will not tolerate.

It came to this, dear reader, when the supposedly liberal institutions decided that setting up departments, primarily the so-called area studies departments, specifically for the purpose of cheering on their own.  The idea, though, was that each department would only cheer for its own team.  When gender studies departments sign up for Team Hamas, that's too much for longtime American Association of University Professors prexy Cary Nelson.

Academic freedom protects the right individual faculty have to take aggressive political stands. But departments and programs speak for the institution. A department’s adoption of a controversial political stance has implications for all who work with that department.

The statement in question, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective,” is far from the generic, anodyne calls for decency, sensitivity or basic fairness that university bodies often issue. On the contrary, it uses incendiary rhetoric not just to support the rights of Palestinians but also to condemn Israel by taking sides in the political struggle: “We do not subscribe to a ‘both sides’ rhetoric that erases the military, economic, media, and global power that Israel has over Palestine.” The statement characterizes the current war as part of an ethnic cleansing program that began in 1947, thereby condemning Israel’s whole history. By declaring “we call for the end of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and for the Palestinian right to return to their homes,” they make clear that their attack on “settler colonialism” applies not just to the West Bank but to Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries as well. “This is not a ‘conflict’ that is too ‘controversial and complex’ to assess,” it concludes.

I might somewhere have a missive from the Association about how disciplines whose discourse practice included really tight priors on what constituted sensitivity or scholarship were fine, that as a way of shielding the area studies departments from suggestions that their scholarship was not disinterested.  "The integrity of academic freedom is being undermined from within, with the complicity of the Association, when it's not enabling it."

THERE'S A PROTOTYPE FOR EVERYTHING.

The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has its own "Fifty Years of Amtrak" photo gallery.  It does not include the following Ronald C. Hill photograph, indexed as Hill-11-04-19, which your Superintendent scanned from the latest issue of Railroad Heritage.

That's a Burlington Northern passenger F unit, still in Great Northern paint, leading a pair of recently delivered SDP40F diesels that could be sold off for freight service once Amtrak failed, on an eastbound Empire Builder in Montana.  By the summer of 1973, although some coaching stock had been repainted into Amtrak colors, that train still has the Burlington Northern look about it, which anticipated Amtrak's "Rainbow Era."  I prefer to think of the Rainbow Era as beginning when the coaching stock Amtrak purchased started making its way around the country.  Burlington Northern, by contrast, was only repainting cars that came in for maintenance in the year leading up to Amtrak.

CONTESTING PUBLIC HOLIDAYS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Socialist sectarianism is summer relief.

On May 17, the World Socialist Web Site reported that during the previous week members of the Democratic Socialists of America had used Twitter to post and disseminate statements and memes celebrating the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, the leader of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Fourth International.

As documented by the report, written by Eric London, those involved in these posts and retweets are not politically inexperienced members of the DSA.

Would that all purity tests were so trivial.  There are purity tests with way more destructive consequences abroad.  There is a reckoning coming.  More to come next week.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Here is a shortish list of posts whose content could be summarized in a pithy way.

1.  The Democrat party in Congress is a Marxist cult; the Republicans are a college fraternity.

2.  "Expert consensus was somewhat illusory."

3.  Likely true, but up to a point. "[T]his culture war battle we're having now isn't fundamentally about whether people are really trans but about when and how to recognize it."  There's more than one way to interpret "it's just a phase."

4.  Limiting government limits rent-seeking.  "[C]onservatives who still believe in the idea of free markets and limited government will have to have a response to the growing anti-corporate movement on the right, because it isn’t going away."

5.  The next cold war: "China lied, people died, planet-wide."

6.  The warring villages? "[T]he tribalist collectivism inherent in contemporary progressives' obsession with identity politics will result in less rather than more altruism in the United States."

7.  The work of political economy is never done.  "Time and time again, [vice president^* Kamala] Harris’s evidence that we need bigger government is pointing to the problems created by… big government."

8.  The plural of anecdote is "investigative journalism."  "It’s a typical media practice: offer a story-driven account that ignores or obscures the statistical reality underneath, and call it 'news.'"

9.  Genealogists quibble by nature.  One can’t simply make stuff up because it suits a narrative.  The extension to other areas of human endeavour are straightforward.

10.  Traffic jams are what keep motorists alive.  "[T]he only thing keeping us from crashing into each other was traffic jams themselves."

11.  Let the Credentialed Experts tremble!  "Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger."  Plus, "Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests."

12.  Make Illinois safe for Eric Zorn?  "I look around our deeply polarized country, see how high the stakes are in the fight for the future and how important it is for the Democrats to hold the line where they can."  Both major parties seem more interested in being more pure for the base than in expanding their appeal.  Is there a better case for limiting government?

13.  Our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success.  The column dropped before those Fauci electronic mail messages became public.

14.  Atlanta residents "could at least stop backing liberal politicians who fail to take measures to curtail crime."

15.  Emergence will find a way.  "Ultimately, no matter how devoted you are to centrally planning your bucolic village, there are just too many variables."

16.  Marketmaking wisdom from Michael Munger.  "[M]iddlemen profit by making other people better off."  Yup.  (So what if it's an old post?  No matter how many times I tell youse guys, there's always some louse messes it up!)

PUBLIC HOLIDAYS HAVE CONTESTED MEANINGS.

