THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIESEL SWITCHER.

We can see the outlines of Big Boy in the earliest steam locomotives.  By the time oil-electric and diesel-electric locomotives appeared on the scene, the straight electric locomotive was established, and the boxcab design seemed like a more logical platform to house the prime mover, generator, and switch gear.

To the best of my knowledge, the first hint of the end-cab diesel switcher was in the form of Westinghouse's 1929 "visibility cab."  Eleven such units were built, between 1929 and 1937, and I am aware of two in preservation.  One is at Illinois Railway Museum, and the narrative reveals a few fits and starts, including the placement of the cab.  That diesel is a project, and, like everything else in railway preservation, it takes donor money and volunteer elbow grease to at least make it presentable, let alone operable.

Another is at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum near Washington, Pennsylvania, and that one has several stories.

Its work assignment was at Armco's Butler Works, the Illinois example having worked at a different Armco property, and the steelmaker refurbished the diesel before shipping it to the museum.  The diesel cannot venture too far, as the museums's trolleys use the Pennsylvania broad gauge (something done at the behest of, take your pick, the existing steam railroads wanting to preclude interchange with those upstart trolley lines, or the residents of the cities not wanting interchange freight service on their streets) while the diesel is the standard U.S. railroad gauge, useful for moving those gondolas of scrap and boxcars of refractory brick that came in from throughout the railroad system around the plant.

Because the diesel works, it can be used, and I understand during a recent power outage, it was used, as the backup generator for the trolley lines.  You couldn't do that at Union with the five car North Shore train and the four car Roarin' Elgin wood train out on the lines, but one Pennsylvania trolley at a time is not a problem.

The museum is worth a look (weekends only) if you're in the Pittsburgh area.  Easy on or off of Interstate 79 near the Interstate 70 connection.  The museum does offer a parking lot shuttle during the Washington County Fair.  A center-entrance Philadelphia and West Chester Car can haul a lot of fair goers.

These post-War St. Louis streamlined cars, which might have been the last interurban cars built until 1982, and, although they look like PCC streetcars from the folding doors to the windshields, they're not streetcars.

The museum has all of its rolling stock under roof, and a well-equipped maintenance shop.

There are two of the center-entrance cars, one of which is still a long way from ready for public use, and two of the streamlined interurbans, at least one of which will be ready for the Fair crowds.  The museum has ambitious plans for a visitor center and urban scene (yes, much like the Illinois project) and a larger park-and-ride lot for Fair weekend.  Perhaps there will be two-car trains, which was the practice in Philadelphia back in the day, time, elbow grease, and money permitting.

There's still summer to go.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

The final word, "system," is overworked.  We can speak of a system as something put together by a person or persons, such as the New York Central System of railroads, or the University of Wisconsin System.  We also use the term to describe emergent and self-organized human (sometimes natural) interaction, most typically around here as a "complex adaptive system," which the New York Central System was not because one word, "railroad" is almost sufficient by itself to describe it; and we can speak of those science-project-in-a-Mason-jar things as an "ecosystem."  That self-organizing capacity is what makes market economies impossible to describe as any sort of "-ism," which suggests some sort of governing ideology.  About the best the magnates of industry, including the Vanderbilts or Morgans, can do, is tame the complexity in their part of the world.

None of which stops good old C. J. Polychroniou, who is vying for the title of Most Mockable Common Dreams Contributor.

We live in a period of great global complexity, confusion and uncertainty. We are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our capability to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a political and economic order based on stability, justice and sustainability. Indeed, the contemporary world is fraught with perils and challenges that will test severely humanity’s ability to maintain a steady course towards anything resembling a civilized life.

The word salad goes on, with a similar degree of lucidity, for some time.  I think he wants the old-time religion back, rather than the vulgar culture studies that isn't even really Marxist.

Darkening times, strangely enough, have never favored the Left. And today’s Left appears preoccupied with identity politics and culture, while unified ideological gestalts guiding social and political action towards the building of a new socio-economic social order are sorely missing. What we may see then emerge in the years ahead is an even harsher and more authoritarian form of capitalism.

Unfortunately, he doesn't even understand why "late capitalism" is such a stupid trope.

Of course, capitalism itself is a highly irrational system for meeting human needs and wants; yet it’s been around for more than 500 years and predictions of a post-capitalist future knocking on our door should be taken with a grain of salt. Capitalism has demonstrated an uncanny ability to evolve, and can easily co-exist with different types of regimes, ranging from social-democracy to dictatorship.  But now it is ruining the Earth, and unless we can tame this irrational economic system and, above all else, do away with its addiction to fossil fuels, the collapse of civilized social order is a near certainty. Then the floodgates of barbarism will be wide open.

