THE RECKONING COMES TO ILLINOIS.

Labor relations among the regional comprehensive universities in Illinois have deteriorated over the past few years, and now they have broken down completely.

Chicago State University faculty members and academic support professionals began striking Monday, and more walkouts are set to begin this week and next in Illinois.

University Professionals of Illinois president John Miller said the union’s members will likely begin striking Thursday at Eastern Illinois University, in Charleston, and likely are walking out at Governors State University, in Chicago’s Southland, at the start of next week.

That Inside Higher Ed reporting notes job actions in other states as well.  The way local journalists are covering the Illinois situation is instructive.

Faculty at Chicago State University, Illinois’ only predominantly Black public university, walked off the job on Monday for better pay and a reduced workload. That’s after 10 months of negotiations failed to bring an agreement between staff and university administrators.

“The professors put in the time and work. They work overtime — I’ve seen it,” said Muriel McClendon, a graduate student at Chicago State who picketed alongside faculty Monday. “They are burning our professors out.”

More than 160 professors, lecturers and academic and technical support professionals at Chicago State on the Far South Side are represented by University Professors of Illinois Local 4100. Data from the state and from the National Education Association show they are among the lowest paid faculty members in Illinois.

Chicago State has been a dropout factory for years and the predominantly black administrators have not been above feathering their nests to the disadvantage of the faculty and students.  Why the place is still operating despite losing enrollment year after year, and failing to properly serve the dwindling numbers of students who manage to graduate is a testament to inertia paralyzed by fear, or something else not so good.

Chicago State serves 2,366 undergraduate and graduate students, according to federal data. Nearly seven out of 10 are Black.

“Our students come from Black and Brown communities,” faculty union president Valerie Goss said at a rally on campus. “I don’t understand why it is that our students have to endure faculty who are being paid less than faculty at any other institution. This is not an equitable picture.”

The inequities begin long before those students enroll at the university, and the new mayor in Chicago does not encourage optimism that conditions in the neighborhoods and the common schools will soon get better.

ENJOY THE NEW RULES.

I closed Tuesday's postings before the polls closed and the losers conceded.  I made a sad prediction, "Restoring something rationally cooperative is never easy. We may be playing by the new rules for some time."

To my north, Wisconsin voters changed the ideological balance of the allegedly nonpartisan state supreme court, and they made the state senate more partisan. "A liberal just won the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Republicans are already talking about impeaching her."

Is anybody surprised that when people who should have known better made noises about impeaching Donald Trump even before he drew to that inside straight in November, 2016, that others wouldn't be similarly inspired?

In the closing days of his campaign, Republican Assemblyman Dan Knodl, who won that exurban state Senate district outside Milwaukee, said that he would consider impeaching [new justice Janet] Protasiewicz from her current position as a judge on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

Now, with Protasiewicz’s victory Tuesday, the comments quickly spurred concerns among Democrats in the state that Republicans in the Legislature would make a move against Protasiewicz's seat in the Supreme Court.

One has to have a heart of stone, or the forbearance of a saint, not to laugh.

Democrats, however, have expressed concerns that the remarks — as well as similar threats from other state Republicans — foretell a GOP strategy of trying to impeach statewide elected officials, including Protasiewicz, with their new Senate supermajority.

“There’s going to be a supermajority in the state Senate that will allow the legislators in control of the state Senate to do what they were threatening back in November, which is to start impeachment proceedings,” Jodi Habush Sinykin, who lost to Knodl on Tuesday, said in an interview with WISN-TV before the election.

Any impeachment inquiry must begin in the state legislature, which has a Republican majority.  That majority is in place in part because of, shall we say, creative pportionment, and in part because of Republican voters who heard "neanderthal" or "deplorable" once too many times.

CONTINUING TO MAKE THE GRADE.

The academic performance information is in and the Northern Illinois women's basketball team has never done better than this.  "Program-High Nine Huskies Named To Academic All-MAC Women’s Basketball Team."  Six of the nine will return in the fall.  The national dean's list will be released in July.

That's good.  As far as I know, everyone who has suited up, whether on scholarship or as a walk-on, has graduated, and a goodly share of these kids with academic distinction of some kind or other.  I do, however, have to repeat a request addressed to the athlete part of student-athlete.

That noted, the challenge I posed last year remains to be completed.  "Now show me that all the Navy SEAL training you've been reporting on all summer turns into extending a ten-point lead at halftime."  The team had a seventeen point lead in the second half of the opening game of the conference tournament, and ... were excused by Ball State.  Season tickets will go on sale soon, but count me out.  Perhaps if I see some performance by mid-January I'll check them out.

In addition, I continue to wonder how effective the all-woke-all-the-time stance the team seems to take on social media and on game days is at building the fan base.

If you have to make a video explaining that your National Anthem protest isn't a National Anthem protest, you're losing the argument.

Enjoy the academic accolades.  Perhaps additional success on the court will provide the value proposition I think sports marketing types would like to have.

PEOPLE SEE MORE OF WHAT THEY'RE LOOKING FOR.

In the fever swamps of Common Dreams, there is a derailment spree along the trunk line railroads.

After at least six major freight train derailments occurred across the United States over the past week, the need for stronger rail safety rules couldn't be clearer, an interunion alliance of rail workers said Monday.

"The recent uptick in derailments across the U.S. highlights the dire need for stricter regulations on the length and weight of trains, as well as a focus on preventing unsafe operational practices such as precision scheduled railroading (PSR) which prioritizes short-term financial gains for Wall Street over the safety of communities and railroad workers," Jason Doering, a locomotive engineer and general secretary of Railroad Workers United (RWU), said in a statement.

