THE WAY TO DEMONSTRATE THE FOLLY OF A RULE IS TO COMPLY WITH IT.

There's nothing like the sound of brackets busting.  Six men's tournaments ago, there were still a few perfect brackets going into the round of sixteen.  As of tonight, none, garnichts.

As of [20 March 2017], out of over eighteen million entries, all of eighteen have the round of sixteen correct.  It is likely that substantially more than eighteen will have the round of four correct, and a non-trivial subset of those will name the team that cuts down the nets.  (But that will be neither last year's winner Villanova nor Duke from the year before that, and Connecticut's men have been cheering their women classmates for some time already.)

But the failure of more contestants to identify the round of sixteen is a signal of a system failure.  The Wise Experts are up front about rigging the competition, something that promoters of wrestling have long been accused of.  As ESPN's Eamonn Brennan has it, "It's about doing what the bracketing principles and procedures are supposed to do, especially with top seeds, teams that have spent months earning their spots. It's about rewarding those who deserve to be rewarded."  That is, the teams the Wise Experts would like to see meeting each other either in the regional finals or in the round of four get to go through the weakest opponents first, while the middling-strength teams get to test their mettle against each other in a game or two before they get to take on the deserving rich.

"Them that has gets" is still the thinking today. "Say what you will about the NCAA, but it generally seeds its men’s basketball tournament well. The dominance of the No. 1-seeds over the past 38 years bears that out."  Then along comes Farleigh Dickinson, and you'd think the sports pundits were parsing the latest pending indictment of a former president.  An example:

It's the NCAA tournament! This is what happens. More so than just three high-major programs losing in the first round so far, it's one 1-seed and one 2-seed. These are seeds that used to be almost immune to first-round upsets. A 1-seed never lost until 2018. A 2-seed was obviously less rare, but now it's happened six times in the last three NCAA tournaments. There was parity at the top of the sport all season, and it's showing itself this week.

Professional basketball and professional hockey have best-of series for a reason. On any given night the player with a hot hand can cramp up, or something can be bothering a steady supporting player, and the favorites are showering up to go home.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The Chicago area O Scale March Meet has returned to its traditional St. Patrick's Weekend dates, and the Gloucester Branch will be available for layout tours.  The summer projects were preparing the part of the train room that is under the garage, and there might be some operable track for visitors.

The Gloucester Branch junction with the Eastern Route Main Line is almost ready for track.  The paint booth will be hidden behind the backdrop here.  The continuation of the Main Line will be this summer's project.

The Gloucester Branch is double track as far as Gloucester, with a few crossovers to allow any local freight train to get out of the way of passenger trains as well as to run around for switching industries.

The section from Beverly Shores to Manchester-by-the-sea should also be installed during the summer.

As long as I'm taking liberties with some of the town names, I can add some industries, such as a fruit broker at Beverly Shores.

We'll see about action videos later this weekend.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's St. Patrick's Day, so let's get the drinking right.  "Today’s super-hopped IPAs are close to undrinkable."  On the other hand, with brackets being busted on the first day, maybe headache in a glass is the only way of dealing with the insanity. If equity is so important, why not eliminate varsity sports?  Because it's the time of the season for recruit, redshirt, and develop.  "We have to get it right with high school guys, we've got to develop and we've got to retain."  (And do so in a way that gets results in the regular season and the tournament?)

Three years ago, the St. Patrick's weekend celebrations were our last breath of freedom.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

WE SHALL TAX AND TAX, AND SPEND AND SPEND, AND ELECT AND ELECT.

Ronald Reagan used to mock that formulation as "tax and spend, tax and spend." His Congressional opposition would correct him to the Harry Hopkins original, and claim that the Harry Hopkins formulation both won elections and worked better for the country.  There's accumulating evidence that the Brains Trust didn't fix the Great Depression.  Not only that, in their efforts to prevent widespread bank runs, they inadvertently set the stage for future bank failures.  "The moral hazard that deposit insurance creates for moneylenders only manifested itself in the aftermath of the stagflation provoked by the so-called Great Society."