Gosh, maybe a form of social interaction (not an ideology, not a system) might have that sort of staying power because it confers evolutionary advantages on its adopters.  Let me educate you, dear reader.

You'd also think that in five hundred years, methods of human interaction that conferred evolutionary advantage on their adopters would have emerged precisely where that existing commercial order was allocating resources least rationally.  Instead you get the likes of C. J. Polychroniou or Robert Reich tapping out their resentment of the existing commercial order on their smart 'phones and hoping their indignation is sufficient to improve the lot of the toiling massses.

THE AMWAY MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

Reality dawns on Rebecca Gordon.  "Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme?"

Yes, yes, it is, and we told you so a long time ago.  (So long ago, in fact, that the links have expired at that old post.)  It wasn't just a pyramid scheme at the lower levels of the academic food chain, even then.

It's interesting, though, how she won't see the root causes of the credential creep she bemoans.

In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don't have a bachelor's degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through résumés for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they'll hire people who don't have the skills they actually need, but that they're eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won't be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.

In part, though, that's an unintended consequence of Griggs v. Duke Power, which held employer-specific aptitude tests to be discriminatory, although what happened next was not amusing.  "I suspect Griggs v. Duke Power gets in the way of such testing, although the evolution of credentialing as a legal screening device that deteriorates into an aptitude test because of the failure of the credentialing institutions to do their work properly is funny."  In the case of those communities of color, it might be failures of their high schools to prepare their students for college, and those failures might be a consequence of fretting over disparate suspensions of the disengaged and disruptive students.

You won't be surprised to learn, dear reader, that a Common Dreams contributor will not go there.

IT'S OVER WHEN WE SAY IT'S OVER.

At the beginning of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, we didn't know how contagious or how deadly the virus was, and that created the canonical negative nonpecuniary externality.  "This notion of large external costs to individual behavior is what economists call an externality. And the spread of COVID-19 presented policymakers with a textbook example of an externality, which is typically viewed as just cause for some degree of government intervention." In the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm, it is, but it takes both an infected person and a healthy person interacting to pass the bug along.  That, recall, was the logic of everybody staying home as much as possible early on, if you're healthy and you don't get exposed, perhaps enough chains of transmission get broken that the immune systems of the early sick shut the virus down.

Given the dense interconnectedness of modern society, uncertainty about who was vulnerable, the subsequent difficulties of protecting them in reality, and the perceived benefits of solidarity from collective action, policymakers ultimately decided that society-wide mitigation policies were better here. All of us therefore faced measures being imposed by the state to mitigate the externality risk, including requirements for indoor mask wearing.

The presumptive “right” that underpinned previous mask mandates, then, was essentially that “individuals should have the right to not have you breathing near them unmasked when indoors.” It was a variant of “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins” with droplets or aerosols from your nose or mouth replacing the hand — albeit recognizing that masks reduced, but didn’t eliminate the risks of transmission given the virus was airborne.

When sufficiently many people have acquired natural or vaccinated immunity, that calculus changes.

Simply put, just about every adult in America who wants a COVID-19 vaccine can get one. Once they do, they have a near-zero percent chance of facing serious illness or death from the virus. So, thanks to these miraculous vaccines, there’s barely any externality still associated with the spread of COVID-19.

Yes, 42 percent of the population has still not received the COVID-19 vaccine, and thus could still get ill or even die from the virus. Yet, at this point, that’s a cost-benefit analysis they made for themselves. If unvaccinated people continue to get sick and pass away from the disease, that’s tragic, but it’s no one’s fault but their own.

There is no justification for restricting the liberty of vaccinated people in order to protect people who have willingly chosen to remain unvaccinated. There’s no longer any significant externality associated with my decision, as a fully vaccinated individual, to enter a restaurant without wearing a mask. Anyone who might be adversely affected by my decision has knowingly and willfully chosen to impose that risk on himself by forgoing vaccination and entering the restaurant.

Thus, the blanket mitigations of a year ago no longer make sense. "Crucially, as more people become vaccinated, the benefit-cost ratio of these mandates falls and the case for them becomes ever weaker." The elaboration follows.

In non-economic speak: if people still want to roam unvaccinated, they should bear the elevated risk, and not expect others to be coerced into making sacrifices to (primarily) keep them safe.

In other words, after setting aside a period of time to allow people to get the vaccines, we should take the non-vaccinated folks’ decision not to be pricked as a willing acceptance to personally front up the infection dangers. Many will self-evidently change their minds if they see delta cases in their area surge. But burdening everyone in a territory with government-enforced mask wearing or even lockdowns again (as Krugman advocates) is unjustifiable when the vast majority of the benefits will go to those actively forgoing the most effective means of alleviating the virus’s effects.

