DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU.

Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty reacts to Jordan Peterson's very public departure from higher education.  Weigh the evidence.

Yet as Peterson’s star has risen in some circles, many academics have questioned the rigor of his analysis—including when it comes to gender (many of Peterson’s followers are young men). He was widely criticized, for instance, for telling The New York Times in 2018 that “the cure” for young men who feel rejected sexually by women and act out against them—so-called violent involuntary celibates, or incels—is “enforced monogamy.” Peterson, elsewhere an ardent defender of free speech, later threatened to sue the feminist philosopher Kate Manne, of Cornell University, for some of her criticisms of his thoughts on gender. One of Peterson’s former colleagues at Toronto, Bernard Schiff, a professor emeritus of psychology, also wrote a 2018 op-ed in The Toronto Star calling him “dangerous.”

Draw your own conclusions.

Over all, the report says, “both the counts and percentages for all appointed faculty categories have increased except for those appointed faculty who self-identify as men (the percentage of appointed faculty who self-identified as men stayed constant at 52 percent although the actual number of faculty who self-identified as men increased from 1,168 to 1,214).”

Across U.S. psychology workforce, 84 percent of psychologists are white, according to information from the American Psychological Association. Sixty-nine percent of those awarded psychology doctorates in 2018 were white.

Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor of religion and political science at Queen’s University in Ontario, tweeted that academic DEI initiatives do sometimes involve “ridiculous” bureaucratic requirements, yet Peterson’s notion that “meritocracy happens in some idealistic void absent socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, gender and other factors is wrong *points to literally decades of research.* There are indeed adult conversations to be had about these issues, but they have to be honest about trying to offer new and better solutions—not more smug op-eds.”

Not all professors are happy to see Peterson go, however. Gad Saad, professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, posted a facetious video, apologizing while hitting himself with “the whip of self-disgust” for “having had a friendship with Jordan.” That’s after he was criticized for wishing Peterson well on social media following Peterson’s retirement announcement.

"Self-identify as men." There's no need to parody higher education, it parodies itself. Apparently, also, some forms of quit lit are preferable to others. I don't recall any Inside Higher Ed discussions of the more usual quit lit (neurotic humanities types, primarily) that bring up personal troubles. "Peterson has had personal troubles in recent years, eventually traveling to Russia and Serbia for treatment of his symptoms from withdrawing from benzodiazepines."

I submit, though, that it's better for disaffected faculty to walk away, whether angry or not, rather than engage in sullen participation, something that the house organ for business as usual just discovered.  "Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away."

KITBASHING IN FULL SCALE.

The electric interurban railways might have been the dot.com bubble of the early twentieth century.  Before it popped, though, we saw some splendid examples of the carbuilders' art.  In the days before Federal Express and United Parcel Service, the interurbans offered their own version of fast package service, often with combination cars capable of handling passengers and those packages, which might include milk cans or hatchlings (preferably before they were fed.)

Some of those cars were substantial steel arks unfazed by a few milk cans being put aboard, and impressive enough to shoulder their way through those flivvers and horse-drawn vans where the interurbans shared city streets.

Indianapolis and Southeastern bought those cars from Cincinnati Car Company.  At one time the railroad hoped to run between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, but that never came to pass.  None of those cars survive in any form, although we are aware of similar cars built for Indiana interurbans that are still in preservation.

By the end of the 1920s, a substantial steel car with parcels capacity didn't fit in with the business model. particularly if it required a motorman to operate it and a conductor to collect the few cash fares or tickets from people not yet enticed onto their flivvers.

As an economy measure, you might reconfigure the car in order that the motorman could both run the car and collect the cash fares.  Indiana Railroad mostly gave up on the baggage business.

There are steps on the opposite side, and the larger window that replaces the door on the nearest corner is for the motorman's compartment.  At the far end, the motorman's door forward of the baggage door has been removed.

Another way for the interurbans to reduce expenses was to invest in cheaper, lighter cars that could be operated by one man.  What, then, happens to the heavy cars that are surplus to your requirements?

In the case of Indianapolis and Southeastern, eight of those cars migrated to The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, where the management were still anticipating increased passenger riding, and they went into Cold Spring Shops as a combination car and emerged as a three-truck train.

The motorman's compartment and baggage area have been rearranged, a new window cut into the body ahead of the paired windows; the original car cut in two pieces in the middle of the fifth pair of windows, with the rear part extensively rearranged, including the placement of the rear truck center closer to the rear of the train.  The middle thirty feet or so of the car, including the double doors, is all new construction.