The past week "was not a good one" for the nation's Class 1 rail carriers, RWU observed.

On Sunday, March 26, a Canadian Pacific train carrying hazardous materials careened off the tracks outside Wyndmere, North Dakota, spilling liquid asphalt and ethylene glycol and releasing propylene vapor.

Last Monday, a Union Pacific iron ore train reached 118 miles per hour as it ran away down Cima Hill in the Mojave Desert before wrecking on a curve, destroying two locomotives and 55 cars in San Bernardino County, California.

On Wednesday, a Canadian National iron ore train derailed in Butler County, Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, a BNSF train carrying ethanol and corn syrup crashed near Raymond, Minnesota, causing a fire that forced local residents to flee.

On Friday, a Norfolk Southern train went off the tracks in Irondale, Alabama.

One day ago, a train operated by the Class 2 regional Montana Rail Link—soon to be owned by BNSF—derailed on the banks of the Clark Fork River in Paradise, Montana.

In that last derailment, several box car loads of canned beer wound up chilling in the Clark Fork.

THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM RECOGNIZES REALITY.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux reviews Elizabeth Berman's Thinking Like an Economist.  The review makes for interesting reading, and the book might merit consideration the next time I add to the already groaning library.  A sociologist's perspective on thinking like an economist is intriguing: apparently constrained optimization and making tradeoffs become optional.

From the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt through that of Lyndon Johnson, Americans on the political left—and not least those in elective office—were motivated by ideals that precluded any utilitarian weighing of costs and benefits. These ideals, as frequently listed by Berman, are “universalism, rights, and equality.” To put these ideals into practice, the U.S. government adopted policies to protect minorities, the poor, the sick, consumers, workers, the environment, and democratic participation itself. Designers of these policies intended them to be implemented without regard to costs. But despite the designers’ intentions, these policies, starting in the 1960s and gaining steam in subsequent decades, were increasingly guided by economic considerations. These economic considerations—above all, the use of cost-benefit analyses—in most cases limited government’s ability to right the wrongs that were targeted by the policies.

Yes, I was in college and graduate school at the apex of the Welfare Economics Paradigm, and that approach surely included cost-benefit analysis, which, along with such concepts as optimal taxation, provided technocrats, with the advice of the proper team of academic economists, with Pareto-improving outcomes along the desirable dimensions.  Professor Boudreaux's summary is consistent with the book learning I got at the time.

Ironically, the impetus for subjecting government interventions to economic considerations did not come from conservative or “neoliberal” ideologues. Nor did it come from right-wing economists affiliated with the University of Chicago. Instead, this impetus came from economists who were ideologically left-of-center. These economists were confident that active, smart government intervention can improve economic performance and social outcomes; they shared none of the skepticism of government that marked the attitudes of their right-wing colleagues. As Berman summarizes, “[t]he central players in this story are economists (and their allies) who wanted to use economic reasoning to make government work better and more effectively, and who thought government had an important role to play in American life. Chicago Schoolers are on the stage, but they are not the stars.”

Also ironically, the left-of-center economists whose efforts would inadvertently over time result in restrictions on the reach of government intervention were given their main toehold in Washington not by a Republican administration or during a time when trust in government was waning. Instead, that toehold was created by President John F. Kennedy, who was in office when confidence in government ran quite high. Kennedy surrounded himself with impressively credentialed technocrats who were sincerely committed to science and quantitative methods. Naively trusting that neoclassical economic analysis is value-free—that is, is scientific—these administration advisors and appointees believed that using economics to guide government intervention would render that intervention more effective.

But, alas, the claim to be value-free is in fact a statement of a value. (Postmodern skepticism has its uses, doesn't it?)

As Berman points out, however, the very use of cost-benefit analysis involves a value judgment. Yet because this economic practice appears to be value-free, the technocrats in Kennedy’s administration—many of whom continued in their positions of influence during LBJ’s administration—endorsed it enthusiastically. To carry out economic-style analyses of government programs, formal systems such as the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) were created for the purpose of improving government decision-making. In addition, more and more government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s established internal offices devoted to amplifying economists’ sway over policymaking.

Economic-analyses’ alluring scientific patina mixed with the increasing institutionalization into formal policymaking processes of what Berman calls “the economic style of reasoning” to produce a result that no one intended—namely, a government-wide displacement of policymaking based on “universalism, rights, and equality” by policymaking constrained by economic considerations.

This entrenchment of the economic style of reasoning into policymaking was fueled also by the success of think tanks—above all, RAND—that, starting in the mid-20th century, used economics to analyze and improve narrow aspects of government policy, such as weapons acquisition. But as government came increasingly to rely on the economic style of reasoning, demand grew for more such analyses to be supplied by not-for-profit think tanks. Government paid attention to such analyses and, thus, encouraged their development. In turn, there blossomed at universities public-policy programs that (as Berman puts it) “centered” the economic style of reasoning. Larger numbers of scholars were drawn to this style of reasoning. Many of these scholars consulted with government and often even took positions within government. Government’s heavy reliance on these scholars of course only further entrenched the economic style of reasoning into policymaking.

That "government reliance" also offered me opportunities to apply my research on behalf of assorted policy initiatives, primarily in energy use.

THESE ARE THE NEW RULES.

In political protests, rules of decorum don't matter if it's your pet cause.

Tennessee House Republicans on Monday initiated the process of expelling three Democratic lawmakers who joined protesters in demanding stricter gun laws following the Nashville mass shooting that left three young children and three adults dead.