It's also a tic of the self-styled progressives to accuse their critics of wanting to "turn back the clock."  That's amusing, here we are, forty years after the beginning of my academic career with a return of stagflation and another series of bank failures.  I thought we had seen the end of "got a problem, get a program" during the 1980s and 1990s.  But if you want clocks turned back, it was at the beginning of my life that Communist China and (then Soviet) Russia were in agreement on what Marxism was, and here we are with Communist China and (now Tsarist) Russia in agreement on who the main enemy again is.

Now comes the latest campaign document disguised as a budget proposal from the Jarrett regency.  It's probably dead on arrival in the House, as well as being unrealistic and foolish.  It's sound politics all the same, as long as there are True Believers,

IT'S BETTER WITH ELEPHANTS, EQUESTRIANS, AND A TRAIN.

Just over a year ago, we had hopeful news.

Feld Entertainment is casting for a new version of the Greatest Show on Earth, as it plans an animal-free relaunch of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2023.

It's always and a train.  The culture was not destroyed in a day, and making the itinerant circus great again will take more than a few days.

There are other itinerant circuses still touring, and their 2022 seasons will be revealed over winter.

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

Our position has long been "As long as there are jugglers, acrobats, mimes, and contortionists, there will be circus.  So let it be with Ringling Barnum.  That's how the Ringling Brothers got started in Baraboo, before the trains or the menagerie."

So will it be with Ringling Barnum. There will even be a short stretch of time when the Fiserv Forum will not be available for basketball.  "The reimagined circus will start traveling through the country this fall, with a focus on the 'superhuman feats' of the human performers, including high-wire, trapeze and bicycle acts."

The itinerant circuses are still touring.  Find yourself a circus and go to it.

HOW PATHETIC IS AMTRAK?

Weather impacts continue to disrupt Amtrak trains.

Washouts in California, plus heavy snows there and along BNSF Railway’s Hi Line across North Dakota and Montana, are among obstacles thrown at Amtrak’s national network the last several days, precipitating cancellations, significant delays, and route truncations.

A washout north of San Luis Obispo, Calif., caused the Coast Starlight to be cancelled in both directions between Los Angeles and Emeryville, Calif., on Sunday; the train is showing “sold out” on that segment for the next few days.

Another washout over the weekend near Bellingham, Wash., canceled all Canada-bound Cascades service at least through Sunday.

And that's before the latest nor'easter rolled into the ... northeast.

Citing “forecasted severe weather conditions,” Amtrak has announced these cancellations and schedule changes in the northeast beginning later today (Tuesday, March 14).

The Amtrak Downeaster website indicates that northbound train No. 689, scheduled to depart Boston at 10:30 p.m., and southbound train No. 688, scheduled to depart Brunswick, Maine, at 5:45 p.m., are cancelled. Cancelled on Wednesday are northbound No. 681, scheduled to depart Boston at 8:50 a.m., and southbound No. 680, scheduled to depart Brunswick at 4:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, according to an alert on the Amtrak website, trains 448 and 449, the Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited, are cancelled today between Albany, N.Y., and Boston.

In other changes , the following northbound trains are now scheduled to terminate in New York today rather than continuing to Boston: Acela No. 2160, scheduled to leave Washington at 10 a.m.; Acela No. 2164, scheduled to depart Washington, D.C., at noon; Acela No. 2168, a 2 p.m. departure from Washington; Northeast Regional No. 86, a 5:35 a.m. departure from Richmond, Va.; and No. 174, a 5:39 a.m. departure from Newport News, Va.