Those cars provided more than enough capacity during the Depression, although the interurban still found itself short of seats during the War.  But they were not able to make the cars longer, the way the South Shore Line did (there's a story about why those South Shore cars were built so short, for another day) because as modified the cars used all the clearance diagram available.

JOHN GALT COMES FOR THE CORONA TYRANTS.

Many years ago, The Washington Monthly ran a short article titled something like "The Gold in the Garbage:  What the Left Can Learn from Ayn Rand."  The article is really old, dating to the Carter administration.  [Late Ford administration, actually, and James Fallows to boot -- Ed.]  Neither has the magazine made it available in their digital archives nor did I in a few minutes noodling with search engines locate any references to it.  [A colleague found it -- Ed.] I dig into these memories, though, as a way of introducing a contemporary story.

That old article devoted some time to the behavior of bureaucrats.  The short form of the story (in Randian fashion, it runs nearly a hundred pages) is the episode of the diesel failures on the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, and the issuance of a ukase permitting a steam locomotive to run through the eight mile long Taggart Tunnel.  The steamers were in even worse shape than the diesels, and, predictably, everybody died.  Not, though, before the relevant bureaucrats, whether in government or among the rent-seeking management of Taggart, issued memoranda demonstrating their blamelessness in what happened.

Discussing new rules for risky virus research when they were finalized a few years ago, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci acknowledged, “I don’t think this is going to be foolproof, things are going to slip through.”

As senators sparred yet again with Fauci at a congressional hearing last week, he stated that his agency has followed the regulations for funding “gain of function” research, which can make certain viruses more deadly or transmissible. But he obfuscated how he played a role in creating those same regulations, which officials and some scientists say are too weak.

Ayn Rand at least credited Wesley Mouch's bureaucrats with a modicum of good sense. The original rule was "no steam locomotives in the Taggart Tunnel."  Somebody had to authorize the work-around.

“The guide rails for what can be done were not established by me, they were by a three-year process led by the Office of Science and Technology at the White House,” Fauci said of gain-of-function research at the hearing.

After some high-profile lab accidents, in 2014 the U.S. government paused federal funding of gain-of-function research. In 2017, the research resumed under a new Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, with a review committee established within the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) to oversee federal funding of such research.

But during those three years, with Fauci’s input, the review committee was stripped of its power to veto proposed research, as The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Willman and Madison Muller noted in an in-depth investigation last year. The definition of the research the panel reviews (the definition that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other senators keep arguing about with Fauci) was also narrowed to exclude some potentially dangerous viruses.

And thus, dear reader, does the steam locomotive couple to the Taggart Express, while there's no ultimate responsibility for the disaster that follows.

IT'S ONLY GOTTEN WORSE.

Eight years ago, when I said goodbye to higher education, my complaints were within the normal bounds.

The legislature has not chosen to fund the universities adequately, nor has it corrected the ham-handed pension reform that has driven about one-fifth of the faculty and staff, along with the institutional memory carried therein, into retirement.

The university has not chosen to properly staff the academic departments, nor has it recognized that making increased demands on the fewer remaining faculty in the absence of any merit money is unlikely to yield enthusiastic participation on committees or a harvest of high-quality publications.

And the subtle denigration of mainstream white guys as less desirable hires or as majors continues.

But I no longer have the opportunity in meetings or other forums to argue against those follies.

Nor need I be complicit in them any longer.

These days, I put it more pungently: too many administrative fads, too much special education, too much affirmative action.

THE BRAIN FARTS JUST KEEP ON COMING.

On the transcript, it reads like a perfectly normal press conference.

Allison Harris, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Speaking of voting rights legislation, if this isn’t passed, do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and its results will be legitimate?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election. And it’s one thing — look, maybe I’m just being too much of an optimist. Remember how we thought not that many people were going to show up to vote in the middle of a pandemic? We had the highest voter turnout in the history of the United States of America.

Well, I think if, in fact — no matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and — and defy the attempt to keep them from being able to vote. I think you’re going to see the people who they’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to make in order to change the law back to what it should be.

And — but it’s going to be difficult. I make no bones about that. It’s going to be difficult. But we’re not there yet. We’ve not run out of options yet. And we’ll see how this moves.

Watch this clip, or the first few questions once the coot finished reading his statement, and tell me I wasn't being harsh last week.

REPORTER: "Do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and the results will be legitimate?"

BIDEN: "It all depends depends on whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to alter the outcome..." pic.twitter.com/COdhiTEYhh

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 19, 2022

Powerline's Scott Johnson described the ordeal as "a senile phantasmagora" and his post embeds all two hours of the show, should you wish to relive the horror.