Days after last week's shooting, thousands of demonstrators flooded the Tennessee state Capitol to decry GOP lawmakers' inaction in the face of deadly gun violence. Inside the House chamber, Democratic Reps. Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Pearson took to the podium with a bullhorn and led demonstrators in chants supporting gun control legislation.

As The Tennessean reported, Tennessee House Republicans cast the trio's actions as an "insurrection" and, at the end of Monday's session, "introduced three expulsion resolutions" claiming that the three Democrats "did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives through their individual and collective actions."

A vote on the resolutions is expected on Thursday. "Democrats will have little power to block expulsions," The Tennessean noted.

So it always is when bourgeois norms break down.

[Robby Soave's] call would be correct if the social norm was that nobody does this kind of thing.  But when the principle is honored only in the breach, and a long train of abuses and usurpations by the cancel culture of the left signifies a desire to subject anyone who disagrees to absolute despotism, that principle is no longer valid.  We are in a grim strategy situation, and it's clear to the culture warriors that offering the other cheek no longer elicits cooperation.  Restoring the old social norms of disagreeing without being disagreeable is going to be difficult.

Did Democrats really think that after the show-trial style January 6 investigations, there wouldn't be an opportunity for someone, somewhere, of a different political persuasion to return the favor?  It's not as if grousing about "fascism" is going to have much purchase any more, either.

Pearson, one of Tennessee's youngest lawmakers, told a local media outlet that "the thousands of children and adults who marched outside of the People's House are not insurrectionists."

"My walk, my colleagues' walk to the House floor was in a peaceful and civil manner, and it was not an insurrection,” Pearson said, pushing back on the state GOP's characterization of the protests.

The both-sides-ists are predictably at it at the usual places.

Republicans always make the same mistakes when dealing with these kinds of antics. First, they seek to “take the high ground,” thinking they are dealing with bad behavior and ill-breeding rather than recognizing Leninist and Maoist revolutionary warfare actions for what they are. Second, they always forget that Democrats never fail to mistake kindness for weakness.

So it goes when you're in the grim strategy equilibrium.

At the moment, there are plenty of things Democrats have done that call for massive punishment. Bear in mind, dear reader, that Grim Strategy outcomes are outcomes in which both the punisher and the punishee wind up in a worse place than they would be in either the repeated Nash or the cooperative outcome.

Restoring something rationally cooperative is never easy.  We may be playing by the new rules for some time.

NEUTER GENDER, HOPELESS CASE.

If some performer does a Bud Light commercial featuring a bubble bath, does it matter whether the tub is full of water or of light beer?  "They’ve checked the ‘we supported mental illness today’ box, but largely this won’t likely get much visibility beyond social media."  The nation's Newspaper of Record gets the story sort-of right.

In a match made in heaven, a beverage that tries to pass itself as beer has hired as its spokesperson a man trying to pass himself off as a woman.

"For decades, we've been putting carbonated backwash in a beer can and pretending it's beer," said Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth. "Who better to represent our brand than a guy throwing on a dress and pretending he's a woman?"

If in Heaven there is no beer, can we be sure that God has joined anything together here?

Victory Girl Nina Bookout attempts to find some logic in the situation.

Dylan Mulvany is parodying a woman. He, no matter how much cosmetic surgery, how much money (evidently more than one million a year) he makes shilling for Bud Light, Tampax, Kitchen Aid and others, isn’t a woman. He’s engaging in what HotAir’s David Strom aptly describes as “womanface.” Which demeans women.

I'm in the mood for a Sprecher. Today was another good day for the Brewers.

THE TECHNOCRACY OF THE PROLETARIAT.

If there are enough "The Secretary shall issue ..." provisions in legislation, Members of Congress are content to ... bypass Congress with executive orders where it suits their desires.

Outlining the steps that President Joe Biden can take now to deliver justice for the working people who helped elect him in 2020, the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday released its 2023 Executive Action Agenda to ensure that the president will "build on his record of progress."

The agenda includes executive actions, strong rulemaking, and enforcement moves that federal agencies can take in five key areas: holding corporations accountable, raising wages and empowering workers, lowering costs for households, continuing to promote climate and environmental justice, and advancing equity.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the CPC, said the agenda offers an opportunity for Biden to make an "even greater impact" in the lives of working people after the White House acted on proposals put forward by the caucus in 2022.

If there is not a stronger case for sunset legislation and regular review of any "The Secretary shall issue ..." provisions in existing legislation than what's in that wish list, I'd be surprised.  Any mention of "rulemaking" reflects a delegation of authority from Congress to some administrative agency, and given the failure of Congresses for years to pass regular order budgets, there have to be lots of provisions that are counterproductive, even if they're not wishful thinking.

Never mind that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is a subset of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives.

"For the last two years, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has led in defining a legislative and executive agenda for working families," said Natalia Salgado, director of federal affairs for the Working Families Party. "Their advocacy and proposals laid the groundwork for the Inflation Reduction Act and executive action on canceling student debt."

"The CPC's 2023 executive action slate again shows the caucus putting forward a bold vision for how Democrats can use all of the power they have to deliver for working people," Salgado added.

That cancellation of student debt is still somewhere in the courts, and the Inflation Reduction Act is another instance of a legislative title that offers the opposite of what it claims to do.

In that final paragraph, though, is the quiet part.  For all that talk of "our democracy"  what this Working Families Party wants its Democratic useful idiots to do is disregard their minority status in order to deliver ... what, exactly?

