WHEN THE FACULTY LOSES STEWARDSHIP OF THE CURRICULUM, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed posed a question to his "wise and worldly" readers.

Last Friday I asked my wise and worldly readers who work at teaching-intensive colleges what the last step is in the faculty interview process.

The answers varied, but they shared a common denominator: the final interview was always one-on-one, with a high-ranking administrator (dean, VP or president) making the final call.

That was … surprising.

When the final interview for a faculty position rests with a dean or higher, working alone, then that dean or higher is cast into one of two roles: either a rubber stamp for the committee or a rogue. Neither is great. A rubber stamp is a waste of time, and a rogue undermines the work of the committee (and potentially introduces all sorts of bias).

I wonder if what we're seeing is the consequences of forty years of institutions of higher (more or less) learning relying more heavily on cheap and contingent labor.  There are people who value being in a teaching-intensive environment, but as the institutional memory is downsized by attrition, if not by administrative ukase, there might be fewer people available to serve on personnel committees.  The dean might be the only person with something resembling institutional memory the potential hire interacts with.

PURE JOY.

The corona tyranny is lifted in Nevada schools.

A small number of the kids appear not to be reacting. I wonder if those have parents like press secretary Jen "Raggedy Ann" Psaki who are OK with their "rising kindergartener" muzzled ad infinitum.

For the most part, though, the kids recognize that they've been set free.

But the children have not been happy. And if you doubt that, you only have to view this viral video showing children at an elementary school in Las Vegas upon learning that their masks are gone as of the following day (although you'll note that many of the children simply stripped off their masks immediately).

The mask ukases remain in effect in Illinois schools. We'll have our monthly report on the effects of the Illinois corona tyranny tomorrow.

THE BEST YOU CAN HOPE TO DO IS CAPTURE THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS.

I return to a familiar theme.  "Complex Adaptive Systems Do Pretty Much What They Darn Well Please." In that post, I quoted at length from a Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn essay on the difficulties of city planning, particularly if highly disaggregated.

Even scarier, with a complex, adaptive system, the same input in similar circumstances at a different time could yield wildly different results. Just because you were right once – or a thousand times – doesn’t mean you will be right the next time. And when you consider what we’re betting here on being right, well….you should be scared too.

What drives me insane about most economists is the lack of humility, the supreme confidence in their own ability to understand what they are doing. It is the same thing that drives me crazy about engineers, planners, economic development advisors and the whole range of professions that profess to use simple equations to explain infinite complexity. They don’t know what they think they know.

And now the same reality comes for the climate modellers.

This is especially true of the heart of the matter: the computer climate models we use to make predictions about future changes in the climate. But as our computer climate models are refined with more and more raw data and endless tweaks of the climate simulations, the uncertainties have arguably grown larger rather than smaller. This is not as outlandish as it may seem, given we are expecting scientists to get a grasp of a phenomenon with so many factors and scientific sub-specialties, from oceanography to forestry.

The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is "in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model." There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem, which some Wall Street Journal contributors described thusly.

First, deep in the story is an excellent description of the complexity—and also the defects—of climate models. The main climate models contain over 2 million lines of computer code (much of it apparently still in Fortran). Even after an intensive five-year process to rework the code and acquire better data at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.”

Strictly speaking, you have to write algorithms to capture atmospheric movement almost at the molecular level. That involves way more than two million lines of code, and you're still a long way from done.  (When we've been here ten thousand years, Bright, shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise, Than when we first begun.)

In addition, as we add code, we run out of computing capacity.  That's something where Divine Intervention can't help you.

Steven Koonin’s recent book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, which contains one of the best discussions for the layperson of how climate models work that I’ve ever seen, gilds this point: “Many important [climate] phenomena occur on scales smaller than the 100 km (60 mile) grid size (such as mountains, clouds, and thunderstorms).” In other words, the accuracy of the models is highly limited. Why can’t we scale down the model resolution? Koonin, who taught computational physics at CalTech, explains: “A simulation that takes two months to run with 100 km grid squares would take more than a century if it instead used 10 km grid squares. The run time would remain at two months if we had a supercomputer one thousand times faster than today’s—a capability probably two or three decades in the future.”