Biden rambled, blundered, lied, dissembled, and streamed his consciousness like Molly Bloom in the last chapter of Ulysses or Benjy Compson in the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury. He searched his notes for talking points. He lost his train of thought, such as it was. He put his senile phantasmagoria on display for all to see. Does he have more than 26 cards to deal from his deck? It was appalling.

And all in service of firing up that docked tail of self-styled progressives.

Biden and his party have painted themselves into a rhetorical corner by endlessly comparing the modest voting reforms in Texas and Georgia to Jim Crow. If you’re going to go that route in hopes of demagoging Manchin and Sinema and getting your base juiced to vote in November, you’re necessarily committing yourself to arguing that an election held under the auspices of those laws is illegitimate. There’s no such thing as a “fair election” in a Jim Crow system, after all. This is another example of the White House’s embarrassing strategic shortsightedness, committing to a Trumpy position on election integrity in service to a legislative push that was all but guaranteed to fail. It would have been malignant but understandable if they had gone crazy with the Jim Crow analogies because they had reason to believe that doing so might flip the two Dem holdouts from no to yes on nuking the filibuster. But to go crazy with them knowing that the reforms they sought weren’t going to happen is political and civic malpractice. It’s inflammation for the sake of inflammation.

It's almost as if the major parties are less interested in expanding their appeal than in containing their opponents' appeals.

The President of the United States says that whether or not he'll respect or trust the outcome of the midterm elections in which his party is expected to suffer significant losses just "depends" because someone might try to alter the outcome, but if his election power-grab passes, then there's no issue?

Yes, we can play that fill-in-the-blank game with both major parties, but when the Leader of the Free World who ran on a platform of Unify the People No Mean Tweets plays the game, that can't be good.

After all, it is something of a mortal sin to those on the left when someone questions the results or methodology of an election. Like most other things, that rule of course only applies to Republican doubts. Democrats have a track record of doubting GOP victories at the ballot box, one that began long before Donald Trump ever ran for office.

It's not as if people aren't on to the con.

So, elections were secure, fair, and legitimate when Trump was president, but won’t be secure, fair, or legitimate unless the Democrats’ voting legislation is passed.

In other words, elections are only secure, fair, and legitimate when Democrats win.

As Twitchy's Brett T. quips, "Nice to know the man who won the presidency with 81 million votes is concerned about voter suppression keeping Democrats from winning."  Nothing like getting the excuses in order now in case the campaigns later, when normal people are paying attention, don't end well for your side.

That is, if all the wrangling over process doesn't antagonize the Normals.

If you dislike the laws governing elections, of course, you're free to try to change them. That's exactly what Democrats are trying to do with their various reform proposals in Congress—and what Republicans are trying to do in various state capitals. There will always be debates over the proper way to conduct elections, but declaring marginal changes in either direction to be so far out of bounds that they render entire elections illegitimate is accomplishing nothing except eroding the actual legitimacy of the democratic system.

If the wrangling is primarily over the outcome of the presidential elections, the country might pull through. Morale Conditioners from both major parties have noted that turnout, and House voting, seem not to be tainted.  So, too, let it be with school boards and highway commissions.

EVERYTHING IS NOT AWFUL.

‘Saturday Night Live’ Cold Open Spoofs Joe Biden With His Plan To Curb Covid.

The show opened with Johnson’s Biden at a lectern, in another speech to the nation, as he leaned into the microphone and said, “There’s one simple thing you can do to make this whole virus go away.” The he whispered, “Stop seeing Spider-Man.”

There's more, including what might be a link to the show segment, at the link. The writers might be lampooning a most-lampoonable public figure.

The skit concluded with a visit from Pete Davidson, playing “Joe Biden from the real universe,” who told the press that “the timeline you are all living in is about to collapse. It was created as a joke starting in 2016 when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Now it spiraled out of control and could explode at any minute.”

“Am I the president in this real world?” Biden asked.

Good thing yelling at the telescreen isn't a thing.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,062.

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.  Despite the Supreme Court vacating the federal vaccine mandate that was supposed to be enforced by the national Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Illinois businesses subject to the review of the state department of labor will still be under that mandate.  With businesses already leaving Illinois, I have trouble envisioning the continuance of that state order persuading wavering businesses to stay.  In addition, the governor's ukases remain in force.  "This marks the 22nd month of disaster proclamations that have brought dozens of executive orders ranging from a stay at home order, to closing schools, to closing businesses and requiring vaccines for educator and masks indoors."  Our Supreme Soviet legislature continues to go along with the tyranny.

We're also back to elective surgeries being postponed.