The following southbound trains will now originate in New York rather than Boston: Acela No. 2165, scheduled to leave Boston at 12:10 p.m., now departing New York Penn at 4 p.m.; Acela No. 2167, slated to depart Boston at 1:05 p.m., now originating at Penn at 5 p.m.; and Acela No. 2169, scheduled to leave Boston at 2 p.m., now starting in New York at 6 p.m. Also affected are Northeast Regional No. 173, which usually departs Boston at 11:10 a.m. and now originates in New York at 3:35 p.m., and No. 137, which normally originates in Boston at 1:50 p.m. and now will start in New York at 6:25 p.m.

If a train is running, it's likely not available account all the available seats being sold, with a lot of the coaching stock out of service, or, if it's running late, there's not enough stock to assemble the return consist, and eventually a round trip will have to be annulled.

Freight congestion and heavy snows also played havoc with the Empire Builder. After leaving Chicago on time, both the March 10 and March 11 westbound Builders were routed through New Rockford, N.D., instead of over BNSF’s Devils Lake Subdivision between Fargo and Minot, N. D. Still, the March 10 westbound train was 6 hours late leaving Minot and 13 hours late out of Sandpoint, Idaho; Amtrak’s website shows the Portland section arriving at 1:01 a.m. today, 12 hours, 44 minutes late. As a result, Sunday’s eastbound Builder was cancelled out of Seattle and Portland, Ore. Without a spare trainset to fill the gap, the westbound train out of Chicago is now cancelled on Wednesday, March 15.

And Amtrak is supposed to be a going concern.

I think back sixty years, to that cold January weekend that the North Shore Line quit business.  Because of uncertainties over whether a court would enjoin the abandonment order, a car due for maintenance was rolled into the shop on the Friday before the end, and that gave some preservation group a car in pretty good shape later, while the railroad ran its full schedule and a few Navy extras right up to the end.

If the current crew running Amtrak had been in charge, any car coming due for maintenance after the final abandonment order came down in November of 1962 would have been laid up out of service, and the cold weather of that weekend would have given management cause to annul all the trains, and give the employees a permanent early quit.

OF RENT SEEKING AND INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLING.

Is the publicly funded air traffic control system a regressive transfer?  Yes, and this one you can't blame on the Trump administration.

"This is your government at work," says Diana Furchtgott-Roth in my latest video. Furchtgott-Roth worked for the Transportation Department during the Trump administration.

I yell at her. "Air traffic control was in your department. You could have fixed it. You should have fixed it!"

She smiles and explains that although she had control of $1 billion, she wasn't allowed to move those funds to where they were needed.

Government managers must fund projects pushed by politicians, like "Justice40," meant to fix "underinvestment in disadvantaged communities."

"Sounds like they mean well," I say.

"It sounds a lot better to talk about social justice," answers Furchtgott-Roth. "Nuts and bolts like computer hardware for air traffic control gets left behind."

It's kind of hard to provide investment in "disadvantaged" communities when there are people of means who want their private jets to get through.

Under our current system, Congress makes sure that the big airlines, which you fly, subsidize private flights' air traffic fees.

"If they have private planes," says Furchtgott-Roth, "they should be able to pay their fair share." Yes. Today's pricing amounts to welfare for rich people.

A third obstacle is fear. "For-profit companies will cut corners and make flying less safe!" But this is nonsense. That GAO study found that safety stayed the same or improved in countries that privatized.

Also, "For-profit companies actually run the airlines!" Furchtgott-Roth points out.

The airlines get FAA supervision, but the main reason planes don't crash is because the private companies don't want to destroy their business by killing their customers.

I'm not sure what that "fair share" is, but a government agency isn't likely to try something like selling clearances on a time-of-day basis, in order that any High Roller in a big hurry has to outbid the charter operator with a load of sports fans headed to March Madness, or the commercial airplane with all the Members of Congress heading home.

THERE'S RIGHT, AND THEN THERE'S DEAD RIGHT.

A Milwaukee television station provides a public service announcement.

When coming to a four-way stop in Wisconsin, the general right-of-way rule is the driver who arrives at the intersection first has the right-of-way.