Accepting this means acknowledging that this principle may result in more illness and death. In many areas with weak vaccination coverage, hospitalizations are surging. If the public health officials are right, then mask mandates would reduce cases and deaths in these cities. But provided these hospitals are not at risk of having their capacity exceeded, the case for personal vaccine responsibility, and government action instead concentrating on broadening vaccine availability to children while offering resources to protect the immunocompromised, is now much stronger relative to society-wide mandates.

An economic approach to the pandemic made the case for certain government-mandated social distancing and mitigation efforts relatively strong a year ago. With vaccines freely available, those same economic principles bolster the case now for more limited interventions for the most vulnerable groups, while leaving most COVID-19 risk management to individuals.

I resist the temptation to be provocative and suggest that clinics and hospitals start billing corona patients for their resource usage. Vaccinated people qualify for a break on their insurance!  I do not resist the temptation to suggest that the Technocratic Overreach be cut off!

Through vaccination, the COVID-19 externality has essentially been eradicated. So, too, has any serious or legitimate case for government measures trampling on individual freedom. The renewed imposition of mandates is thus little more than an unjustified attempt by power-hungry politicians to flex their authority and prolong their expanded control over our lives.

It's long past time for the corona tyranny to go.

If a bunch of people are becoming infected but not experiencing serious symptoms, then that really isn’t much of a problem. It’s especially not a problem of the magnitude that justifies restoring obsolete mask mandates and other heavy-handed impositions.

Early in the pandemic, when we were unsure of the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, did not have widely available (and very effective) vaccines, and had no natural immunity, there was a compelling case for masks, social distancing, capacity restrictions, and so on. We are no longer in that situation, and it’s not only irrational to pretend like we are, but insulting to Americans who have sacrificed more than enough over the past 18 months. It’s time to say enough, and leave masks in the past.

For instance, in mitigation-obsessive Illinois, a vaccinated person has a better chance of winning the lottery than of having a bad experience with Wuhan coronavirus.  "Of the more than 6.5 million Illinois residents who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, only 0.01% have been hospitalized with a breakthrough infection."  It is long past time to stop worrying about the variants and the breakthrough infections, unless your salary and your TV appearances depend on keeping up the skeer.

Of course, proponents of big government and government officials themselves will be the last ones to acknowledge the reality that the most dangerous phase of this pandemic has long since come to an end in the US. Why? Because the rhetoric of “emergency” and “crisis” is the government’s favorite tool to use in expanding and maintaining its power over our lives.

Those public officials, though, derive their powers from our consent. It is our right, as the Sovereign People, to withdraw that consent.

Once again, vaccination is widely available in the United States and the unvaccinated have chosen that status. They've made their own decisions and assumed the resulting dangers, just like people who smoke, eat too much, ride motorcycles, or go rock-climbing. In a free society, people have the right to make their own risk assessments, even if others don't approve, and the rest of us should get to live our lives without limiting ourselves because of the decisions made by others.

COVID-19 has been an unpleasant ordeal for the entire planet, but perhaps not so awful as the policies inflicted on us in the name of public health. It's time to move beyond pandemic panic to rebuild our prosperity, raise our kids, and reclaim our freedom. If the control freaks don't like that, well, they're another affliction we can do without.

Sometimes, the only intellectual argument is "pound sand."

Public-health authorities don’t know how to stop giving you extra-restrictive advice. And they can’t learn how to stop giving it if we don’t learn how to stop asking for it. Or until we start ignoring what they say, and start punishing politicians who translate their guidance into nuisances.

The people started staying in and stockpiling toilet paper before the governors issued their ukases; the people started going about their normal lives before the governors backed off, and the people can tell Our Intellectual Betters that it's over. It's Over.

The prudent thing to do, dear reader, might be to go about your life.  If you're feeling ill, the wise thing to do is just stay the hell home.  Emily Oster will lead you through the nuances.

Be more careful—more masks—when in indoor settings. Re-evaluating events like weddings, depending in part on how important they are to you. And if you feel sick, get a COVID test and wait for the results, even if you think it’s probably just a normal cold.  (I would suggest getting some rapid antigen tests to have at home).

If your whole household is made up of healthy, vaccinated people, then you should feel protected, and taking these precautions is a good idea and probably enough. (If your household contains older, immune-compromised people, I think this all gets a bit more complex, but I’m not going to talk that through today.)

There's more advice at the link about how best to work with children, who still aren't eligible for their shots.