Pritzker issued the hospital edict Thursday as the state set yet another troubling record with more than 30,000 confirmed infections in a single day. Hospitals are already treating the most coronavirus patients they’ve seen in more than a year, with nearly 5,700 beds occupied as of Wednesday night — fast approaching the peak of last fall’s resurgence, when nearly 6,200 beds were filled.

“We’re asking our residents to temporarily hold off on important medical care like tonsillectomies, bariatric surgeries and hernia repair,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As we work to keep ICU beds open, I continue to applaud the efforts of our hospitals and health care workers across the state, who have been heroes for us all.”

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

David Marcus has a pessimistic projection.  "It didn’t end five hundred and eighty-one days ago. And today, there is reason to fear that it never will."  That's the foolish ukases, not the virus.  So how's the corona tyranny working out in Illinois?

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,560,363 infections, up by 331,146 from last month, and 15,470 deaths, a change of 312 from that report.  

The latest report from Illinois counts 2,589,640 infections, an increase of 685,381 over last month, and 32,532 deaths, adding 2,578 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.

As of this afternoon, the state counts nearly twenty million doses of the various vaccines administered; theyve updated their talley to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations.  The state's total count of the scary variants includes around twenty-four thousand of the primary strain of Delta, up from around twenty thousand a month ago, and about two thousand Xi Omicron being reported.

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

At Beethoven's birthday, the governor trailed by 14,796.

At Veterans Day, the governor trailed by 13,981.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by  less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect.  Now we're adding over a thousand in a month.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.  Tell me again how all this micromanagement is for our benefit?

WHAT WILL THEY LEARN?

The latest American Council of Trustees and Alumni performance reviews for higher education are out.  Northern Illinois University failed to impress.  Of the seven dimensions the organization views as necessary for a proper core curriculum, there's only a composition requirement.  Given all the fulmination I'd engaged in over the years about that composition preparation leaving much to be desired, I have to wonder if that requirement is present in name only.  As, apparently, it was ten years ago.

OMAHA SPEAKS.

Somebody in Union Pacific's communications office gave up part of Wild Card Weekend to comment on the news reports about looted container trains.

Union Pacific has 1,600 employees covering 275 miles of track at its nine rail facilities throughout Los Angeles County. The railroad mobilized an aggressive response, increasing the number of police assigned to protecting the targeted areas in Los Angeles County, as well as leveraging technology, such as drone surveillance, specialized fencing and trespass-detection systems.

Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, but less than half are booked and some are released in less than 24 hours.

In addition to Union Pacific efforts, partnership with local and state law enforcement and elected public officials is essential. Over the past year, rail thefts have increased by 160% in Los Angeles County and have spiked in the past three months during the holiday peak season. In October 2021 alone, thefts from Union Pacific trains increased 356% compared to October 2020.

Thefts over the past two weeks left Union Pacific rail property littered with debris, as reported by numerous media outlets.

The railroad called attention to their problem before Christmas. If you're a George Soros-backed prosecutor, you don't have to bother.

“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The letter goes on to say criminals are boasting to Union Pacific officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence.

The letter urged the District Attorney to reconsider the policy applied to these cases: “While we understand the well-intended social justice goals of the policy, we need our justice system to support our partnership efforts with local law enforcement, hold these criminals accountable, and most important, help protect our employees and the critical local and national rail network.”

Apparently government jobs programs aren't bringing relief to the hobo jungles, but organized crime workfare is.

A bottleneck in the supply chain and the presence of homeless encampments near rail lines have contributed to the thefts, officials said.

"Organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft ... impacts our employees, our customers in the overall supply chain industry," said Adrian Guerrero, a director of public affairs for Union Pacific.

Guerrero estimates that about 90 cargo containers a day are compromised, sometimes by an organized group that has halted trains and recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

Los Angeles officials, however, seem to be taking a similar line to Chicago's mayor. In Chicago, she took Magnificent Mile retailers to task for not investing enough in security (wait, what happened to the talking point that in-store security is all about the profiling, with those security people following lawful shoppers around?)  Likewise, it's apparently Union Pacific's fault that there aren't enough railroad bulls on the property.

Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

"We have millions of dollars of items and equipment, but it is unpoliced," Hurtado said. "There are even sometimes weapons on these trains. Everything goes by train, you learn."

It's not as if the city fathers haven't been aware of the situation.

Dumping, trash and encampments around railroad tracks last year prompted Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino to call for the city to declare them a public nuisance. But the effort was dropped after Union Pacific cleaned up a swath of tracks, said his spokesperson, Branimir Kvartuc.