Put another way, it would take longer to extrapolate a century-long climate emergency on the computer than it would take for the emergency to materialize. And rewriting the code in something other than FORTRAN would not change that reality.  Let the fun begin.  "The Wall Street Journal reports that the newest models kept spitting out even more dire predictions of future warming than many previous models—but that the climate modelers don’t believe the projections."  In part, that's because the models fail one relatively cheap accuracy check, known in some circles as "backcasting" and in others as "calibration."  If you use observed data from some previous time, and your model gives you something tolerably close to what came after (where "tolerably close" means "isn't so far off reality that even a true believer referee has to reject the paper") you might be able to do some extrapolating.  Apparently, the current suite of models doesn't do well with Ice Ages.  And the modellers aren't even close to capturing some really essential elements.  "One big reason the 100 sq km resolution of climate models is inadequate is that the behavior of clouds and water vapor can’t be adequately modeled—something the [Internationa Panel on Climate Change] reports usually admit in the technical sections the media never read."  The ad hoc modifications you might do to account for clouds tend not to work well.

Maybe, between the corona scares and the environmental scares, it's time to place less confidence in extrapolations, particularly those sensitively dependent on initial conditions, whether on the ground, or in the prior beliefs of the programmers.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, CANADIAN DIVISION.

Failed politician Linda McQuaig attempts to demonize and downplay the pushback against corona tyranny.  How well did it turn out?

The occupation represents an abject failure by the Ottawa police — as well as by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, both of whom have been fearful of triggering a confrontation that might antagonize right-wingers in Western Canada and rural Ontario.

By allowing the convoy to be coddled like this, Trudeau and Ford have given the freedom-bullies a sense of their own importance that is as oversized as their trucks.

Alberta and Saskatchewan premiers have lifted their mask ukases, haven't they?

Now, with a 12-day occupation of the nation’s capital under their belts, the freedom-bullies have been catapulted to the centre of the national stage, looking like a force that’ll have to be reckoned with in the future. Diane Deans, chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board, declared: “This is a nation-wide insurrection.”

No, it isn’t. It’s just a small group of belligerent men with very big trucks.

I’ve been part of much larger demonstrations that got a fraction of the attention. If these guys hadn’t been handed such an easy win in Ottawa, they — and their cause — would have likely gotten no more than a few minutes airtime on the national news.

That's not how it's playing in Paris or Brussels or Wellington, and the homeland security types in Los Angeles are wetting themselves over the prospect of a sympathy convoy in Los Angeles, and it's not that bringing Skyline Chili to the Super Bowl leads to greenhouse gas emissions.  (Too bad the Packer special teams messed up.  A chili throw-down between Cincinnati and Green Bay chili heads would have been epic.)

And what is with the promiscuous use of "insurrection" these days?  Doesn't an insurrection require the storming of a government building followed by drumhead trials of public officials?  Maybe with Eisenstein filming the re-enactment.

Maybe those Russian trucks in the borderlands are massing for a vaccine protest.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, ENVIRONMENTALIST DIVISION.

Dear reader, this, too, is a true story.

Beginning in June, all sunrooms included in new construction projects will be required to show they will not create “unwanted solar gain.” The change, noted Daily Mail, is part of “a raft of measures” aimed at “future-proofing” homes against summers where temperatures are predicted to reach 104º F. Though “well above what is currently experienced in Britain,” such highs would “cause conservatories to become unbearably hot, often increasing the temperature uncomfortably indoors too.”

This is a proposal from the U.K., where they're a long way from hitting three digits Fahrenheit most of the time. As the columnist notes, "More than half of the United States just laughed out loud and said 'Hold my beer.'"

In addition, did anybody even think about how an attached sunroom might come in handy in the winter, when most of the consumption of fossil fuels to heat houses go on?

According to Daily Mail, the objective of the new rules is to “improve domestic ventilation” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. (I wasn’t aware that sunrooms emit anything — least of which, greenhouse gases.) As a result, window sizes will be limited according to which direction they face and whether the home is likely to overheat.

Presumably, the process-worshippers are fretting about people using their central air conditioning more intensively on those two or three hot summer days because of the ambient heat coming from those conservatories.

Did it ever occur to them that large windows facing south and west take some of the load off the central heating in the winter?  There are several such windows at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, including (gasp!) an all-season sunroom, and from September to mid-November and mid-February to late April, the heat contained therein substantially lessens the use of central heating.

NEWS OF THE WEAK, STUDENT DIVISION.

It's generally my practice to cut collegiate columnists some slack, because they're still learning and there is much they don't yet know.  But then you get this complaint.