EVERY MAJOR INSTITUTION IN OUR COUNTRY REVEALED ITSELF AS A FARCE.

That's J. D. "Hillbilly Elegy" Vance on the sudden bugout from Afghanistan, and worth reading in full for that alone.  While you're at it, read Jim Treacher asking, "With experts like those, who needs experts?"  That, too, focuses on the bugout, and the reprise of the fall of Saigon.

The generalizations, though, are straightforward.  A year-and-a-half, now, of however many days it has been to slow the spread, to no effect.  The continued efforts by apologists for urban unrest to somehow reimagine law enforcement whilst keeping the residents safe.

Isn't it long past time to turf the Credentialed Establishment out?

IS THERE SOME WAY THEY COULD SETTLE THIS IN THE OCTAGON?

Hope Solo Says Teammate Megan Rapinoe Would 'Almost Bully' Team to Kneel During Anthem. 

Ordinarily, it's not sporting to make fun of the off-the-field issues of the women's soccer team.  I'll make an exception because of the cast of characters.  But rather than trade barbs in Newsweek or on one of the social media sites, or go on an ESPN talk show, wouldn't a no-holds-barred cage match between these two be much more fun to watch?

THE INSURGENCY IS STILL THERE.

A few years ago, I referred to "the Confederacy of the frustrated," with an illustration of a flag sales tent at a Midwestern threshing bee.

My reaction at the time was, "The more censorious the Perpetually Aggrieved become, and the more in-your-face the rainbow coalition is in the entertainment industry, the more Gadsden flags and POW-MIA flags and Confederate battle flags will sell.  Subverting the dominant paradigm and being transgressive isn't for the critical studies people only."

At the time, I promised to keep my eye on the flag-sales tents.  It's been a few years since I got to a county fair or a threshing bee, but with the easing of the corona tyranny, some road tripping and some suitable stops have been possible.

You now have to look harder for Confederate battle flags, but Gadsden flags, Thin Blue Line flags, and variations on the Trump flag continue to sell well.

Sometimes, the message is more explicit.

Doesn't look like much of a chance for a single vision for the country anytime soon.

There are a few more county fairs and the like coming up, and I'll have to look for flag tents offering the, shall we say, opposing points of view.

HIGH SCHOOL CAN SUCK IF YOU'RE AN OUTLIER.

A College Fix contributor attempts to deal with her son's troubles.

Two years ago my husband and I were blindsided by our son telling us he was “trans” without any gender confusion before this time. He only had male friends and only liked and played with typical male toys and activities.

Apparently, boys wanting to cross are relatively rare, all the attention a few runners in Connecticut get notwithstanding.  These parents weren't sure what they were dealing with, and they did some digging.  (It's College Fix, so I can't vouch for the validity or generality of what follows.)

Quickly some interesting commonalities emerged: 85 percent of our boys had an IQ over 130. We learned that these are mostly smart nerdy boys who claim they are straight and want to identify as a lesbian. They also were also often on the autism spectrum, had suffered trauma, or had internalized homophobia.

Put another way, outliers in the social structure of their high school.  That's the way of the world: the matching and mating rituals select for the modal population, and it's always going to be tougher for the people who live farther from the mode, whatever that mode is.  I suspect, though, that the matching and mating opportunities are going to be tougher for crossers than for people who practice their alternative lifestyles with the anatomy they were born with.

WEAK, MEEK, INEFFECTUAL, INCOMPETENT, AND CONFUSED.

Yes, that sounds like Friday short Take material, although when we're dealing with the dotard who is officially president of the United States, we ought devote a post to why his critics are writing such things.

As of Saturday, Kenneth R. Timmerman was hoping for the best.

The Pentagon is desperate to avoid a rout that is broadcast live on prime time. They want no helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy with desperate Afghans clinging to the skids, as happened in Saigon in 1975. They want no Blackhawk downs, or civilian contractors hung from bridges, all of which could have happened if they had allowed Biden’s retreat to continue as planned.

By Sunday, Miranda Devine saw a pattern. "Joe Biden has the reverse Midas touch."  The editors of National Review concur.  "This is a debacle and, more than most acts of the U.S. government, it is the responsibility of one man — Joseph Robinette Biden."

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds sees bipartisanship at work. as well. "Remember: The political establishment — including many Republicans — was so eager to rid us of a non-establishment President that they stuck us with this incompetent and his incompetent-buffoon staff. And they said they did it in the name of 'principles' and 'standards' and 'competence.'"

What would we ever do without Expert Competence?

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 11,502.