Still, Buscaino said, Union Pacific needs to hire more agents to patrol the tracks. "It's no surprise we are seeing the additional crimes," he said in a text, adding that the problems had been "unabated for years."

I wouldn't put it past California politicians to suggest that cleaning out hobo jungles is somehow not equitable. Meanwhile, the pilfering continues, and apparently local residents pick over the stuff the first wave of container robbers toss out.

No, I'm not joking about any of that.

In a hard-hitting social media post, Buscaino accused Union Pacific of not spending enough money and employing too few people to keep the areas around the tracks clean.

“I join the affected communities who are fed up with the lack of basic standards of maintenance along these tracks from a company who made $6.3 billion for their shareholders in 2020,” Buscaino wrote on his Facebook page, “and who boasted that Trump’s tax cut bill saved them $5.9 billion in 2017.”

In California, there are no limits to what you can blame on Donald Trump.  Even though Los Angeles's soft on crime policies are making conditions countrywide worse.

LET THERE ALWAYS BE MORE STORIES TO TELL.

It has not been a good couple of years for posting entries in the 50 Book Challenge.  We'll see if my resolution to file more book reports and fret less about national affairs that I can't influence stands up this year.

Book Review N^o. 1 is Giles Milton's Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy: How the Allies Won on D-Day.  Mr Milton had access to Cornelius Ryan's files, and some of the stories help square some of the scenes present in The Longest Day on screen with their absence or at best passing reference to in the book of the same title.

I'll recommend only that people pick up the book and read it through.  OVERLORD was a project of such magnitude that there ought be no end to the retelling of stories.  I'll only tease a few things.  Soldier, Sailor begins with Eva Eifler, a German girl conscripted into the Luftwaffe Ladies' Auxiliary to transcribe radio reports, who reported for her graveyard shift the rainy evening of 5 June, 1944 anticipating, owing to the weather, a quiet evening.  Around midnight, though, the radio reports kept coming and coming and the anxiety level in her office kept rising.  Toward the end, when the German air force had been invisible most of the day, British troops and French civilians heard airplanes, and interpreted them as Boche avion!  The Germans, a few of whom had managed to get close to the Channel in the gaps between the beach-heads (it is worth making a visit to Normandie, dear reader: on a clear day you might be able to pick out Pointe du Hoc from Ouistreham) knew better.  Those planes had the piano-key striping and the Germans became fearful before the French relaxed.

What, then, of the infamous bespoke shoes that gave Erwin Rommel cause to be away on 6 June?  They didn't fit.  Was the Field Marshal not aware of his wife's shoe size?  Was she vain?  Or might some as yet unknown Parisian cobbler have cocked a snook at the Herrenvolk by getting the order wrong?  Let there always be more stories to tell.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BEER CARS GONE?

I'm not referring to the first generation of billboard refrigerator cars, which were a casualty of prohibition and depression.

There's a simple enough explanation for their disappearance.  Suppose some proto-hipster four generations ahead of his time had kegs of Old Frothingslosh delivered to a Third Ward team track for his watering hole in the ward or across the river in Walker's Point.  Now there's an empty refrigerator car, and Milwaukee is the Beer City, so why not send it back home loaded?

THAT'S THE WAY THE INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES.

The coffee and Adderall must have worked well enough on Friday for the coot to dodder to his pretend Oval Office stage set and offer remarks on the infrastructure appropriation that got through Congress despite objections from his party's Gimme Caucus.  There was the curious incident of the freight railroads in the remarks.  You say there were no remarks about the freight railroads.  That is correct.  Somehow, the freight railroads have managed to replace main tracks from the ballast up or run double tracks through canyons that look like something a coyote should splatter into or replace a viaduct with one capable of handling heavier trains at higher speed.  I suppose it's impolite to note that  "No Federal stimulus funds were appropriated for this project. Your tax dollars go to repairing the damage the trucks cause to Interstate 40. Fifty additional trains mean capacity for up to 5000 additional containers on the rails rather than on the roads" or that "No transportation bill or stimulus money [was] involved. The railroad recycled some spans from a redundant Milwaukee Road high bridge further south."

GREAT MOMENTS IN PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES.

Anybody with a functioning brain and a modicum of empathy can distinguish between a stammer and a brain fart.  The coot is clearly in brain fart territory.

What you are hearing in that clip is not a stutter either, and it’s insulting to people who deal with a real stuttering problem for Democrats and the media to keep claiming that. Forgetting how to pronounce things, going “uh” over and over, and losing one’s train of thought is not what a stutter is. Rather, those are the symptoms of a man who is clearly losing what little mental capacity he had left.