There is just one factor that is not included within the push for supporting smaller businesses: fat people. While consumers worry about the environmental costs and capitalistic practices when it comes to shopping at smaller companies, I have to worry about my body size.

That's a Northern Star columnist, and she's offering that complaint in all earnestness. Not even The Onion would dare go to the carbon footprint of plus-sized clothing (which either is machine produced for a mass market, or it has to be custom sewn), although they might serve up something like this.  "Sure, it is amazing to include the size XS, but not including the other end of that spectrum is oppressive to fat people."  Throw in enough buzzwords and nobody notices how solipsistic you're being, I suppose.

Lots of brands purposely make their plus-size clothing years behind on trends due to fatphobia. This leaves many fat women with little to no choices for fashionable clothes, and unable to shop ethically or support small clothing businesses.

As someone who lingers between M/XL and has short legs, it is near impossible for me to find trendy, fitting clothing at any ethical, small business. I can barely find properly fitting clothes at big stores like Target or American Eagle, despite them having an extremely wide range of sizes. I imagine that those bigger than me have an even more difficult time.

While environmental and ethical standards are important factors to consider while shopping sustainably, the idea of size inclusion often goes ignored.

Perhaps it's a poverty problem. The United States are where you find obese poor people.  It's never possible to be too rich, and if you're not too thin, that might be the way to be able to have plus-size stuff that looks fashionable custom made.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association began stratifying its basketball tournament by school size.  I suspect that was reality, the Hebron, Illinois title or plot of Hoosiers just didn't happen often.

The first winner in the big-school division was Milwaukee Hamilton.

In 1972, Milwaukee Hamilton started off as a team that didn't appear state championship bound.

"At the beginning of the season we were not gelling," Kevin Soucie says. "We were faltering. In fact, we lost three of (the) first four games."

Then they reeled off 18 straight wins, rallying from double digits down to beat Neenah for the championship.

There's a video at the link. There was a 35 year gathering, that was an early opportunity for me to use the Elburn rail station. It wasn't until 2005 that the school put up a banner for the event. Yes, the words of the school fight song were set to "The Stripper," even though the school system honchos didn't approve.

REALITY IS A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION.

The formulaic introduction to economics might go something like "the study of how people allocate scarce resources among competing uses."  A person considers a resource scarce if he'd like to have more of it than he currently has.  The competing use takes the form of another person also considering it scarce.

We could allocate the resources by force, the winner of the conflict establishing ownership.

We could allocate by force at one remove, with rulers determining who gets what, and enforcing the outcomes by having a monopoly on violence.

We could allocate by force at a second remove, by establishing and enforcing institutions within which people trade for mutual gain.

The problem of allocating scarce resources among conflicting uses does not go away.  Somebody, perhaps everybody, makes do with less, or perhaps does without.

When it comes to allocating health resources, Our Political Masters have trouble determining whether the second remove is even possible, or if the first remove is still the way to go.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Another week passes, another roundup of reinforcement of Cold Spring Shops themes.

Follow the links for the elaborations on the pithy bits.

IT CAME TO THIS WHEN SHE ROPED OFF THE SEED AISLES.

Governmental excess has been a depressingly familiar feature of the past couple of years, and Michigan governor Gretchen "Schlachterfrau" Whitmer earned high marks for silliness, with her rules on what home-improvement stores could or could not sell, and on how many people could occupy, or even launch, a pleasure boat.  When courts ruled she exceeded her authority, she just kept on exceeding her authority.  She even went so far as to suggest that making the ficus president would mean the end of the corona tyranny.  No dice.

We still live in a constitutional republic, and when the dictatorial governors don't play by the rules, It is the Right and the Obligation of the People to make the necessary alterations.  I mean, it's so bad in Michigan that Kelly Stafford left for California and its corona tyranny.

But the Schlachterfrau's ukases, and the implicit elite contempt for Normals, continue, and some Normals with big rigs have said Enough.  You can't say, Schlachterfrau, that I didn't warn you.

"These governors and departmental secretaries have a better chance of keeping their offices by treating their constituents as citizens with the rights to dissent and to review, rather than as children to be bossed around."  Better to be voted out, which is what constituents who have run out of patience do, than to be subject to what can happen when subjects run out of patience.