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 1,110,147 infections and 14,621 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,466,813 infections and 26,123 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, commenced last Friday, 11 June.  As of this afternoon, the state counts 13.6 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they're still not disaggregating among finished and partial vaccinations, and the state's total count of the scary variants includes all of two thousand Delta and under three thousand Gamma infections diagnosed.  That's not much change on a month ago.

Note that since last month's post, Worldometers counted fifteen additional corona deaths in Sweden.  A year ago, a Foreign Affairs article suggested "Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s."  In the early going, that didn't look like a good idea, particularly to people keeping score, but a year on, we're seeing headlines like "Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths."

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the good news is the bad news might be wrong: "Delta variant of COVID-19 ready to ravage unvaccinated in Illinois: ‘Some areas are going to blow up’"  The sensationalist journalists are still claiming there will be a surge, but it's not yet showing up in the reports.

The state continues to administer vaccines.  The latest count approaches thirteen million injections (the page doesn't disaggregate among finished and pending) and the latest count of those scary variants notes just over ten thousand, with 2,600 or so being whatever the "gamma" variant is.

These post will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 11,187.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 10,944. 

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 details for the past seven months are on page 2.

TAKING UP THE SLACK LEFT BY SECOND CITY COP.

I warned you today was not going to be cheerful.  We'll be releasing a compendium of policy failures, working our way from the cities to the states to the Nation today.

"The Night Chicago Died" includes a compendium of links detailing the continuing mostly peaceful summer weekends in Chicago.  Second City Cop recently filed a report on the most recent acts of disrespect from city government.  "The political structure, combined with the 'merit' system, has finally produced what is (likely) the ultimate nadir of morale. The wholesale abandonment of the rank-and-file is laid bare for all to see."

LEFTARDS REALLY OUGHT TO COME UP WITH BETTER SLOGANS.

Sorry, today is going to be primarily gloomy posts.  The best I can do on the lighter side is note how unimaginative the contemporary Jacobins are.  "Human Need, Not Landlord Greed."  Can't anybody come up with something that Ayn Rand didn't satirize years ago?  But the wishful thinking never stops.

Rent control doesn’t just improve tenants’ market position; it also paves the way for greater working-class organization and political power. With lower rents and guaranteed renewal leases, rent-controlled tenants are better positioned to organize and fight their landlords. They cannot be evicted for demanding more repairs, lower rent, and better housing conditions.

The writer has the somewhat charming faith that the owners might just write their investments off and go away, and the rent-controlled blocks will be residually inhabited by, shall we say, not the highest type of neighbor.

IT IS NOT ABOUT ZERO CORONAVIRUS.

Australia is an island with drastic quarantines in effect in response to relatively few infections or deaths, and that's not restrictive enough for some people.

Any strategy short of elimination will be a disaster for both the health and economic stability of Australians. According to the government’s own modeling, if we open up when 70 percent of those over seventeen (56 percent of the population as a whole) are vaccinated, it will result in two thousand preventable deaths within six months. Recent modeling suggests that if Sydney exits lockdown on August 26 — even with an adult vaccination rate of 70 percent — it will lead to 100,000 cumulative hospitalizations, 10,000 patients in intensive care, and thousands of deaths.

Here we go again with the modelling, the same sort of foolish extrapolations that anticipated twelve of the last two inches of rain in DeKalb during July.

But it's got nothing to do with the modelling, or even with the mitigations.

Giving all workers paid pandemic and vaccine leave would dramatically reduce the spread of the virus in poor communities where workers cannot afford to lose income by taking time off to be tested or vaccinated. These measures would also undermine anti-vaccination sentiment. Additionally, we need to overhaul the vaccine rollout to prioritize all frontline workers. This will halt the spread of the virus in Australia’s developing underclass of young workers in essential jobs who are disproportionately migrants.

That's right, dear reader, it's about zero commerce.  It's Cloward-Piven with mask mandates and boffins in lab coats.

Labor’s commitment to neoliberalism has stopped it from advocating serious redistributive measures and the reconstruction of our health and social-welfare systems. The Left must put forward a far stronger alternative. We must fight for an elimination strategy.

That does mean lockdowns and border closures. But more importantly, it means fighting to put working-class people first with a broad pandemic management strategy that breaks with the pro-business logic of neoliberalism. To be COVID-free, in addition to vaccines, we need better quarantine, better income support and welfare, and an overhaul of our health system.

Put another way, we need an Australia with all the redeeming features of Poland circa 1985.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The craziness around the world doesn't take a holiday just because I do.

1.  Vogue hates conservative women?

2.  Sexual freedom enslaves.  "What word of sanity can bring us back from the breach of normalizing pedophilia, for example, when the slope everyone swore wasn’t slippery has indeed led to the prophesied transgender craze and the celebration of every manner of sexual perversion?"