Harsh, but fair.

LIFE PARALLELS ART.

Once upon a time, potatoes moved out of Aroostook County on boxcars calling attention to State of Maine Products.  The "potatoes" label didn't last long, as the shippers of newsprint or toilet paper objected.

The decorated boxcars are long gone, but every so often their plainer successors have some use.

A banner crop of potatoes in northern Maine this year has forced growers along the former Bangor & Aroostook Railroad — a carrier once synonymous with moving spuds — to turn to rail once again.

This winter, reefer cars are being loaded in Van Buren on the Maine Northern Railway and shipped south to Pan Am Railways. On Pan Am, they’ll move west to be interchanged with CSX Transportation and finally Union Pacific, which is moving them to Washington State. At least 33 cars have been shipped so far, according to MaineDOT.

That's right, dear reader, potatoes are being routed past Idaho (coals to Newcastle?) and thence to Washington. For conversion into french fries there, or ultimately shipped to China?

Let the record show, though, that my State of Maine Northern Railroad, which you last saw venturing offline, existed in model form while there still was a real-life Bangor and Aroostook, and the current layout was under construction before the Lac Megantic disaster and the restoration of Canadian Pacific's Lines in Maine.

Those model potato cars?  The routing back in the day was Bangor and Aroostook - Searsport - State of Maine Northern - Boston - Boston and Albany (NYC) - Chicago - The Milwaukee Road - Seattle.

I wonder how long the contemporary Aroostook County potato rush will continue.  I keep hearing about shortages of truck drivers, and yet I fear the railroads will let this business go back to the highways, the same way the short haul intermodal might go.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I'm still working off the backlog from the winter break.  The good news is that more people are catching on to the corona tyranny and assorted other failings of Our Intellectual Betters.

The rot begins at the top.  Joe Biden Is in over His Head.

SEE THE TOTALITARIANISM INHERENT IN THE PROGRESSIVISM.

When you consider yourself on the Side of The Angels, it doesn't matter that you're a docked tail.  Everybody else should get out of the way.  "With Joe Manchin pulling the string on Biden’s signature legislation, it’s past time for him to use his own authority to make progress."  The doddering ficus has no authority over his own brain, let alone the executive actions David Dayen and the Gimme Caucus are hoping for.

Pramila Jayapal has come around to the right idea, after foolishly putting her trust in Biden to work out a deal with Manchin. She said on a press call today that the Biden administration must now pivot to executive action to make progress, as Manchin has stalled it at the legislative level. “We cannot make the same mistake twice,” Jayapal said. “It is abundantly clear that we cannot trust what Sen. Manchin says.”

It just so happens that well over two years ago, [American Prospect] magazine wrote a guideline to using presidential power called the Day One Agenda. We identified 77 discrete actions the next president could take on their [c.q.] own authority simply by executing laws already passed by Congress. In fact, we wrote it imagining precisely the kind of political gridlock we now face, where there just aren’t enough votes to advance policy.

There’s a lot of energy that will be put forward in the coming days to calling executive action a weak substitute for a wide-ranging legislative package like BBB. And certainly, it’s not the preferred path of congressional reporter tip sheets that measure progress by a legislative scoreboard they can easily track. But enormous progress could be made through executive action. Some already has.

I cannot find that passage in the Federal Constitution that defines "enough votes to advance policy." The point of deliberation is to advance those policies, which includes doing no new harm, that are in the interests of the people of the several States. But the self-styled progressives seem to think that a continent can be governed from an island under the aesthetic preferences of Ivy League common rooms.  Even if that governance is an end run around the legislative branch.

For those like Manchin who desire the status quo, a president committed to taking action would put him in the position of wanting to legislate, to ensure he has a say in the process. There’s been no effort to threaten executive action as the antidote to legislative inaction. Between that and the fear that no Build Back Better means reduced economic growth, maybe you can get Manchin to yes on something.

I wouldn’t hold my breath, but executive action is a duty regardless. The function of the president is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. If Biden wants a successful presidency, the only path forward goes through using his own prodigious authority. We wrote the Day One Agenda precisely as a counterpoint to the despair of legislative paralysis. There’s not a ton we can do about the paralysis, but a president can govern. And we know what he can do. We wrote it down and everything.

Nick Arama knows otherwise.

We can’t wait to act for the Constitution or proper process, they’re saying, because we want what we want and we demand Biden give it to us. Hang the law because other members with sense might shoot down what they want. Do you know what that’s called, progressives? That’s called the legislative process, and if you can’t get it that way, you’re not supposed to get it. The president isn’t supposed to make law; that’s not the way the system works. But Democrats keep trying to twist the system into a pretzel.