In this case, it's Canadian subjects who have run out of patience, but the Schlachterfrau is feeling the pain.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called on Canada to take "all necessary and appropriate steps to immediately and safely reopen traffic so we can continue growing our economy, supporting good-paying jobs, and lowering costs for families."

"Our communities and automotive, manufacturing and agriculture businesses are feeling the effects," she added. "It’s hitting paychecks and production lines. That is unacceptable."

The Anderson Economic Group in Lansing calculated an initial estimate for lost direct wages in the Michigan auto industry as a result of the protest beginning Monday at more than $51 million.

It's a little late for somebody who was willing to cordon off the seed aisles, and allow Illinoisans, but not Michiganders, to go pleasure boating, to fret about jobs put on hold, isn't it?  No more corona tyranny, no more job action at the Ambassador Bridge.

U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Stockbridge, said that she hopes Canadian leaders reach "a safe and quick resolution" but added that "Americans are fed up with government mandates."

"It’s time for the Biden administration to listen to the people," she said. "These mandates are going to cripple our supply chain, and the Democrats can blame freedom loving truck drivers, but the real blame is on the vaccine requirements at the border."

So far, no liquor stores have been burned, no pawnshops have been looted, and no "fiery but peaceful" chyrons have been seen on cable news.

With the public health authorities suggesting the coronavirus is becoming endemic, and pandemic mitigations ought soon end, why the freedom protests now?  Perhaps because sometimes evidence accumulates that public officials are going skiing on that slippery slope.  Slow the spread was the bridge to masking which was the bridge to the shots that were our bridge to freedom, but Nature and the political class had other plans.  This late into the emergency, is a new international vaccine mandate on the relatively few holdouts among the truckers necessary?  Or does it bespeak a pattern of abuse that began with the closure of roadside eateries and truck stops two years ago?  There's not much we can do about Nature, but we must push back against the professional managerial class.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-INFLICTED LOSS OF AUTHORITY.

University of Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank is making a career move.

Blank called the state’s political divide the “greatest existential threat” to UW-Madison.

She said politicians are using the university as chips in “their partisan wars.”

The political divide can translate to less state funding, which can lead to fewer federal dollars dependent on a state match.

She added that the polarization is leading to people losing trust and confidence in the university.

It's long been a talking point from Bascom Hill that those mean legislators are picking on the university.

Sometimes, those talking points might be valid, but too often, the university comes off as taking sides in ways that might make legislators join me in being reluctant to continue to cut checks.

IMAGINE NO COMMUNISM.

It's easy, if you try.

Enjoy.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SOCIABLE?

If there's broad consensus on what the common schools ought be teaching, the school board election is probably no big deal, and it doesn't much matter who runs, or who turns out to vote.

That, however, is not reality for school boards.

“We’re certainly seeing the nationalization of school board races here in Wisconsin and across the country,” UW-Oshkosh associate professor of public administration Michael Ford said. “You’re seeing a heck of a lot of talk about things like vaccine mandates, critical race theory, things that are actually pretty disconnected from the reality of being a school board member.”

Yes and no.  Are school boards approving curricula that don't sit well with parents?  Have they been captured by public employee unions?  Have the public health measures been debated in Congress, in legislatures, in the city council?

While more civic engagement is always welcome, politicizing such historically nonpartisan races threatens to make governing more difficult, Ford said.

“The worry is obstructionism,” he said. “You have a one-issue candidate or, more importantly, if you have a few candidates who are just hellbent on conflict, you really start to mess with the group dynamic of a governing board and grind the process to a halt. That’s the real fear.”

Recent efforts that have gummed up the workings of government, Ford said, include more than a dozen school board recall elections, launched in response to COVID mitigation policies, that took place across the state since the pandemic began. A parent group in Oshkosh that was vocal about the school district’s mask policies had a few candidates throw their name into the hat to seek seats on the School Board.

“Just about every major school district in the state has at least one candidate who is running on an issue like critical race theory, and if you had gone pre-COVID-19 that was not a thing. That was never an issue anybody had talked about,” he said.

“It’s more of a frustration that some folks have with state and federal government and their inability to gain traction at the state and federal level has brought some of these more social issues to the surface at the local level.”