However, when two vehicles approach an intersection with a four-way stop at the same time, the vehicle on the left must yield to the vehicle on the right. However, if a vehicle on the right is speeding, the driver forfeits the right-of-way.

If a driver comes upon traffic signals that are not working properly, drivers must then treat that intersection as a four-way stop.

I don't know, Yogi, if you're approaching one of those four-way stops and you see somebody to starboard charging up to the sign, do you insist on the right-of-way despite the other fellow showing every intention of running the stop, or at least of decoying you into thinking he is?

I'm told that in England, there are no four way stops, in part because of the potential for things going wrong.  Either there's a clockwise roundabout where two equal roads intersect, or perhaps a traffic signal, or there are stop signs only on the inferior road.

HOW DECAYED IS THE VALUE PROPOSITION?

The collegiate basketball tournaments are upon us again, and this year the women's tournament is hoping to get more spectators in the arena by doubling up the second weekend's events.

In the men's tournament, the first weekend's games take place at a variety of large neutral site arenas, while the second weekend games are at four arenas, usually different from those used in the first weekend, before the semi-finals and final game use a domed football stadium.

In the women's tournament, the first weekend's games take place at the home arenas of the stronger teams.  Yes, there are people who will grouse about the unfairness of having to play at South Carolina or Notre Dame or Connecticut or Tennessee, and they might have a point, although ask the Green Bay Packers how well playing at Lambeau in January has worked out in this century.

The second weekend's games will take place in two arenas: Greenville, South Carolina; and Seattle, Washington.  In place of the old compass point regionals, there are Greenville 1 and Greenville 2, and Seattle 3 and Seattle 4.  What, no Greenville Teal or Seattle Lavender?  Because there are at most four games in a day during the second weekend, there are no television conflicts, plus fans have the option of watching two games in a day, perhaps leading to more butts in seats.  So much for amateur sports, having nothing to do with money.

That latest attempt to extend the appeal of the game might be running afoul of another value deficiency, namely that the game isn't appealing to enough players.  No, seriously.  You'd think that if the pool of available players was increasing in quality and quantity that the quality of play would be better, and that established teams would find ways of remaining strong.

I dipped into the second half of Wisconsin playing Purdue at the Big Ten tournament, which featured Wisconsin giving away a seventeen point lead and eliminated from the tournament.  OK, that happens, but there was a five minute stretch in the third quarter in which neither team scored, and not because of a defensive identity on both sides that one would associate with grandmasters versed in the Caro-Kann.  More like turnovers and missed shots, of quantity and quality that might have caustic critics of the game nodding.  "At one time, the University of Connecticut was the preeminent women’s college basketball program. No one could beat the team except for a group of former boys high school basketball players."

But Purdue has at least one national championship in this century, and even that tradition hasn't been enough to keep the team a regular participant in the tournament.  Apparently they advanced far enough in the conference tournament to be in that "last four in, first four out" situation that the scheduling committee now finesses by making Purdue and St. John both eleven seeds and letting them play in the "First Four," so now named and so structured as to not be the stigma of those games only being played by winners of conference tournaments in weak conferences, although that is still a thing.

The Mid-American, which five years ago qualified two teams for the national tournament, this year sent only the winner of the conference tournament.  Neither Buffalo nor Central Michigan from 2018 even made the conference tournament, which of late has been limited to the top eight teams, and in the three rounds of that tournament, the higher seeded team won each game.  In the regular season, Northern Illinois won its one game with conference champion Toledo, while splitting with Bowling Green and Ball State.  That got them a participation trophy chance to hoist another banner and three games for the seniors with aspirations of playing professionally to show their stuff.

THERE ARE LIMITS TO DOING MORE WITH LESS.

I've long maintained that downsizing is a false economy in business.  There comes a time when you cut staff or add tasks and the goods or services are no longer useful.