When they show you who they are, believe them.

The progressives have now issued a statement calling on Joe Biden to act by executive action and impose his (their) will on Americans — even if the Congress wouldn’t pass what the Democrats want. Can we call that an “attack on democracy”? They throw that term around but when they demand that things be done according to their will without passing legislation, it sounds like their actions are a much better fit for that term.

Let them keep their antics up, that docked tail is going to be further docked.

The problem with Democrats is that the most vocal, active, and ascendant wing of their base pushes an agenda that isn't popular. Defunding the police is not popular. No one cares about college loan debt, which is a bailout for the privileged professional elite. And removing the SALT cap on taxes is a giveaway to the rich. This is not a left-wing country.

I'm not sure you can call such a small tranche of the electorate ascendant, but that's a quibble.

To compound this messaging issue, white college-educated liberals have zero patience or tolerance for people who aren't like them. In fact, they hate people who aren't like them. Not only are these people wrong if they disagree with them, but it also goes deeper into questions of morality and character for these people. The level of emotionalism is so high that it leads to tantrums that would drive away any voter with a conscience. Even attempts at debate are seen as enabling white supremacy. And yes, calling everything from math to SAT scores white supremacy is another way to get people to roll their eyes, tune you out, and walk away.

Let us hope that the walking away continues. "The far left is so insane, so fixated on pronouns and problems that aren't based in reality that it's starting to make nonwhite voters vote Republican. And if white and nonwhite working-class voters start to vote for the GOP in near equal numbers, well—electoral pain is what's in store for the Democratic Party."

THE INTELLECTUAL YET IDIOT.

Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, the newest act in the side show is Notre Dame's Cyraina Johnson-Roullier.

On one side, the violent visuals of Jan. 6, 2021, insist that this horrific moment was about the denial of one of America’s most treasured ideals — the peaceful transfer of power. On the other, that it was an act of committed patriots desperately fighting to save their country. Bypassing its hard surface reveals that this terrible juncture was also about language.

More importantly, it concerns an invisible relation between language and color that distracts from the true problem — how we are ever to reconcile such profound differences. Yet despite the pain and disillusionment felt by all, if we do not together find a way to articulate a new possibility, no one will be the winner.

Sometimes a truly stupid and futile gesture is that. But you don't get to show off your culture-studies chops that way.

If we are to successfully empower ourselves to avoid another event in our political future as traumatic as Jan. 6, we must use this moment to understand that many of the roots of its central conflict can be found in language seemingly innocuous, yet color-coded.

We don’t talk about language in terms of its having a “color.” This idea remains underground, in a noiseless place of assumption and belief that substitutes itself for the authentic reality of human experience. As an African American raised on standard English, I’ve often been asked, “Why you talk white?” by others who aren’t. Efforts to understand how such mainstream speech came to be also often raise the question, “Where are you from?”

I wonder is she omitted the verb between "why" and "you" on purpose, or if I should throw an implicit bias flag right there.  On the other hand, that first sentence betrays a lack of facility with clear writing.  Stick around, there are even deeper rabbit holes to go down.

On Jan. 6, 2021, this “color” of language was everywhere, and especially in then-President Donald Trump’s speech at his “Save America” rally, where he urged supporters to “stop the steal.” This idea is what Janet McIntosh, professor of linguistic anthropology and co-editor of the book “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies,” calls a “dog whistle,” or a seemingly innocent allusion with special meaning for others.

Here, McIntosh explains, it is racially charged as “the phrase ‘Stop the Steal’ has special resonance for … (Trump’s) followers, because for years … (he) has stoked the idea that racial minorities are ‘stealing’ from ‘decent’ (white) Americans; (and) that immigrants are pouring in to plunder the nation.”

Even more significant is the idea that this “color” of language is also part of a generalized “language” of race in America. And because this “language” is historically both word- and image-based, as professor of literature Robyn Wiegman explores in her book “American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender,” racially determined words and images are often inextricably intertwined in violent and forcible cultural meanings that are also deeply divided.

As the Pajamas Media people frequently note, if you're hearing the dog whistle, you might be the dog.  Does trotting out the full arsenal of scare quotes and untestable High Theory to turn a protest of ad hoc alterations to voting procedures into the next coming of Jim Crow persuade anyone?  We might expect such foolishness out of a serial plagiarizer who has become a senile figurehead.  But a tenured professor at what is supposedly a highly regarded university?

THE GRINCH'S BETA COUSIN.