DON'T GIVE YOUR OPPONENT BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL.

The women's national basketball tournament wrapped up over the weekend, with Friday's events foreshadowing Sunday's game.

Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark played noticeably lax defense against the then-undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks in the Final Four.

And LSU Tigers players — who face Clark and her Hawkeyes in Sunday's national championship game — found Clark's antics "very disrespectful."

"Me personally, I find it very disrespectful," LSU guard Alexis Morris told ESPN Saturday. "So I'm going to take that personally going into that game."

"You're going to have to guard us," she added. "That's just the competitor in me, and the will to win."

When tasked with defending freshman Gamecocks guard Raven Johnson, Clark guarded her from a considerable distance. At one point when Johnson had the ball outside the three-point line during Friday night's contest, the 6-foot Iowa point guard waved her hand dismissively and continued to double-team South Carolina's bigs in the paint.

The game itself might have been interesting, but contra USA Today sports pundit Nancy Armour, for all the wrong reasons.

Half the people who watched the national championship game were furious with the officials, while the other half was incensed an athlete had the audacity to talk trash.

If you want the surest sign yet that women’s basketball has arrived, there you go.

For too long, women’s basketball – all of women’s sports, really – has struggled for air in the national conversation. There are all kinds of reasons why, and that’s a debate for another day. But for several decades, the score of LSU’s 102-85 win over Iowa on Saturday would have been noted, maybe the fact it was the Tigers’ first national title, and that would have been about it.

I don't know, the impression I got from social media was that curiosity seekers who tuned in were put off by everything that wasn't settled by the players.

Now the women are getting the same kind of treatment the men get, with every detail parsed over and picked apart. Did Angel Reese really diss Caitlin Clark? Or was she mimicking what the Iowa star did just last week? Was this game part of an on-the-job training program for officials? Or did they really think the sold-out crowd and millions more watching at home were there to see them?

In the hours after the game ended, “Taunting,” “LET THEM PLAY” and “The Refs” were trending, along with Clark, Iowa and Kim Mulkey.

These are the types of debates that rage white-hot after every significant, and some not-so-significant, event in men’s sports. These side conversations are what keep games in the spotlight long after the final buzzer sounds, and ensure that interest in sports and the people who play them aren’t dependent upon a single game.

It is a truth universally accepted that the expanded presence of referees in interminable reviews has been to the detriment of the experience, and the very phrase "process of the catch" ought tell you that you've introduced unnecessary complexity into the experience.  We'll get to the specific events, many of which Ms Armour alluded to in her column, in time.

THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUESTION-BEGGING.

A Time contributor called William Kleinknecht complains, "No One Is Talking About What Ron DeSantis Has Actually Done to Florida."  He's the author of States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined America.  It's a funny kind of "undermining" when whatever those leaders are doing seems to be attracting internal migration, but you do you, Willy.

Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society.

Florida may be the place where “woke goes to die”—as DeSantis is fond of saying—but it is also where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, unemployment benefits are stingier than in any other state, and wage theft flourishes with little interference from the DeSantis administration. In 2021, DeSantis campaigned against a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage, which had been stuck at $8.65 an hour. Under DeSantis’s watch, the Sunshine State has not exactly been a workers’ paradise.

Look, if people want those Californian or Illinois style public benefits, they have the option of moving there.  That's not happening, is it?  In addition, the migration from metropolitan areas to metropolitan areas has not turned out favorably for those big cities in blue social model states.  "There has been a general migration from the 'Rust Belt' to the 'Sun Belt' going on as long as [James Joyner has] paid attention to such things. Newer cities aren’t really 'cities' at all in the way I tend to think of them; they’re really more concentrated suburbs."  That reminds me to take a closer look at the effect of parking minima, zoning codes, and air conditioning on urban form, but not today.

I'll let Lidblog's W. T. Huston give Mr Kleinknecht the Bronx cheer.  "This happens because liberal states are all… to a location… failed states, while the red states are thriving and growing. Once again, we see that Democrats destroy everything they touch."  Florida might not be a "workers' paradise," but then, the places that are trying to be workers' paradises are dump heaps.

FIRST, ACKNOWLEDGE THE PROBLEM.

Inside Higher Ed contributor Steven Mintz, an historian, asks "Can the English Major Be Saved?"

That's not an alley-oop question, no matter that Francis "Manhattan Contrarian" Menton would see a slam-dunk.  "The Humanities: Another Example Of Leftism Ruining Everything It Touches."  That's to motivate a quick response to Nathan Heller's "The End of the English Major" in The New Yorker.  The expected dunking quickly follows.  "[I]t’s also obvious that the humanities departments are the center of the obsessions with Critical Race Theory, diversity/equity/inclusion, and the like. Can anybody blame the students for staying away?"

Mr Heller sort of touches on that objection.

Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all that criticism—and art—can do.

Others, though, suggest that the humanities’ loss of cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship itself. One theory is that the critical practices have become too specialized. Once, in college, you might have studied “Mansfield Park” by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read?

It doesn't, which is where Professor Mintz comes in.

For nearly a century, academic critics of literature—from I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and Lionel Trilling to Derrida, de Man, Foucault and Lyotard, to Judith Butler, Stanley Fish and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak today—have been regarded, in large parts of the discipline, as more important than the literature they write about.

Of course, the rise of academic theorists and college-based critics occurred at the very time that public readership of academic literary criticism has fallen precipitously. Maybe that isn’t an accident or coincidence. It seems like an ideal time for a stocktaking. Such an assessment has now appeared.