So it also is with washing machines.

Biden's Energy Department last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to "confront the global climate crisis." Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They'll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache—each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.

It's not as if the designers of washing machines have some interest in selling more detergent and electricity.

For the Heritage Foundation's Travis Fisher, however, manufacturer concerns over the proposal are justified.

"When you're squeezing all you can out of the efficiency in terms of electricity use and water … you by definition either make the appliance worse or slower," said Fisher, who serves as a senior research fellow at the foundation's Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. "Why are we so focused on the energy output, as opposed to if it's helping me wash my clothes? That standard has kind of gone off the rails."

Beyond the performance standard debate, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers argued that the Energy Department's washing machine regulations "would have a disproportionate, negative impact on low-income households" by eliminating cheaper appliances from the market.

That's how the fuel economy standards worked, years ago.  The remaining guzzlers, or cars that burned leaded gas, lost resale value and wound up being owned by poorer people.  As far as washing machines are concerned, I can reduce their water, energy, and detergent use to zero by ... not washing clothes.  But if my standard of efficiency is "being presentable in polite company," that sort of environmental performance is not efficient at all.

Didn't these Wise Experts learn anything from the so-called low-flow toilets, that had to be flushed twice, using more water than the toilets they replaced, to clear the bowl?

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WORK.

Union Pacific Track Inspector Rescues Couple from Burning Home.  Mike Brown was inspecting track on what might have been the former Litchfield and Madison northeast of St. Louis.

“It was blazing pretty good,” said Mike Brown, Maintenance of Way inspector. “I figured someone else probably reported it, but I pulled over and called 911 just in case. The dispatcher said I was the first one to call and asked if I would make sure everyone evacuated.”

Brown headed toward the burning house in his Union Pacific work truck, passing a few drivers watching from their vehicles.

“When I pulled up, a man with crutches was trying to get out of the house,” Brown said. “I helped him get outside, and he said his wife was still inside. The scariest thing I’ve ever done is look into that door and debate whether I should go in. The Courage to Care took over and I told myself, ‘If you’re going to do this, let’s go.’”

Using the hood from his sweatshirt to partially cover his face, Brown entered the house and called out to the woman.

“I couldn’t see her, but I finally heard her yell back,” he said. “She made it to the doorway, and I picked her up and carried her out to a safe place while we waited for first responders.”

Well done. It's worth noting that the track inspectors are also among the few eyes on the freight trains, at least by day when the inspectors are out and about.

MORAL HAZARDS.

One reason macroeconomists of the Keynesian sort don't get too upset about deficit spending (at least in times of recession) or accumulating Federal debt is that the bonds the Treasury sells to finance that deficit spending serve as assets on the balance sheets of banks.  Because the Treasury's promise to make good on those bonds when they come due has so far always been kept, a bank that owes money to depositors (its liabilities) is almost always sound because there is a market for those government bonds.

There is one complication, though.  When older treasuries offer a lower interest rate than current treasuries, those older bonds can be sold, albeit at a discount relative to current bonds bearing a higher interest rate.  Think about it this way: a one-year promise to pay a dollar used to sell for 99 cents; these days that promise might sell for 95 cents.  The calculations get more convoluted than I'm in the mood to get into when we're talking about thirty year bonds, but the intuition is the same.

FREE THINKING IS CONTRARY TO THE ORTHODOXY.

We Normals have used the expression "political correctness" as a pejorative, but even we didn't grasp the full extent of it.  "A DEI Director Ousted for Questioning DEI?" Is Stalin a Bolshevik?

The faculty director for a California college’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education says she’s being terminated after she questioned antiracist “orthodoxy,” objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe, tried to bring a “Jewish inclusion” event to campus, declined to join a “socialist network,” refused to use the gender-neutral terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” inquired why the word “Black” was capitalized but not “white,” and allegedly disrespected a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tabia Lee also wrote, in a narrative explaining her situation, that “I no longer participate in gender pronouns because I find that the same toxic ideologies around race ideologies are now being advanced under gender ideologies; I also find that the constant obsession with pronouns and declaration of pronouns causes deep discomfort for individuals who identify as gender fluid or who struggle with gender dysphoria.”

