OOPS.

A day or so ago, supportive staff at George Washington University put up a Stars and Stripes worthy of the J. L. Hudson department store on a building facing the jihadi encampment.  The militants voiced their discontent.

“Your flag is gay!!!”

—A protestor as the American flag unfurled at George Washington University:

🎥: @GoadMason https://t.co/NyvbPLzkn7 pic.twitter.com/1DFEJ94D3s

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 4, 2024

Maybe that jihadi didn't get the intersectional memo, or maybe he was wishing he was back in Asia Minor, where something "gay" could be tossed from the rooftop, all in the name of Allah the Merciful, of course.

Elsewhere along the Protest Beat, we have evidence that Joe Biden is, indeed, the Uniter.

Happening right now at LSU. Both sides are chanting "F*ck Joe Biden" in unison. pic.twitter.com/02CijYtPuM

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 3, 2024

Town Hall's Matt Vespa has a few more gems, mostly from the Southeastern Conference, which might quickly be establishing a value proposition that transcends hot sorority girls and football.  "It also shows that perhaps a good chunk of these students aren’t political junkies but can’t stand the anti-American and antisemitic shenanigans that are overtaking not just LSU but other colleges nationwide. It was a nice refresher that these people are in the minority and the IDF is going to wipe out Hamas in the coming days."

FORGETTING NOTHING, LEARNING NOTHING?

The current president of Kent State University, historian Todd Diacon, meditates on the ominous parallels between what happened at his campus half a century ago and the current opprobrium higher education has brought upon itself.

The name Kent State and references to the shootings have recently become ubiquitous as the media cover current college and university protests, and as some call for the use of the National Guard to quell these protests.

My point isn’t to wade into the protests, their structure, demands and organization, nor the opposition to them. Instead, I will simply say this as an historian and as the president of Kent State University: Our history is a bitter and vivid reminder of what happens when division and polarization crowd out peaceful dialogue and the search for understanding. To avoid this division and polarization, we embrace free speech while at the same time encouraging members of our community to practice kindness and respect when debating issues of the day. This is aspirational, we know. The alternatives can be dangerous.

Nor, I suppose, should somebody whose salary depends on the continuation of business as usual in higher education acknowledge the ways in which division and polarization, trafficking under the rubrics of critical theory, have crowded out free speech, kindness, and respect as "bourgeois fetishes."  I exaggerate, but only slightly.  "Those politically correct atrocities have accumulated, though, in such a way that the Ivies might have piddled away their primary selling point."  My sometimes Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom picks up the rebuttal.

Adding insult to this injury, just about every malignantly bad idea infecting our society and body politic today originated in academia; diversity-equity-inclusion or ‘white people bad!’/POC can do no evil, the viability of gender-swapping and forcing women to share intimate spaces and sports teams with men LARPing as Audrey Hepburn, and those designated as disadvantaged minorities are entitled to whatever retaliation they want to take against those they hold responsible for their condition. I’m certain that dozens of other bad ideas can be laid at the feet of the ivory-tower academics. They’ve long been enamored of communism and that slightly less poisonous junior partner, socialism, because it sounds so logical and sensible in theory. Never mind that extolling Marxism in practice means glossing over mass murder, famine, gulag slave labor, political corruption, and a stagnated manufacturing sector. If academia can overlook all that … well, what’s the murder, kidnapping, mass rape and torture of 1200 Israelis in comparison?

Yes, plus intersectional incoherence.  A minor Columbia academician by the name of Johannah King-Slutzky recently provided Militant Normals with a new figure of fun.  "She is a paid instructor & PhD candidate at Columbia studying 'theories of the imagination & poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens.'"  Because of course she did.  "Because colonialism and occupation and genocide."

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It has been over three years since we featured an "On My Workbench" post, and one could easily see in that post that the workbench was, to put it charitably, cluttered.  The most recent "Watch This Space" post featured the addition of staging tracks in a central peninsula.