Yes, it's time to put the seasonal displays away, but those are put away until the next Festive Season.  Not, though, if you are MSNBC's Hayes Brown.  He wants to cancel the Santa Tracker for once and for all.

This Christmas Eve, the United States military will be busy “tracking” Santa Claus’ sleigh as it makes its reindeer-powered journey across American airspace. What’s today known as the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has been doing so each holiday season for over 60 years. If I had my way, this year would be the last.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Scrooge or some kind of anti-Santa advocate prone to humbuggery, and I acknowledge that the story behind how NORAD’s predecessor started the tradition is cute: a typo in a newspaper for Sears’ Santa hotline was the number for a secret line of communication, originally designed to give the orders to launch a nuclear onslaught against and/or in response to the Soviet Union. Heartwarming stuff, folks.

"Don't get me wrong" is right up there with "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

No, I’d prefer we end the tradition because it’s about time that we decoupled St. Nick from the world’s most powerful military. American culture is saturated with a desire to associate the military with the saccharine. We get videos of soldiers returning home to their pets or children but never questions about why they were deployed for so long or what threat they were fighting; military jets flying over NFL games give us an injection of jingoist testosterone before more regionally focused battles of testosterone are played on the field; and we get the Netflix movie “Operation Christmas Drop,” a seasonally themed rom-com that cheerfully seeks to boost approval for America’s military base in Guam.

"Jingoist testosterone." Gotta like that; and if Guam could be depended on for three electoral votes for Democrats, there'd probably be somebody at MSNBC wanting to make it a state.  The column gets sillier from there, speculating on Santa Claus becoming collateral damage because a tracking computer malfunctioned.  I don't know whether Hayes Brown was naughty or nice, but Jazz Shaw has thoughts.  "You can debate any of the known issues with war and other broader policies without punishing the children who still have the opportunity to enjoy the Christmas season. So for Hayes Brown, I shall award him five out of five lumps of coal in his stocking. Merry Christmas, sir, whether you manage to find a way to enjoy it or not."

QUEEN ELIZABETH HAS GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN.

They probably can't trick-or-treat as the Queen, but Kentucky toddlers can.  And get something close to the Royal Assent.

Jalayne Sutherland, who just turned 2 on Dec. 30, dressed up as Queen Elizabeth II for Halloween.

Dressed in a blue overcoat, hat, a white wig and the queen's signature pearls, the young girl from Florence, Kentucky, posed alongside her family corgis, Rascal and Jack.

“When it comes to corgis, the Queen always comes to mind,” said the girl’s mother Katelyn Sutherland.

The family did the predictable social media things.  They also tagged Buckingham Palace.  The Palace's response was definitely not "We are not amused."

The family received a letter with the Windsor Castle insignia from the Queen's lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Mary Morrison.

Dated Dec. 9, the letter reads, "The Queen wishes me to write and thank you for your letter, and for the photograph you thoughtfully enclosed. Her Majesty thought it kind of you to write to her, and The Queen was pleased to see the photograph of your daughter, Jalayne, in her splendid outfit. Her Majesty hopes you all have a Merry Christmas, and I am enclosing a little information about the Royal Pets, which Jalayne might like to have."

Good. There is more than enough crankiness, humorlessness, and excess earnestness, and I enjoy being able to document the occasional item that is none of those.

THERE IS NO MEDIA BIAS.

Washington Post contributor Manuel Roig-Franzia is simply an objective observer of late-night television.

In [Greg] Gutfeld's America, President Biden is a doddering geezer. The mainstream media is essentially a house organ for the left. And the nation isn't engaged in a necessary national conversation on race, and racial disparities in housing, health care and employment. Instead, he aims to persuade his audience that the nation is consumed by destructive and divisive "reverse racism" and an insidious campaign against Whites.

Seriously? In real life, Joe Biden is a doddering geezer. In real life, the mainstream media is a house organ for the left.  In real life, I sometimes fear that some communities might be one looted strip mall away from becoming sundown towns.  In real life, Student Affairs and admissions offices occasionally lump "White" with "Asian" (itself a massive aggregation of several distinct ethnicities) as people to be excluded from inclusion efforts.  Would he prefer that late-night comedians laugh the Woke into oblivion, or take more direct actions?

What Eric Deggans, NPR's television critic, sees at play in programs such as "Gutfeld!" is an effort to undermine the idea that there is systemic racism in this country.

"Some of the ways you push back against that is through humor," says Deggans, an MSNBC contributor and author of the book, "Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation." "You try to turn the term 'woke' into a joke and a pejorative."

Better that they laugh at the Excessively Earnest People.  As well as at Hunter Biden and Brian Stelter.