That's interesting. She's not wrong, those -x suffixes are an attempt to inject some kind of Wokebonics into two languages based on Spanish, with all manner of gendered nouns and endings, and it could well be that those pronoun declarations on one hand affirm the people who are confident in their dysphoria, but on the other might push people who are still questioning their "identity" to disclose something they're not yet comfortable disclosing.

It gets better.  "[Tabia] Lee [shown in the article as a Black person with curly purple hair who is wearing pink lipstick] is Black. She said an employee in her office accused her of 'white speaking,' 'whitesplaining' and supporting white supremacy."

Didn't you know, dear reader, that the Diversity Office exists to provide Correct Messaging?

“In all of the teacher education things I’ve done and been exposed to in more recent years, there are lots of ideologies being pushed—lots of time a single one, but no one names what it is,” Lee told Inside Higher Ed.

“I was told that [I] was supposed to only advance what at that time I was calling a third-wave antiracism ideology,” Lee said.

Whatever that means. The pattern, though, is familiar.  Women who do not adhere to whatever the current wave of feminist ideology dictates are somehow not women; blacks who do not adhere to whatever the current wave of militancy calls for (or who don't vote for Dementia Joe) are somehow not black; and men of whatever ethnicity don't go along with the sissy aesthetics of the Diversity Weenies are toxic.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay.

OPTING OUT OF THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL BUBBLE?

The men's basketball team formerly known as the Marquette Warriors won both the Big East regular season title, that unexpectedly, and then held serve in the conference tournament, still held in the attic of The Pennsylvania Station.  One passage in Milwaukee media coverage of that tournament intrigues.  "This was the first Big East title game since the conference dropped football in 2013 to not feature any of its longstanding Northeast members."  Marquette gave up college football over sixty years ago, their last graduate to play on Sundays was George Andrie; and I'm not sure, looking at the list of Big East teams, where Connecticut plays football, if they still do, or if anybody cares.  A number of those other "longstanding Northeast members" were never meaningful participants in college football.  Perhaps that's additional evidence that college football is not quite the revenue powerhouse its boosters think it is, or that more youngsters are avoiding the risks of the game.

IT'S STILL EMPIRICALLY EMPTY WORDNOISE.

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire."  Here's the abstract.

As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.

Apparently if you know how to do various kinds of "readings" of a situation, you can produce a Minimal Publishable Unit without doing any analysis.  I think Jeff Davidson diagnosed the type.  "These self-loathing liberals, nonetheless, feel morally superior to everybody else. As such, they display an odd psychosocial characteristic which social scientists will be examining for decades to come: How individuals, programmed en masse to loathe themselves, despoil every facet of our western culture which they don't meet their highly subjective standards."

WILL THEY PUT A RING ON IT?

Today in tabloid politics.  "Lauren Boebert, 36, Is Going to Be a Grandmother."  The article is from Jezebel, and predictably full of taunting.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) announced this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference that she’s going to be a 36-year-old grandmother. At the very same gathering, the anti-abortion lawmaker also said that she wants to ban comprehensive sex ed in public schools. Huh!

Boebert won the Mothers of Influence Award at the CPAC Women’s Breakfast last weekend, and shared in her acceptance speech the news that her 17-year-old son, Tyler, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and they’re having a boy. It’s not known how old his girlfriend is, but Tyler turns 18 on March 21, and Boebert said the baby is due in April.

I don't know, but somehow observing that the kids could dispose of the products of conception in the feminist way, or offering as one advantage of puberty blockers for middle schoolers a permanent preemption of the submarine race oopsie doesn't sound convincing.  So it has always been, though, anybody else remember Caribou Barbie?