Inside that peninsula is space for a workshop.  Once the March Meet wrapped up, that space started getting organized.

All the workbenches and machine stands are in one place, and the clutter on the bench tops is being sorted through, discarded, or put in a proper place, and there might be some progress reports of actual work on those actual workbenches in the near future.

THE ATMOSPHERIC RIVER TO THE RESCUE.

At the end of January, we noted that a canal built through a tropical rain forest could still go through a lot of water.  "It's not enough that Iranian proxies and African pirates are scaring shippers away from Suez, which makes for intermodal business on Eurasian railways.  Now, the rains aren't coming in Central America, and transloading in Panama has picked up."  It's May, the rainy season is starting in the Canal Zone, and La Niña is weakening.

There might be a slight break in the bad news, and it comes with an interesting little sidenote attached for climate cultists desperately flogging the global warming narrative.

As far as the Panama Canal situation goes, things are looking up in a good, rainy, and wet way. Last August, they had a 20-day wait and a 200-ship transit backlog due to low water levels, which was forecast to worsen this past February. The Panama Canal Authority was planning to drop the number of ships even further.

Then the rains came.

They never did have to cut back to 18 from 24 vessel passages a day.

In fact, by March, things had improved to where they could bump up a couple of extra slots thanks to "above average rainfall."

Sometimes a well-understood phenomenon of long standing is well-understood and of long standing because it ... works.

The climate phenomenon known as El Niño—and not climate change—was a key driver in low rainfall that disrupted shipping at the Panama Canal last year, scientists said Wednesday.

A team of international scientists found that El Niño—a natural warming of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide—doubled the likelihood of the low precipitation Panama received during last year's rainy season. That dryness reduced water levels at the reservoir that feeds freshwater to the Panama Canal and provides drinking water for more than half of the Central American country.

Human-caused climate change was not a primary driver of the Central American country's unusually dry monsoon season, the World Weather Attribution group concluded, after comparing the rainfall levels to climate models for a simulated world without current warming.

The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal yet but follows scientifically accepted techniques, and past such studies have frequently been published months later.

One surely hopes that working papers turn into minimal publishable units eventually, rather than having the editor turn it down because the results have been so widely shared in the working paper.  (Yes, that's been known to happen.)  It should not come as much of a surprise that natural variability is a stronger explanation than the results of an extrapolation model, which is only as good as the priors of its composer.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Higher education, destroying its value proposition.  "Elite universities pander to a small minority of progressive students at the expense of the students who simply want to enjoy a normal college experience, which involves things like frat parties, university traditions, and joy."

I keep warning you what happens when you deny coherent beliefs.  "There is much educators can and should do to restore objective truths, and in turn, our country. Right now, powerful intellectuals are doing the opposite."  We're noticing.  "It looks like an American seriousness crisis in slow motion. If our elite schools aren't producing industrious people with critical thinking skills, what good are they exactly?"  Not much.  "If there's a meaningful, practical difference between destruction and deconstruction, I've yet to hear it."  But they persist.  "Progressive hothouse plants assume their supposed moral superiority exempts them from living by the rules in the manner of others. But sometimes it is not just the police who anger them, but the very Frankensteinian monsters they created who do not cooperate with their degreed and elected enablers."  That's when the fun begins.  "No one is well disposed toward fatuous busy bodies that think themselves superior to mere mortals."

Where were these Capital District faculty thirty years ago?

George Washington University, and indeed universities across the DMV and the United States as a whole, will fail in their most basic promises and commitments if they continue to repress, arrest, suspend, and stifle the free speech and political activity of their students. We condemn any move by GW to shut down student gatherings and restrict access rather than open spaces.

We will not tolerate the weaponization of unfounded presumptions of bigotry to intimidate, punish, and silence students who are not engaging in anything of the sort. As educators, we will not stand for the criminalization of peaceful protests on our campuses.

The Columbia faculty, same question.

Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools more than 400 people being detained so far.

The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."

"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."

Study history.  "The antiwar movement was mostly counterproductive and did little to end the Vietnam War."  Someone delivered.