Put another way, had Congress or the state legislatures or the city councils been involved in approving the public health measures, the school boards might not have become contested territory.  Whether parents were quicker to find out about critical studies or other intrusions into the curriculum because they could see the indoctrination on their kids' computers is an area for further study.  But it is not a defense of the status quo to complain about "gumming up the works" of making policy.  That's a valid outcome where there is consensus, but where has there been consensus on anything, lately?  Well, maybe in ultra-woke Madison.  Not so much elsewhere in the state, or nationwide.

[Madison political scientist Barry Burden] said some of the people seeking public office in Wisconsin are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden and Gov. Tony Evers and motivated to enter the race by issues such as COVID mitigation policies and equity initiatives in K-12 curriculum.

“It’s anger more than enthusiasm, and the people who they’re angry at are the incumbents,” he said.

In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again.

Yes, if the public employee union endorses a slate, and the city is full of ... public employees, that's not a surprise.  They deserve the indisciplined schools and the children rendered illiterate by woke education that they'll get.  Voters elsewhere in the country can also see that outcome, and they get to say no.  If that means a loss of consensus and comity for the time being, so be it.

REVISITING THE CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE.

I've long taken a dim view of the REMFs in higher education converting the course outline into something akin to an end user license agreement.

Now comes M. S. Stewart, just in time for the end of the academic year, offering advice to Inside Higher Ed readers.  "Print the syllabus out and return to your own student days in your mind. Is this a course you would have wanted to take yourself?"  That comes, only after blocks of text that includes nuggets such as this.  "If offices such as campus security, disability services, the registrar and so on require boilerplate sections, do explain to students that the voice may be different but the shared values are there."

It's gotten to such a state in higher education that when a professor calls attention to the folly of the deanlets' micromanagement by complying with it, the best one J. B. Field could do was somehow defend the micromanagement.

A recent occurrence that bubbled out of the world of higher education and onto the radar of national news media like The New York Times and CNN concerned a stunt by Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who hid instructions in his syllabus for locating a $50 bill hidden in a library locker. At the end of the semester, he shared an image of the $50, still in the locker.

Whatever the professor’s motivations were, many observers quickly concluded that his students should hang their heads in shame for their failure to read the syllabus. Others took a different view and suggested that the professor was setting his students up to fail just so he could gain clout on social media. As Kevin Gannon pointed out, the putative clue was terse and buried in one of the many paragraphs that universities require faculty members to include in every syllabus.

Most of that verbiage is useless.  But if you write for the generally less paywalled house organ for business as usual in higher education, you might have to defend the rule, no matter how foolish it is.

I continue to be uneasy with the idea of a professor showing his students up the way that Wilson did and think sharing his trick on public social media is tacky, for lack of a better word. More generally, though, I believe this moment demonstrates that the problem is not with our students but with our syllabi.

As it stands, the syllabus is a document that has to function in at least three different ways. For the professor writing the syllabus, it is an introduction to the course and a sort of intellectual itinerary for the ground the course will cover. That’s important to many students, but they also approach the syllabus as something like a contract that stipulates the work they need to do to earn the grade they desire. And while the university may be concerned with those intellectual and academic aspects, the syllabus also functions for it as a space to share statements about various university policies that deal with issues such as academic integrity and compliance with Title IX, the Americans With Disabilities Act and COVID-related policies. My employer, for example, requires faculty members to append a 10-page document concerning university policies to the end of each syllabus or to share it with students as a separate document.

Many colleges and universities mandate what seems like an ever-expanding litany of material that must be included on every syllabus. Unfortunately, that approach can make the policies seem less rather than more important. When the same text appears on every syllabus, and students see it four or five times in short order, they often start to ignore it. If you have ever skimmed a rental car contract or clicked “Agree” on terms of service for a piece of software without reading it closely, you are familiar with this dynamic.

Presenting institutional policies in this way can have the unfortunate effect of trivializing them. The principles enshrined in Title IX or the Americans With Disabilities Act are more than “fine print” for survivors of sexual assault or people with disabilities. We do our students a disservice if we think of them as “boilerplate.” The academic part of a syllabus is important, but the due date for Essay No. 1 or which edition of McTeague to use fade into irrelevance if a sexual assault survivor finds themselves newly traumatized because they disclosed their experience to a mandatory Title IX reporter without realizing what that might mean for them.

The compromise he came up with was to create two documents, a course outline and a separate supplement that I would be tempted to call "navigating the therapeutic bureaucracy."  Apparently, though, all faculty have been conscripted into the role of "mandatory Title IX reporter" even though they're not well briefed in on the dos and dont's.