3.  Two rotten politicians demonstrate the sickness of America’s political culture.

4.  If Republicans lose big time in 2022, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

5.  No wonder the vaccine is still politicized.

6.  Preach it!  "The modern characterization for many politicians who refuse to take a stand, especially in the midst of the growing and rapid threat of American socialism, is the word 'weenie.'"

7.  The legacy of the self-styled progressives.  "Should we be surprised that an ideology that believes American civilization is fundamentally evil has resulted in the breakdown of that civilization?"

8.  No increase in the debt ceiling!  "They run up the credit card and blame the credit card company for not giving them a higher credit limit."

9.  Never apologize, never explain, always mock.

10.  Environmentalist wackos.  "Greenpeace's decades-long campaign against modern crop biotechnology is a disgraceful disservice to their fellow human beings."

11.  The end of federalism?  "As a result, we're continuing to move even further down the road toward the states effectively becoming administrative units of the federal government."

12.  Thanks, ficus.  "If Biden hadn’t been so dead set on killing the energy industry here in the United States, he might not have had to go begging to OPEC for more oil!"

13.  Well, good. Increasing vaccination rates among Americans may result in a decoupling between infections and deaths.

14.  The populist blogosphere at work.  "Cuomo has to go now, not because the establishment found out about him, but because we did."  But his tyranny gets a pass?  "Better to brush Cuomo under the rug than for Cuomo's opponents to continue holding him up as an object lesson in dictatorial and bloviating incompetence."

15.  Easier to create majority-minority districts? "Because of residential segregation, it's easier to break apart or pack together communities of color to move the dial."  Depends on who perceives the inequity.

16.  That is, if "majority-minority" even makes any sense. “What’s the fastest growing group? Mixed race. That group doubled. Anyone who goes into the group takes away from one of the other groups.”  It was early in the history of Cold Spring Shops that I noted kids dating across what used to be uncrossable lines.  Maybe in a hundred years their grandchildren will wonder what the fuss was about.

DOES THE ARGUMENT GENERALIZE?

Why should public health bureaucrats be different from any other bureaucrats?  "Unvaccinated Americans have been called 'arrogant,' 'selfish' 'stupid,' 'idiots' and worse for refusing to get the jab." Is it churlish of me to note that people who objected back in the day to intact busing of classes, or to critical studies in third grade today, get called "racist," or that sport shooters who object to totally ineffective "common sense gun control" get called "NRA dupes."

Yeah, that's whataboutism.  Deal with it.  Then, dear self-styled Intellectual Betters, take an education from some of the people whose job it is to persuade people who have not yet gotten their Trump shots to schedule an appointment.

"If you’re going to call me an idiot … that isn’t encouragement,” Stephanie McClure, an assistant professor of biocultural medical anthropology at the University of Alabama, told USA TODAY.  “You usually don’t get anywhere by attacking people.”

Shaming and insulting people is "not a very effective way to promote adoption of a behavior,” said McClure, who leads the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, team for CommuniVax, a national alliance advocating for historically underserved Black, Indigenous and Latino populations amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

That "basket of deplorables" or that "47% dependent on government" didn't work so well for a few recent presidential hopefuls, did it? The same thing is true for convincing people that the shots are safe.

[Behavioral scientist Gleb] Tsipursky said all major demographics of unvaccinated people don't respond well to authorities telling them what to do.

Blame and insults are particularly counterproductive when dealing with people who may see the vaccine as a political issue, he said. That tone creates a defensive response in which they are likely “lash out against authority” – even if it puts them at a greater risk.

Tsipursky said he prefers positive language: Vaccinated people are doing their civic duty; they're patriots; they're protecting their families.

A little humility on the part of the Credentialed Experts would also help.

IS IT TIME TO CREATE A BREWER DISTRICT?

In Milwaukee, the political authorities are forever attempting to get their expressways right.  The original expressway, from near the fairgrounds to downtown passing the baseball stadium, was jammed into a space between some cemeteries, as well as running along the side of a bluff.  It really doesn't make sense to widen it, as that won't do anything for the congestion.  That original system also included the beginning of a crosstown expressway that forced the destruction of the Washington Park Zoo (in favor of a modern zoo in suburbia that has won a few awards, as well as providing the name of an expressway interchange that figures in all the traffic delay reports) and would have carved up the Sherman Boulevard neighborhood to the north and the Jackson Park neighborhood to the south.  Those segments were never built.  But what to do with the short segment that was built?