Reality always wins in the end.  Every. Single. Time.  'It's FINALS. I want to GO HOME.'  People aren't interested in playing nice.

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

WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?

Particularly, armchair strategists with no understanding of logistics.  "Ukraine is defying the US over strikes on Russian oil refineries. Experts say it's a necessary risk."

Only in the common room, or among the talking heads on the Sunday shows, does any of the following make sense.

Four days after the US voted to sign off a long-awaited $61 billion in aid, Ukraine did the one thing that the White House has reportedly been asking it not to do: It struck another oil facility on Russian soil.

Ukraine says that Wednesday's drone attack took out about 900,000 cubic feet of Russian fuel. This was followed on Friday by 10 drones slamming into an oil refinery in Krasnodar, shutting the plant down, The Telegraph reported.

These are just the latest in a ferocious string of attacks on Russian energy facilities, launched by Ukraine since the start of the year.

Ukraine's rationale for hitting Russia's energy infrastructure came in response to the muted impact of Western sanctions, as well as delays in Western aid as it struggled to hold the front line.

Ukraine needed to be "more creative, or think in more 3D terms about the battle space," Ann Marie Dailey, a geopolitical strategist at the RAND Corporation, told BI.

"You need to find other ways to weaken your opponent and stretch their resources," she added.

What a nasty piece of work is Dementia Joe. In addition to pleading with Israel to pull its punches in order that the jihadi element of his coalition shows up to vote in Michigan and Minnesota, now he's hoping that Ukraine will pull its punches in order that summer road trippers don't cancel their cross-country trips to the national parks and roller coasters thanks to the sticker shock.

FROM THE RIVER TO THE CORNFIELD.

When I said the mid-majors should consider themselves as in the same business as the Ivies, I wasn't advocating for doing the Columbia envy first.  "Ivy-envy has infested those institutions in the worst possible way, with the faddish multiculturalism and identity politics combining with access-assessment-remediation-retention to create dropout factories."  In that post, that sentence was a question, and I prayed that the answer was "No."  At Northern Illinois University, though, the administration building was the objective of an end-of-semester (today is Reading Day, and the weather is suitably gorgeous for procrastinating) gathering of the discontented.  "Pro-Palestine Protesters enter Altgeld Hall."

The article was last updated at 12.35 this morning, there are no new developments reported by The Northern Star this afternoon.  Whether this was some sort of coordinated action or something spontaneous on a rainy day, so far the students unleashed some salty language, but did not trash the building.

At 12:25 p.m. Thursday, student protesters began to gather at the MLK Commons stairs with snacks, chalk, posters, Palestinian flags and sunscreen.

The protest started marching toward Altgeld Hall at 3:18 p.m.

“In our millions, in our billions, we are all Palestinian,” a crowd of 21 people shouted while marching.

Once the crowd reached the front of Altgeld Hall, they stood on the circle and shouted.

“Lisa Freeman, you’re a sellout, pack your bags and get the hell out,” the crowd shouted.

At 3:30 p.m., the protesters entered Altgeld Hall and were met by Jeffery Salmon, director of the Center for Student Assistance, and Alex Pitner, director of Students Organizations.

Salmon asked if they had specific demands they wanted to deliver. Salmon took Salem and Narjis Ammar, sophomore biochemistry major and vice president of [Students for Justice in Palestine], to Altgeld Hall Room 300 while the rest of the protest went to Altgeld Hall Room 315.

Room 315 is the lobby of the regents' meeting room, and it's designated as a free speech zone for procedural reasons.  After the students delivered their manifesto, they went about their business.

When the protesters returned to the stairs at MLK Commons, the students ordered Vinny’s pizza and ate together.

A crowd of 17 people gathered at 6:15 p.m. and ate the pizza as they told stories about their family members from Palestine.

Protesters disbanded at 7:20 p.m.

It was the last day of classes.

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.

HERE COMES THAT SECOND TRAIN TO THE CITIES.