If there is a more thoughtful, penetrating, insightful, trenchant, acerbic, scathing or original analysis of a scholarly discipline than John Guillory’s Professing Criticism, I have yet to see it. Partly a history and in part a sociology of English as a profession, Professing Criticism is an extraordinary book, truly a landmark work of scholarship and interpretation, without a doubt the most important intellectual and sociocultural study of a humanities field that I have encountered.

It should be read not only by the English professoriate, but by its counterparts in art and music history, history and philosophy. Consider it a red alert, a cautionary tale, a fire bell in the night and an omen and admonition about how professionalization, specialization and bureaucratization can damage a field of study, even as it has benefited those with tenure, especially those who teach at the more selective institutions.

The ensuing essay is long and it will reward careful study.  Perhaps it is time, for instance, for English to rethink the utility of the minimal publishable unit.

Guillory wants his readers to seriously ponder the limits of the analogy with scientific research. He points to his discipline’s lack of clarity about the utility of literary research and even its subject matter (that is, how far it should stray from its traditional domain of poetry, plays, novels and literary essays). If literary scholarship isn’t progressive in a scientific or medical sense, then, he suggests, it might take alternate forms, for example, through alternate formats that extend beyond the book or scholarly essay or modes that speak to public audiences outside the academy.

I'd be happy if English stayed away from dabbling in political economy, and exposed students to examples of good writing, in order that senior compositions might not bog down in jargon and elegant variation.

Apparently, notes Professor Mintz, it's not only traditionalist Tories who see something wrong with the reward structure in English.

Much recent criticism of English departments comes the conservative right that decries academic jargon and theorizing and the purported dismissal of the traditional canon, but Guillory’s critique comes from a very different vantage point. His interpretation is heavily influenced by the “outlaw Marxist” sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner’s 1970s studies of the rise of a self-aggrandizing New Class that creates new ideas and knowledge and controls the theoretical and technical expertise that contemporary society depends on. Guillory treats the English professoriate, for all its internal differences and disagreements, as a credentialed speech community that participates in in a shared culture of critical discourse, that helps define what it means to be educated and cultured and that strives to maximize its autonomy, perquisites and cultural capital.

I don't care who argues that the Credentialed Elite be taken down a notch or two, as long as it is done.  The Art of Living is for everyone.

THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS IS ABSOLUTE.

There is no carve-out for alphabet people, who have the same right to self-defense everyone else does.  It's funny, though, watching broadcasters who would otherwise abridge the right to keep and bear arms contort themselves to find carve-outs.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened his popular show Tucker Carlson Tonight by ridiculing National Public Radio (NPR) for their clownish new double standard on the Second Amendment rights of Americans. Apparently, only the LGBTQ alphabet mob is permitted to own firearms, according to U.S. state media outlet. Carlson called them out using sarcastic humor and ridicule in a way only he can pull off.

Setting the stage, Carlson narrated: “[T]he other day, we’re driving through Cambridge in the old hybrid Subaru, adjusting our surgical masks to cover both nose and mouth and listening needless to say to National Public Radio, the voice of menopausal liberalism. And as we're listening we hear this.”

It's the adenoidal voice of menopausal liberalism, but I digress.

Mass shootings targeting LGBTQ spaces and a rise in anti-trans rhetoric have inspired some queer people to take up arms. New Hampshire Public Radio's Todd Bookman joined the monthly gathering of a gun group that sees firearms as key to their own self-defense. And as you might imagine, the story does include the sound of gunfire.

TODD BOOKMAN, BYLINE: On a recent Sunday morning, the parking lot of Pawtuckaway State Park in southeastern New Hampshire is filling up with hikers. There's also a different crew packing up warm clothes and weapons.

FIN SMITH: Thank you all for coming to Rainbow Reload.

BOOKMAN: Today's organizer is Fin Smith. Like everybody else in this story, they've requested some level of anonymity because they fear for their safety.

SMITH: I recognize the temperature is freezing, and this is not the most comfortable, but if it's raining, we're training. If it's snowing, we're going.

BOOKMAN: Groups like Rainbow Reload exist around the country, often called pink pistol clubs. It's a place for experts and the gun-curious to practice and improve their shooting, but this goes beyond hobby. There's a practical goal here, to prepare and protect themselves.

SMITH: If the world is dangerous, then you have to be dangerous back. And that very much has pushed me into where I am now.

I don't know, the best way to overcome the aversions of others might be to mingle with others, and a proper range safety course, or a conversation over the relative merits of loads afterwards, or perhaps a hunting trip, might overcome more misconceptions than a Festive Season of scolding and unpleasant family gatherings.  But, public radio being public radio, the instinct to use euphemisms ("gun-curious") and to divide by identities is strong.

BOOKMAN: The experienced work with the less experienced. Everybody shares guns. They geek out on scopes. There's not a ton of data on LGBTQ gun ownership, but a UCLA study from 2020 found that about 21% of lesbian, gay and bisexual people live in a house with a firearm. That's compared to 36% of heterosexual adults. In terms of partisan breakdown, a recent Pew study found that about 1 in 5 self-identified Democrats own a gun compared to nearly half of Republicans. Rainbow Reload is not a political group. It doesn't advocate for any gun policies. And amongst the members, there are a variety of opinions.

Such, I suspect, as would be the case at any other gathering of sharpshooters.  It's the people who don't take the range safety course or understand the merits of scopes, or the responsibility of using a firearm properly who commit the mass shootings.

The segment, though, provided amusement for Tucker and his audience.