POWER PLAY BASKETBALL.

The box score for a collegiate basketball game suggests that Ohio University dressed seven players for a weekend visit to Northern Illinois, and two of them fouled out.

The minutes played column credits Ohio with two hundred minutes played.  Reality was different.

After NIU stretched their lead to as large as 16 at 72-56 with 7:34 remaining, the Bobcats went on a 11-2 run to make it a seven-point game with 4:15 to play. Playing with only five available players, an injury to Hooks at the 3:31 mark forced Ohio to play with only four on the court for the remainder of the contest. The Huskies utilized the player advantage to secure the 80-70 win.

There's apparently no provision for a disqualified player re-entering the game, or it might be so onerous that it's better to play short-handed.  The game broadcaster recalled a high school game that ended five against three.  All the short-handed side can do is play the box without one or the triangle without two and hope the team on the power play doesn't run up the score.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

The Pajamas Media types like to characterize Bill Maher as "of the left."  It's more accurate to think of him as left-libertarian, and his Politically Incorrect show of thirty years ago had lots of "party of LOL and WTF " moments.

It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL😂 and WTF🤦‍♂️. pic.twitter.com/gpdAY4vhEV

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) January 29, 2022

Enjoy.

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

I've invoked that trifecta so many times I should apply for a copyright.

A bad experience at an airport in winter (are there any other kind?) has Owen Pickford picking up the cry.  "High Speed Rail Is a Solution for Terrible Airlines."  Do it right, and you can carry it off with diesel trains topping out at 110 to 125, but you have to get the routing and the frequencies right.

My last terrible flying experience was a trip from Columbus to St. Louis. There are no direct flights between these to major cities, so you can drive 6.5 hours, bus 7.5 hours, or spend 4.5 hours flying through Chicago.

Since we were just spending three days in St. Louis, we chose to fly. Our flight departed 40 minutes late and then spent 45 minutes on the tarmac in Chicago. We ran to our connection and saw the airplane still attached to the jet bridge, but alas, they didn’t let us board. The gate was closed. A customer service agent told us the problem was coded as “weather” — so no compensation — and the earliest flight we could get on would be 1pm the following day. Our three day trip turned into a two day trip.

Columbus, Ohio, is one of several state capitals without a passenger train of any kind, and the direct passenger service for St. Louis quit with the Carter malaise taking down the National Limited.  The latest wish list for the North Central states is still too much a hub-and-spoke system.

Unfortunately, the proposed alignments still don’t have a direct route from any Ohio cities to St. Louis. Instead, the proposal recommends a hub-and-spoke system where nearly everything runs through Chicago. Much of it is not really a high-speed rail network, more like “higher” speed. Only on “Core Express” corridors will train speeds exceed 125 mph, while the “Regional” sections will be in the 90 mph to 125 mph range under the FRA plan. An incremental upgrade on the Chicago to St. Louis segment is already under development and last month saw speeds on some segments increase to 90 mph and will see some 110 mph sections once it’s done. When that corridor will achieve its planned “Core Express” status, with speeds above 125 mph, is not yet clear. As of now, the total travel time is 5.5 hours to cover 284 miles.

Get some additional lines, such as a corridor-style service linking St. Louis to Pittsburgh or Cleveland by way of Indianapolis and Columbus, and people might use it. 

Drive when you can. We draw a six-hour drive circle around our house. If we’re within six hours, we’re in the car. The airport experience and the hassles associated with flying these days make driving a much less stressful trip. That’s true even with gas prices where they are today.

That's advice from a retired airline pilot.  The train likely isn't in his mind because, apart from the current Chicago regional network, such as it is, the Northeast Corridor, and possibly Southern California, there's not much of a circle.  But a train cruising at 110-125 will be able to get people to many of those destinations within the six hour driving circle in three to five hours.

OUR GERONTOCRACY.

The world's oldest valley girl is vice-president, and that puts the party of Silent Generation governance in a bad place.  "At 28 percent approval, say goodbye to Kamala Harris being Plan B to an aging Biden."  That makes it all the more important to keep the de jure president, who is in his late seventies, alive.

When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.

The president was seated more than 10 feet from everyone, including Vice President Kamala Harris and members of his Cabinet.

A White House staffer who was wearing a surgical mask when Biden entered the room was quickly handed an N95 version.

The precautions aren't a good look.