PASS THE POPCORN.

A few days ago, the behavior of the Democrats on the "weaponization of government" investigation amused.  "That Democratic members of the House committee investigating what the majority call "weaponization of government" seemed more interested in questioning the motives of the people reporting on what sure looked like social media companies cooperating with Official Washington than in, oh, proposing less lurid explanations and offering witnesses the chance to evaluate those, does nothing to dissuade people who are disposed to think Democrats have been lying to, and scolding, Normals for political gain, from thinking differently."

Common Dreams contributor Kenny Stancil is from the class of people that argues with, but mostly votes for Democrats, and he's arguing here.  "Anyone who cares about the free press should be concerned by the FTC's demand that Twitter identify journalists who have received information that might embarrass the administration."  In the manner of self-styled progressives everywhere, though, he thinks solely in terms of legislation.

"The FTC," said [Freedom of the Press Foundation spokesman Seth] Stern, "should not have to violate the privacy of journalists to protect the privacy of Twitter users."

"It's especially disturbing," he continued, "that the demand could enable future efforts to obtain the journalists' newsgathering materials."

The FTC's actions underscore why Americans of all political persuasions "should support passing the PRESS Act," Stern added. "It's the only way to ensure that all administrations, and all government agencies, are prohibited from surveilling or retaliating against journalists."

I don't know, here we are again with shield laws and enemies lists, only from a different part of the government. Isn't the plain language of the First Amendment sufficient?

IS THE CRUELTY THE POINT?

My Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom suggests as much:  "The Calculated Infliction of Misery."  The elaboration:

I have become convinced in the last few months that the real intent isn’t ‘health and safety’ at all – but the systematic immiseration of everyone but the comfortably ruling class elite. Oh, they didn’t really care much at all and haven’t for the last couple of decades, about the convenience and conditions for the ordinary citizens, except save when they were rolled out by their handlers to make a few remarks to housebroken establishment press representatives, especially at election time when they had to be seen to throw a bone or two in the direction of the electorate, or make the correct sympathetic noises after a natural disaster. It was necessary that they be seen to care … care deeply, just make a shallow pretense of deeply caring. They don’t care, and perhaps have never really cared, beyond making the proper noises in the established media – the credentialed elite in their glass-walled corner offices in the bicoastal ruling class enclaves, and their lushly-paneled and carpeted Congressional office.

But the brutal fact is … they don’t. They don’t give a couple of satisfactory bowel movements about the ordinary electorate, the regular, law-abiding middle and working class out in Flyover Country, the class that pays their modest taxes, runs the business that keep all afloat, volunteer for the military and everything else – and I believe the goal for the elite ruling class now has gone beyond indifference into active malice. They wish to see us impoverished, dirty, miserable, cold and starving, because that makes such obedient servants, of course. A powerless peasant class doesn’t make so many demands on their rulers – and that’s the point at which we may have arrived – not when election results can be called up and organized to give the satisfactory (to the ruling class) result. What need have they of voters then, when the results can be automatically jiggered to give the correct result?

That's an expansion of a long-running theme around Cold Spring Shops.  "In the States, it's going to be on libertarians and post-Trump Republicans to make the administrative state and the Democrats (and their enablers in news, entertainment, and the academy, but I repeat myself) own the shutdowns, own the overdoses, own the depression, own the suicides."  Yes, and the deprivation in the name of the climate emergency, or in order to deconstruct masculinity.

SHIRTSLEEVES ON THE SIDELINES.

Harry Peter "Bud" Grant, three-sport letterman at the University of Minnesota, won a basketball championship ring with George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers, won four Grey Cups in six attempts, and is probably best remembered outside Minnesota for losing four Super Bowls in as many attempts.  It's not that things were any better in Wisconsin in those days, although we could joke about either Bo Schembechler or Bud Grant not eating any cereal. It's been so long that references to the statuary group on the Minnesota Capitol as Eller, Larson, Marshall, and Page have become obscure.