When that laughably hypocritical segment ended, Carlson returned and laughed at the taxpayer-funded propagandists he just heard suddenly support gun rights after spending decades railing against them.

“Your anti-trans rhetoric makes the trans community carry guns,” Carlson said sarcastically. “Rainbow Reload!! They’re packing heat, they’ll be appendix carrying in more ways than one, watch out.”

For anyone who didn’t grasp the stunning hypocrisy, Carlson pointed it out to them: “Wait a second, we thought. This is NPR? National Public Radio? Suddenly telling you that actually guns are good, they’re valuable tools of self-defense, really against you. So, there are times when guns are good, says NPR.”

“We've been listening to NPR since, well, Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers. And we remember very clearly their position on guns,” Carlson added.

What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?

GLUTTONY IS STILL A DEADLY SIN.

No matter how much Puffington Host contributor Jillian Wilson would like it not to be.  "Anti-fat bias is prevalent throughout our society, from how we think about food and exercise to the words we say."

No, seriously, you probably shouldn't say badonkadok butt either!

According to Tigress Osborn, the board chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, our associations with eating and body types can be traced back to historical ideas about racism and white purity.

“In an American sense especially, white Christian purity and what it means to be a ‘good woman’ has to do with controlling yourself, controlling your appetites, controlling your body,” Osborn said.

And self-control was a way to differentiate oneself from others, particularly Black and indigenous people.

“We don’t think often enough about how much all of our ideas about why fat is so bad and so gross are related to these really racist and eugenicist ideas about what bodies should be and what behavior about food should be like,” she said.

Silly me, here I thought it was impolite, possibly even bigoted, to suggest there were populations that lacked impulse control, and here is this Tigress Osborn turning that derogation into a character trait.  And I can't help but think that behind this acceptance of fatness is an echo of Rush Limbaugh's undeniable truths.

The article, though, comes up with more ways for the Anointed to make family gatherings unpleasant.

These phrases are pervasive in our culture, so it’s reasonable to think you will hear someone utter one soon. “It is important to recognize that not everyone feels safe pushing back against this stuff, there is such a stigma against fatness in our culture,” [eating disorder dietitian Christine] Byrne said.

Additionally, it’s not safe for everyone to push back, and she added that it’s important to protect yourself mentally and physically in these situations. “You are under no obligation to say anything if a fat-shaming [comment] has been directed at you and you don’t feel safe in the situation,” Byrne explained. “I think if you’re a thin person listening to a comment that is fat-shaming, you are probably in a more safe position to say something about it.”

But when you've deconstructed all the bourgeois norms, there you are.

These phrases are harmful yet embedded in our culture — some are even mistaken for polite responses. All of this makes it hard to remove these words from your vocabulary and your way of thinking, but it’s important to try and do so.

“The central question is when people are using these phrases that are really body-shaming or food-shaming, what do you really mean?” Osborn said. “You don’t really mean that, or if you do, maybe you want to examine that means in how you relate to other humans in your community.”

The problem with the advice is that sometimes it's people attempting to be kind to others ("you look fine") and sometimes it's people expressing regret about their condition ("I feel fat" or "I'm having a cheat day.")  But the advice is of a piece with something I've come to suspect, that the rhetoric of inclusion is so inclusive the only permissible thing to do is to use none of it.

POINTLESS ARROW APRIL FOOLS.

To really foul things up requires a computer.  A week ago Friday midwestern trains weren't rolling.

In Michigan, two westbound morning trains operated into Chicago with minimal delays, but westbound Wolverine No. 353 and eastbound train No. 350 were stopped on either side of Battle Creek, Mich., for an extended period. This is where Canadian National controls about a mile of track over which the Amtrak trains operate. As a result, eastbound afternoon no. 352 and evening westbound no. 355 have been cancelled.

Two Chicago-Milwaukee Hiawatha midday round trips have also been annulled, as was the morning Chicago-Quincy, Ill., eastbound Illinois Zephyr and westbound Carl Sandburg.

There was something wrong with the master controller for positive train control on Amtrak, and things didn't get any better during the weekend.

Ongoing issues with the server involved with Amtrak’s positive train control system have led to the cancellation today (Saturday, March 25), of a number of trains in the Midwest and elsewhere.

According to the Amtrak Alerts Twitter feed, 11 of the 13 Hiawatha service trains between Chicago and Milwaukee have been canceled as of 9:41 a.m. CDT. Still slated to run as of this writing are northbound No. 333 (an 11:05 a.m. departure) and southbound No. 336 (leaving at 1:05 p.m.)

Also cancelled in the Midwest are Lincoln Service train No. 301, the 7:15 a.m. departure from Chicago to St. Louis, which was originally reported as being delayed because of equipment problems; St. Louis-Chicago Lincoln Service trains Nos. 300 (a 4:30 a.m. departure) and 302 (a 6:40 a.m. departure); and Wolverines Nos. 350, the 6:45 a.m. departure from Chicago to Pontiac, Mich., and 351, the 5:43 a.m. departure from Pontiac to Chicago.

Long-distance cancellations include today’s departure of the northbound Texas Eagle from San Antonio, and the westbound Sunset Limited from New Orleans. Trains that were scheduled to depart Friday that were eventually cancelled included the westbound Sunset Limited; the westbound Empire Builder, and the southbound Texas Eagle, which was slated to leave Chicago at 1:45 p.m., and was cancelled about 7:45 p.m., although that cancellation was not reported on Amtrak Alerts until 1:01 a.m.