It’s no surprise that unusual steps are taken to protect any president. But the strict precautions could also threaten to undercut the Biden administration’s own efforts to tell Americans — especially those who are vaccinated and boosted — that they can get on with something closer to their normal lives in the face of the omicron wave.

The de facto president, who is even older than the de jure president, favors those precautions. Deal with it.

THE INDICATOR SPECIES OF THE STROAD.

I found the following clip on a Strong Towns post.

The voice is friendly, intimate, measured, detail-oriented, and humorous. There is a hint of non-venomous, non-judgmental snark. It’s your favorite, funny, smart colleague you might Slack with a couple times a week, if you’re in the business.

Watch the video, and judge for yourself whether the producer got the tone right.

Let me remind you, dear reader. "Cold Spring Shops, however, welcomes conversation about transportation policy on the merits of the modes, rather than on the ideology of the advocates."  I've often wondered whether the tone of transit or bike advocates is as much a turn-off to people who might be receptive to some of the substantive points (there's not enough money to maintain the roads using current methods of finance, it's impossible to have fast flow through commercial areas, and it's impractical to build your way out of congestion) and yet get encounter an off-putting level of preening from the oh-so-hip types.

DO OUR POLITICAL MASTERS REALLY WANT US PAYING ATTENTION?

I've contended that governance is a drag on civilization, because people have to think about ever-larger bundles of policies being imposed on ever more people.  Sometimes I consider the possibility that devolving power from national governments, or the international institutions, to regional, state, or local institutions or government might be the sole way for those national and international politicians to save themselves.

That's not the way Tom "Death of Expertise" Nichols sees it.  "'I know my reaction to the Tom Brady coverage is churlish,' said Nichols (Ph.D.), 'but it’s also consistent with 40 years of my astonishment that Americans know everything about sports figures but can’t read a goddamn map or name their own member of Congress but who then bitch about democracy.'" It might be that Congressional districts are too big, or that as long as the streets are plowed and the power stays on, there's not much to get worked up about.  Perhaps it has never occurred to Mr Nichols that if those Americans who astonish him paid more attention to politics, and voted, the outcomes might not be to his liking, or to the pleasure of the professional managerial classes?

What Nichols seems to be suggesting is that there is something wrong with the fact that many Americans are aware that, say, Jonathan Taylor is the 2021 rushing leader but do not know that the House Minority Leader is a fellow named Kevin McCarthy. I am not familiar with any public polling that attempts to compare knowledge of or interest in professional football with the Schoolhouse Rock understanding of politics whose absence Professor Nichols laments, but my sense is that many millions of Americans will find themselves on the receiving end of his implied censure.

But what is he actually complaining about? Is it really such a strange thing to think that for the vast majority of people in this country, football is simply more important than politics, especially in the narrow electoral sense of the word? Readers of this website are far more likely to be interested in politics than the average American, but I would pose to them the following question: When was the last time an action or decision made by a member of Congress—your own representative in the House or any other—meaningfully altered you and your family? I suspect that very few would be able to answer the question, and that even fewer still would say that an elected official had done anything in living memory that inspired joy, awe, longing, envy or any of the other emotions (save perhaps despair) that millions of us experience weekly, indeed even hourly, during football season.

Food for thought there. Perhaps the parties have gotten so good at drawing Congressional districts, for instance, that even if the representative from that person's district was the influential voter in a close vote, that person would most likely approve of the outcome (whether that person voted or not).

But how often does such a thing happen?  There's no regular order with each Cabinet department having a separate appropriation, only a quarter century of continuing resolutions, and for the past two years Congress and the state legislatures have mostly been irrelevant as the two presidents, and fifty governors, have issued ukase after ukase.  If we gripe about that, Mr Nichols, it's not democracy we're griping about, it's tyranny.

Besides, as Matthew Walther continues, politics-as-practiced looks more like sport than serious discourse.

This is to say nothing of the fact that politics in the sense meant by Professor Nichols is something its followers mostly enjoy at precisely the level on which football fans engage with their sport. Being “informed” does not mean understanding why it is that store shelves are empty or being able to make the case for giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine (one of the esteemed professor’s hobby horses); it means watching the Red Team beat the Blue Team and vice versa.

That is, if your participation is engaging only on social media, or you get your information from watching cable news squabbles, you're delegating the thinking, such as it is, to others, who are paid by the sound bite, not by the insight.