Get rid of it.  "This highway spur is not serving the city well in its current form, and should be converted to a boulevard. If we are going to be spending a billion dollars to reshape the infrastructure of the west side of Milwaukee, let’s do something that would have the potential to bring truly meaningful change to this city."

The author suggests naming the boulevard for Henry Aaron.  The article (it's long, and wonky in places) invokes the Deer District you might have seen on television during the basketball championships.  That area used to be the route of the Park East expressway, a northwest to downtown expressway that was supposed to continue along the lake shore to the south.  As the extension from the Capitol Court area to downtown was projected through a historically black neighborhood, that idea went away sometime in the 1970s.  But we lost the lakefront Chicago and North Western depot.

A short stretch of an otherwise not terribly useful expressway, hard by the stadium, might be yet another good location for outdoor watch parties.

WHY CAN'T WE GET BETTER TRANSPORTATION WRITERS?

Florida's Brightline will be resuming scheduled train operation.  That's good news, but check out the misleading sub-headline in the story.  "The passenger rail service, linked to an unusual number of deaths, suspended operations in March 2020." No, the trains were not a coronavirus vector.  The linkage, also, is suspect, but you have to read way down for the clarification.

Brightline is completing several projects to address safety issues that arose soon after its bright yellow trains began zipping through densely populated South Florida at speeds up to 79 miles an hour.

A 2019 Associated Press investigation documented that its trains killed more pedestrians and car drivers per mile than any railroad in the country. The 45 deaths prior to Brightline suspending service translates to one death for every 31,000 miles.

Most of the deaths have been by suicide. The rest were drivers and pedestrians trying to beat the train by going around guardrails or running across the tracks.

None of the fatalities was deemed to have been the fault of Brightline engineers or trains, but the crashes have had a psychological impact on crew members. Several have been involved in multiple fatalities.

If only journalists on the railway beat would read Cold Spring Shops.  We've also called attention to the anguish dub drivers and suicidal pedestrians cause the engineers.

All the misinformation in that article does is make people less willing to ride trains, or to provide public money for railway infrastructure that is often more productive than the usual roads, bridges, airports, and waterways.

NEUROTIC CAT LADIES WHO DON'T WANT ANYONE HAVING FUN.

I've heard that description of Our Progressive Betters a few times recently, both on populist television and among the weblogs that cater to the Militant Normals.  The more I follow the second year of corona tyranny, the more I think that there's something to it.  Consider, dear reader, the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which, last year, was supposed to be The End of The World.  "I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings."  It wasn't.  But that wasn't newsworthy.

No matter, though.  The bikers are gathering again, and the fretful people are fretting again.

While Fauci is once again “very concerned” that we will see another surge related to the rally, he provides zero evidence there was one last year, and the data does not support his contention. Once again, he is saying we have to get the pandemic under control before people can return to normal activities.

It’s just more messaging that reduces confidence in vaccines from the man who is the face of the pandemic response. If the vaccines effectively prevent severe illness and death, attendees have had adequate time to receive one. Those who have chosen not to are making their own risk assessment. Fauci’s continued insistence that the government has a role in managing people’s behavior with vaccines available to everyone is getting absurd. Zero COVID-19 is no longer a rational goal, and it is long past time for Fauci to admit it.

When the public health boffins talk about "a pandemic of the unvaccinated," that's not really a pandemic, is it? I also have a suspicion that "zero corona" is about "attaining zero corona." That I will develop another day.  Today, it's about the use of the corona tyranny to shame people Our Intellectual Betters despise.

It has been obvious from the beginning that the rules that CDC and Democratic governors inflict on the rest of us do not apply to liberal elites. Chuck Todd is not a journalist, and 'Doctor' Fauci is not a scientist. No wonder so many people don’t bother to listen to either one.

Somewhere, there has to be a culture-studies type wondering what the intellectual standards are for celebrating some kinds of transgressivity but not others.  "Vendors at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota are selling merchandise bearing Nazi imagery."  It's not enough that those riders are burning a lot of gasoline and making a lot of noise despite The Climate Crisis, and that they're hanging out and drinking a lot of beer and spreading the Wuhan coronavirus.  They're also buying their grandparents' war trophies.

[South Dakota ABC (of course) affiliate] KOTA interviewed one vendor, Jenny Alonso, who defended selling merchandise with offensive imagery.

"A lot of bikers, you know, it's a freedom thing," Alonso told KOTA. "A lot of bikers want to be free and voice their opinion and I like to cater to what they want. It doesn't mean that I necessarily believe in everything but, you know, I like to please everybody."

Alonso described Nazi merchandise as a way to honor US soldiers who brought Nazi memorabilia back as trophies after World War II.