On the Sunday, it might have been easier for Amtrak to post a list of the trains that were actually running, as almost everything was out of position or could not be run because the master controller still didn't initialize.  Chicago to the East Coast?  Fuhgeddaboudit!

And after the master controller came back on line, trains that were listed as available ... weren't.

Amtrak departures from Chicago began at mid-morning today (Sunday, March 26) following two days of widespread cancellations because engineers couldn’t register, or initialize, trains in the interoperable positive train control system shared with host railroads.

The impact of those cancellations will reverberate for days because equipment isn’t available to return to Chicago. Today’s westbound Cardinal, Lake Shore Limited, and Capitol Limited from the East Coast, northbound City of New Orleans, and eastbound Empire Builder were all canceled. Also not running will be Monday’s eastbound Builder, Southwest Chief, and northbound Texas Eagle and the eastbound California Zephyr departing Emeryville, Calif., on Tuesday.

It got worse.

Initialization was able to take place intermittently outside of Chicago because there was less data flowing into the interoperable PTC network at other locations. Though not yet confirmed by Amtrak, it appears the company did not proactively cancel trains in the hope that the server issue was close to being solved.

When that didn’t happen, passengers who had been told earlier Saturday that their train would depart suddenly became stranded at Chicago Union Station."

Why, it's as if Dementia Joes brain activity had been loaded into that server.  The incompetence that we see in the most diverse Cabinet of this century appears to be characteristic of the middle management of the government agencies as well.

APRIL FOOL.

Presentism leads people who should know better to make the kinds of statements that are so foolish only an academic can believe them.  Apparently when swimmer and women's rights advocate Riley Gaines went to Pittsburgh, she had some fun with anthropologist Gabby Yearwood, who teaches something called Activist Anthropology, and who didn't have a good answer ready to go to a simple question.  "A crowd broke into laughter as an anthropologist denied differences in people’s bones based on their biological sex." Let's watch:

.⁦@Riley_Gaines_⁩ to anthropologist: "If you were to dig up… 2 humans… 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?"

"No."

*CHAOS*

"I'm not sure why I'm being laughed at if I'm the expert in the room. ... I have a PhD!" pic.twitter.com/YYW76ISevI

— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) March 30, 2023

The professor is being laughed at, because nowhere in his rambling discourse does he suggest that anthropologists might not know enough about tenth-century androgynous practices, if there in fact were any.  More from the Examiner.

“I actually have a question for you. You being an anthropologist, which anthropology is the study of human civilization,” Gaines said as the anthropologist noted that his area of study includes a focus on biology.

“So if you were to dig up a human, two humans, in 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?” Gaines questioned.

The anthropologist said, “No,” as those in attendance burst into laughter.

“I’m not sure why I’m being laughed at if I’m the expert in the room,” the anthropologist said. “Have any of you been to archaeological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data. I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at.”

As Gaines began to explain that she had “put a lot of research into this,” the anthropologist cut her off to say: “I have a Ph.D.”

The crowd once again began to laugh.

Arguments from authority only work when people respect your authority, and this guy pissed all of his away. He could have shown his audience some respect, perhaps reminding students that on many essay questions, the best answer is "it depends."  But he was so used to craven careerists in woke anthropology, or to cowing students by grading for agreement that he lost the good of the intellect, and was promptly brought up short.

Even physical, biological sex is merely a construct. Said an anthropologist.

The students laughed at him. Because of course, he was lying, and they knew it. Sex has a concrete reality, whatever critical theory claims. Unfortunately, the room is filled only with people who actually cared to hear Gaines, and far too many are led astray by the “authority” of the professor.

He, by the way, was very offended. He is an “expert” after all. The students should defer to his authority, despite it being based upon lies. He is supposed to have the power, after all.

If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con.  A gratifyingly large cohort of current students is not.  Nor should they respect anyone, holder of a terminal degree or not, who is condescending, disrespectful, or too full of himself.

APRIL FOOL.

Frederic Decker illustrates why political economy is too important to be left to sociologists.  "Social Security Is Not Adding a Penny to US Debt."  Really, Freddy?

Busting the debt myth can start with a report from the Government Accountability Office where stated how for years the Social Security program “built up reserves” from revenue collected that “were invested in federal government securities, reducing the amount that must be borrowed from the public,” including from other countries, to cover federal deficits. (By law surplus funds in Social Security have to be invested in government securities.)

Surpluses were possible, of course, given Social Security is largely funded by its separate payroll tax. Not totally by general revenue as likely some surmise, or haven’t considered questioning, from those typical charts on federal spending.

And, relatedly, not enough is made of this fact: Today, Social Security (formally, the “Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI] Trust Fund”) actually owns more U.S. debt, $2.7 trillion in Treasury securities, than the top two foreign governments, Japan with securities valuing $1.1 trillion and China with under $1 trillion.

That's reassuring, in the same way that a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried can assure the earliest bondholders that current contributors are (still) helping to build up reserves.  Until the building up stops.  Which it's about to do.  Remember those brief shining moments of federal surpluses back when lying about diddling an intern was not impeachable conduct?  Those were the Social Security taxes of prime-age Baby Boomer and Thirteenth Generation workers, which, by law, could be spent by Congress as long as the offsetting large treasury bill was held by the so-called Social Security trust fund.  Those might be assets to the Social Security Administration, but those are liabilities to the general taxpayer as the so-called trust fund redeems those bonds.

APRIL FOOLS.

The compilers of Michigan State's "Inclusive Guide," which apparently works under the imperative that excluding words is the way to achieve inclusion.