It is fitting and proper in a constitutional republic that we do so.  Therefore, I'm not going to get too worked up over Campus Reform trolling collegians with a petition to abolish Memorial Day.  "One man condemned Memorial Day as a celebration of American Imperialism before even having seen the petition."  The interlocutor was the expected scruffy hippie type.  The intellectual argument might have purchase in other sorts of intellectual circles, whether of the skeptical-of-nation-building school or the Mind Your Own Business school, which might also sail under the banner of America First.  No imperialism, or no nation building, or no overseas interventions for whatever reason, fewer bodies coming home on transport aircraft.  Indeed, in DeKalb, the local interfaith advocates for peace and justice (if your understanding of those words is consistent with George Orwell's, you've pegged them) carry photographs of the recent war dead in the Memorial Day parade.  It is fitting and proper that they do so.

It's more troubling that people, possibly including the students Campus Reform found, don't understand the meaning of the day.  "But what is even more troubling is the fact that several students that were interviewed acknowledged that they were not aware of why America celebrate the holiday in the first place. However, some did understand that the holiday was intended to honor those who gave their lives for the United States and still believed that the country should do away with Memorial Day."

In part, the ignorance stems from the existence of two public holidays with similar and overlapping purposes.  DeKalb restored the morning ceremony, without the parade, the school bands, the interfaith portrait chain, and with socially distanced seating.  The observation traditionally makes use of a joint task force, which is to say all the local veterans' organizations, e.g. American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and for all I know there are still a few members of the Societe 40 et 8. 

Strictly speaking, Memorial Day began, after the Civil War, as Decoration Day, which was May 30, no matter which day of the week that fell upon, and it became a tradition for people to decorate the graves of their ancestors as well as the Civil War dead.  Memorial Day was codified ... Washington standardization again, as the final Monday of May, and thus the beginning-of-summer long weekend that trips up politician and entertainer alike took its current form.  In November, what we currently understand as Veterans Day (it's an adjective, not a possessive) emerged out of Armistice Day, and it retains its November 11 date honoring the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the War to End All Wars ended.  In the British Commonwealth, that day is currently Remembrance Day, there being an encore to that War to End All Wars, and there's more of the tribute to the dead in that nomenclature, thus their Remembrance Day has more of a Memorial Day atmosphere to it.

An observer, though, might, upon observing the same sort of joint task force providing the honor guard, the bugler, the three volleys both in May and in November, perceive a similar purpose to either day, and wonder, why have both?  It's also difficult to distinguish "war dead" from "veteran" in identifying who to memorialize, what with people returning to civilian life after being exposed to nuclear weapon tests, or Agent Orange, or the smoke from those weapons dumps set afire in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the nightmares that recur no matter how pleasant the home life or the day job might be.  Thus more than a little advocacy for veterans' benefits might find its way into the Memorial Day speechifying.

We might, however, add to Red State's Jeff Charles's worries about collegians not being aware of the origins of the holidays, the possibility that the organizers of and attendees at Memorial Day events also are reinforcing their prior beliefs, and doing some polarizing of their own.  On Monday, one of the speakers in DeKalb, and then Milwaukee Brewer broadcaster and Army veteran Bob Uecker, both recited the "It is the veteran" (it also appears as Charles Province's  "It is the Soldier") including the provocative "It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer, Who has given us freedom to protest."

In our citizens' republic, yes, by fighting soldiers in the service of other governments, or, more recently, non-state actors, who would like to abridge those First Amendment rights.

How many times must I tell you, dear reader, that emergence is messy?

PUBLIC SPENDING IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Last week, we picked up the first round of Cato's Neal McCluskey questioning the use of public money for universities, and Inside Higher Ed's Matt "Dean Dad" Reed offering a qualified defense of that use.

There's a second round, which isn't likely to change many minds.  I'm not sure what Mr McCluskey is advocating for (there's a lot of libertarian point-scoring going on, but no simple recommendation) although Mr Reed seems to interpret it as "taxpayer funding isn't desirable."

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY GOES ON A ROAD DIET.

Apparently keeping federal money coming for the upkeep of state highways, which I understand is one reason DeKalb's main street remains a truck route, is still preferable to providing a truck bypass all the way around town.  As there are a lot of warehouses served only by trucks on the south side, that's where a lot of the traffic goes anyway.  Facebook's new data center probably will make do without a lot of truck or track connections.  "[City engineer Zac] Gill said the Lincoln Highway lane reconfiguration project – which includes making Lincoln Highway a three-lane road with a center turn lane instead of the current four lanes in those four blocks in the downtown area – prompted the need for the parallel bike routes."  I'm not sure "slow the trucks" is really a design feature, as the somewhat maltimed traffic lights through downtown give the gear-jammers a major workout starting and stopping.  "'The project will slow truck traffic on the downtown’s main thoroughfare, making the downtown more pedestrian friendly while providing businesses with more sidewalk space for sales and outdoor dining,' city officials wrote in the post."

The crosstown bike trail will almost cross town, southwest to northeast.  The plan features a new First Street bridge long enough to bridge both the Kishwaukee River and a riverside bike path; there's still a proper crossing to be made at Hillcrest.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,810

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 1,068,473 infections and 14,413 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,382,186 infections and 25,223 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.   Illinois is currently in the bridge phase, with an expected transition to a modified full reopening in mid-June, and most of the ukases remain in effect to the end of May.  A number of businesses are publicly changing their mask requirements, we'll see whether the ukases will end with gubernatorial assent, or vanish by common consent.  More people are opting not to bother with the masks in businesses that only recommend their use.  As tourist summer begins, hospital utilization rates are down, although capacity might be tight in a few regions.  It sure looked like normal life over the weekend.

Meanwhile, Sweden's economic recovery looks promising.

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 ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will. 

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count is over eleven million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes just over 8,200.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,645.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  The body count is growing faster than the variant count. The details for the past six months are on page 2.