"So, we're kind of honoring that not necessarily that, you know, we believe in Nazis and Hitler, but it's just kind of a special thing that the US military was able to go and win the war and bring things back as souvenirs and they would put them on their bike," Alonso said.

But if you're a neurotic cat lady, that's having too much fun, in an environment too drenched with testosterone and estrogen interacting the way Nature, or Nature's God, intended, and you have to shame it.

THE ETERNAL FASCINATION OF BASEBALL.

Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Aaron Ashby made his debut against the Chicago Cubs a few weeks ago, pitching 2/3 of an inning, going back to the minors with an earned run average of 54.00 and no decision.  More recently, the Brewers have had a run of positive tests for Wuhan coronavirus, affecting the bullpen in particular, and Mr Ashby was back up.  To pitch to the Cubs at Wrigley Field in a game that started, then went into a long rain delay.  "Ashby doubled up on his last outing going 2 innings allowing two hits and a strikeout. Ashby presumably would’ve gone deeper into the game, but a rain delay lasting one hour and twenty-six minutes were too much downtime for Counsell to send out Hunter Strickland."  A denominator of 2 2/3 with no runs allowed can do wonders to the earned run average.  It's just math.

It's after the rain delay that the fascinating stuff began.  Mr Strickland pitched a scoreless inning.  He was succeeded by recent trade acquisition John Curtiss, who has not had an auspicious beginning in Milwaukee.  Patrick Wisdom touched him for a home run, then he pulled up lame with two out, two on, and a full count to Johneshwy Fargas.  It turned out to be a fairly serious injury, and Mr Curtiss's season might be over.  In comes Miguel Sanchez: Mr Fargas looks at strike three, then the Brewers bat around, with Mr Sanchez lifted for a pinch hitter and getting the win as six runs come in.  (Five burgers, five bucks, for those who live close to a George Webb, and hoist the Sprecher at Cold Spring Shops.)

And how quickly the fortunes change for the Cubs.  When was it, early June, that four pitchers combined to no-hit the Dodgers, which was the last time the Cubs beat the Dodgers.  And the Brewers have been giving the Cubs fits all season.  "Milwaukee Is Responsible for the Cubs’ Rebuild."  Here's how Chicago sports scribe Paul Sullivan sees it.  "The Brewers have managed to win without significant offensive contributions from Christian Yelich, the 2018 NL MVP, and despite having seven players on the COVID-19 injured list, including closer Josh Hader and infielder Keston Hiura."  It's still a long way to September, though.

MILITANT NORMALS CAN PUSH BACK.

Chris Stigall sees what Our Progressive Betters are doing.

We’re living in a time of great provocation directed at the American people from those in elected office.  Virtually all levels of government are barely hiding the disdain and contempt they have for the people they’re supposed to serve.

The pandemic has given county commissioners, school boards, health directors, mayors, governors and federal officials an emperor complex, lording over our daily lives deciding which privilege they will or won’t allow based on their whims.

They justify it by calling it science.  It’s not.  It’s provocation and it's working for the left on many fronts in very effective ways.

It's more like a restoration of the primitive, with the denunciation of heretics being the way to control people. Yes, I still owe you an elaboration of that claim. But that's for another day.

Government agents big and small and their fascist corporate partners flexing their muscles, poking you in the chest, smiling as they call you an insurrectionist and just daring you to cross them.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was written at a time when fathers were kings of their homes and wielded total, unquestionable authority. It’s Paul’s biblical warning to fathers not to behave as tyrants lest they produce restless or rebellious children who ultimately resent them.

That same warning should be heeded by public officials who forget we’re a republic and “consent of the governed” is still the order of things.  Ignoring that fact will produce a “restless and rebellious” electorate, too.

And that’s just what the provocateurs in charge are hoping.

I'm not sure about that last sentence: the provocateurs in charge might be hoping that the traditional incantations and totems will still work.  Rick Moran suggests the provocateurs are in trouble.  "One Republican super PAC — the Congressional Leadership Fund — is testing three specific war-winning strategies in swing districts this week that will highlight the incompetence, the stupidity, and the radicalism of the Democratic Party. They are running ads targeting three vulnerable Democratic House members on three issues of great importance to all Americans: inflation, violent crime, and the teaching of critical race theory in schools."  I've called attention thereto before, with "It's a side benefit that the artsy establishment is of a piece with that part of the policy establishment with a history of being soft on crime, soft on communism (when that was a thing) and soft on counterterrorism."  The technocratic overreach that has been the corona tyranny can also be a winning pragmatic populist message, if delivered properly.