Don’t use the shorthand “POC” for people of color, “BIPOC” for Black, Indigenous and people of color or “QTBIPOC” for queer, transgender, Black, Indigenous and people of color unless in a direct quote; when used, explain it. These are vague terms that may unintentionally leave out race and ethnicity groups or create hierarchy. In some cases, other wording may be appropriate, e.g., “students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds,” “diverse groups,” “various heritages” or “different cultures.” Identify if you are writing about students, staff, faculty, staff, alums, etc.

Oh, in that excerpt they weren't referring to pickling spice. "For example, one recommendation to use alum(s) or graduate(s) instead of the gendered term alumni does not apply to office or group names, such as the Alumni Office or MSU Black Alumni."

THE POWERS OF TEN.

A month ago, we found a German work extra with steam power.  More recently, a video of another German Decapod, slugging it out over hill and dale with a gravel train, came to light.

I don't know, those level crossing warning bells don't sound that authoritative, but the stack talk is compelling.

That got me looking around for a serious North American revenue move with a Decapod, and one took place not too far from here.  A few years ago, the Illinois Railway Museum leased its mainline to Union Pacific to store idle unit coal train consists, and Russian Decapod Frisco 1630 was available for its break-in run to return the coal cars to Union Pacific.

On a preservation railway, it's not featherbedding to have a few extra hands on board to help out just in case, or perhaps to record the activity.

The museum did not rent out the main line for storage this past winter, which freed up track space for a few commemorative events. The steam season will resume Memorial Day weekend.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Silly me, I thought "March Madness" referred to the NCAA's basketball tournaments, and here it really means the celebration of a school shooter in Weimar America.  "The Democratic Party and its press allies have created an environment where mentally ill people are 'affirmed' instead of being given the help they need and then they want us to play by their rules when one of those mentally ill people lashes out and commits an atrocity."  Sapir-Whorf are wrong.  "Not calling transsexualism a mental disorder did not make it any saner."  At least hippies could take a bath, and get a haircut, or nature would run its course.  "Usually fads aren’t quite so permanently damaging as the trans mania has proved to be. I would cautiously hope that this one is on the deflationary spiral, although I am afraid that whatever appears to replace it in shallow public awareness might prove to be even worse."  Women and girls are hardest hit.  "'Self-identifying female' athletes aren’t competing with girls and women so much as swaggering and peacocking before them. And if you’re a talented female who’s worked hard at your sport, all you can do is smile with your second-place trophy." It's reality versus fantasy time.  Just don't call attention, the rage mob will come after you.

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

MARINATE IN THE SMUG.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg reacts to an indictment in the way of the lakefront liberal.  "Those addicted to the brew of lies and self-regard that Donald Trump deals in aren’t about to change their minds."  I suppose he'd consider Mark Levin's "America, you are looking tyranny in the face right now" as just the predictable response of voters who deserve no respect.   Losing skippers blame everybody but themselves, and the corollary proposition is for smug cosmopolitans to blame the voters.

Being an expect-the-worst kind of guy, I simply assume Trump will win in 2024 against a senescent Joe Biden. Of course he will. The whole thing will begin again, the lies and bombast, grievance and cruelty, will roll over the country like a tsunami. Worse this time, because the shock has become blunted, and helpers have stepped up and are ready, with a Supreme Court, a third of whom he picked himself, ready to sing “Amen” to his every overstep. Abroad, tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu will be comforted by the success of a kindred spirit, and at home the people who live for this kind of thing will ululate like true believers, clap like seals, salaam in adoration, and the whole madhouse will thunder on for another four years.

That "senescent Joe Biden" has put into office the most diverse cabinet of incompetent box-checkers has nothing to do with the understandable anger of the voters.  Mr Steinberg can't quite come to terms with that reality.

No addiction is easy to break, particularly not one offering blanket permission to live in your own fantasyland of perpetual grievance and self-assigned victimhood. It’s too powerful a potion for millions of Americans to pass up.

They’ll never quit Trump. As I’ve been saying for years, he is a symptom, not a cause. The Republican reaction to Jan. 6, 2021 should have made that clear. Trump is the whistle on a boiling tea kettle. Take the whistle away and the tea kettle is still boiling. It always has been.

I mean, when Robert Reich comes up with a sensible observation?

Trump’s fusion of himself with his supporters galvanizes those who project onto him the power and status they feel they’ve lost in America — people who are mostly white, rural, and without college degrees.

But Trump is not engaging in this fusion as a means of being reelected president. In fact, even if it helps him win the Republican nomination, it will lose him the general election, because it will turn off all Republicans who are focused on real issues or who worry that he’s nuts, and it will cause independents to flee.

Well, yes, I reject the false binary and have no patience for anybody who tells me that if I vote for somebody other than the reality show host or the corpse I'm somehow wasting my vote.  I also reject the invalidation of voters' choices because of some perceived loss of status some sociology professor probably dreamed up.

The dirty little secret of Trump’s third campaign for president — one that the media has so far ignored — is that he is not seeking to become president of the United States, at least not the United States as it is now organized. He is seeking to become president of a very different nation — overwhelmingly white, straight, Christian, and authoritarian.

That there might be some overlap between that population and the bourgeois norms of the American High is too much for any of the self-styled progressives to acknowledge, even though the past sixty years of the Consciousness Revolution have not been an unambiguous blessing, even for the people supposedly liberated by it.  And Reality gets a vote.  "Yet in fact he will not be elected — unless the U.S. economy is by then in a deep recession, or Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has a serious health problem."