I'll yield to Power Line's John Hinderaker for the elegy.

Grant was a patriot and a conservative. In his later years, he occasionally made waves by speaking his mind. I don’t know whether he ever commented publicly on the detestable practice of kneeling during the National Anthem, but I’m pretty sure I know what he thought about it. When he coached the Vikings, he required his players to stand in a straight line for the anthem. On at least one occasion, he famously had his team practice lining up for the Anthem.

That Anthem line-up did become a cultural issue in college football of those troubled times.  Bud Grant's Vikings split their two meetings with Vince Lombardi's Packers in 1967.  Thanks for the memories.

GIVE US A BETTER SOCIALIST EXAMPLE FIRST.

Some railroad workers, and their willing accomplices in the commentariat, think a change in ownership of the freight railroads would put an end to the rash of derailments and service meltdowns that have been depressingly common of late.  "Much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States, including the interstate highway system, is publicly owned."  Yes, and that's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  But if your priors are tight enough, you pay no attention to reality.

"On-time performance is in the toilet, shipper complaints are at all-time highs. Passenger trains are chronically late, commuter services are threatened, and the rail industry is hostile to practically any passenger train expansion. The workforce has been decimated, as jobs have been eliminated, consolidated, and contracted out, ushering in a new previously unheard-of era where workers can neither be recruited nor retained. Locomotive, rail car, and infrastructure maintenance has been cut back. Health and safety has been put at risk. Morale is at an all-time low. The ongoing debacle in national contract bargaining sees the carriers—after decades of record profits and record low operating ratios—refusing to make even the slightest concessions to the workers who ... have made them their riches."

Liquidating a company doesn't sound like the best way to produce long-term shareholder value, but, then, the shortsightedness of mutual fund managers or takeover artists is nothing new, nor is it something that some sort of governmental action can fix.  That the Commuter Rail authorities are government agencies, as is Amtrak, and they have trouble playing nice with the freight railroads is nothing new.  But where there is government failure already, is adding more government going to fix things?

Much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States, including the interstate highway system, is publicly owned. And the railroads were themselves under federal government control during World War I. When the war ended, rail workers and their unions pushed to keep the industry publicly owned. Eugene Victor Debs, a veteran railroad union leader, campaigned on the issue in his 1920 Socialist Party presidential bid. Many progressives, especially in farm country, agreed. But the government handed the railroads back to their wealthy owners and the issue died down—until the Great Depression devastated rural America.

In 1933, Joseph Bartlett Eastman, a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, was nominated by President Franklin Roosevelt to serve as Federal Coordinator of Transportation. The following year, Eastman wrote: "Theoretically and logically public ownership and operation meets the known ills of the present situation better than any other remedy. Public regulation of a privately owned and operated industry, reaching deeply into such matters as rates, service, capitalization, accounting, extensions and abandonments, mergers and consolidations, is a hybrid arrangement. When an industry becomes so public in character that such intimate regulation of its affairs becomes necessary, in strict logic it would seem that it should cease to masquerade as a private industry and the government should assume complete responsibility, financial and otherwise."

Eastman's ideas appealed to organized labor. Rail union heads called in 1935 for "the immediate taking over of the railways of the United States by the federal government and the creation of agencies within the federal government to manage and operate the railways."

William Green, who was then the American Federation of Labor president, told his group's convention: "It seems to me that the railroads are headed for government ownership. I do not see where we can find any other remedy. The only way the railroads can be saved, the interest of the workers maintained, and service be kept up for the good of the country is through government ownership."

Curiously, although none of that nationalization took place, other transportation scholars and policy experts of the era suggested there were too many railroad companies (if the phrase "wasteful and duplicative competition" comes to mind, dear reader, you may remain after class and help clean the erasers) and that perhaps two to four large regional or national rail carriers would ultimately be the result.