With the Fall, 1971 timetable Amtrak introduced a second daily Chicago - Twin Cities service.  The Empire Builder to the West Coast was accompanied by a Hiawatha that on days it ran to the West Coast through Montana senator Mike Mansfield's (a Democrat majority leader) principal cities was the North Coast Hiawatha.  The North Coast Hiawatha stopped running as part of the 1979 Carter era retrenchments, although an overnight Chicago - Duluth North Star offered that second frequency for another year or so.

Passenger Rail advocates of the Upper Mississippi Valley have wanted at a minimum that second train.  I've had that skepticism born of years of politicized train service.  "I suppose I'm asking too much even for journalists not to describe trains as "chugging" let alone a serious corridor service extending from Chicago as far as Fargo or Grand Forks with multiple frequencies between the Cities and Chicago."  Earlier this year, the consultants got to wet their beaks with all sorts of feasibility studies for a return of the Chicago and North Western network to Wisconsin.  That second frequency between Chicago and the Cities was included.  "The only train that is even close to entering service is that Great River (think Morning Hiawatha northbound, Afternoon Hiawatha southbound) and I'll believe it when I see it running."

TODAY IN SOCIALIST WISHFUL THINKING, INFRASTRUCTURE EDITION.

Read LeeAnn Hall's column, and revel in the fantasies.  "Reducing the miles Americans have to drive would mean enormous savings, cleaner air, and more connected communities."  Who can be opposed to Good Things?

In cities and in rural areas, in red states and blue states, most residents want cleaner and more connected communities. Public transit — including trains, buses, and dial-a-ride services — and accessible walking and bike routes give us healthy, clean, and affordable ways for everyone to get where they need to go.

But for too long, policymakers have sold us the false choice that we must fund highways above all else. They continue to waste billions of our tax dollars on highway expansion projects that pollute our air and increase traffic, instead of funding sidewalks, safe biking routes, and robust public transportation options. This has resulted in a system where most people must drive for every trip to meet their daily needs.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This spring’s Earth Day celebrations gave us the opportunity to step back, imagine our future, and commit to the changes that get us there. And to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst effects of climate change, we must address the elephant in the room: transportation.

Here I thought Earth Day was an opportunity to give thanks that we are still here, never mind what the Doomsday Cult warned us.

THERE'S POPCORN ON HAND, AND SPRECHER IN THE COOLER.

Perhaps the best evidence that there is a death duel of the dinosaurs between the communist and corporatist wings of the Democrats is Dementia Joe's ongoing silence, until this morning, when it comes to the campus protests featuring people who we can be certain are not Trump voters.

The chaos engulfing the campuses is but a first foretaste of the bitter cup which will be proffered to Biden at the Democratic convention this summer, when the same protesters, with degrees from the same "elite" institutions bring their "peaceful" protest tactics to Chicago intent on wreaking havoc.

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

Biden is, of course, not taking a strong stand because the left wing of his own party, already inflamed by his mealy-mouthed support for Israel, is actively participating in these protests. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) dropped by to fist bump the Columbia campers. Biden can’t afford to alienate them further, and like Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik, will soon realize you can’t reason or negotiate with a mob.

This morning, fuelled by a cup of coffee rather than the triple espresso he requires in the evening, Our President gave a standard sort of "respect your fellow citizens" sort of pep talk.  Common Dreams regular Jake Johnson hit the ceiling.

In brief, unscheduled remarks delivered from the White House, Biden acknowledged that "peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues."

But he then proceeded to cast recent campus demonstrations as abhorrent, using instances of property damage to broadly paint student protesters as out of control—giving a pass to police forces and pro-Israel mobs that have brutally attacked peaceful encampments.

Biden, who has armed Israel's military to the hilt, also conflated trespassing and disruptions of day-to-day campus activities—including classes and graduations—with violence, saying, "None of this is a peaceful protest."

"Dissent must never lead to disorder," the president said, ignoring the long history of disruptive civil rights and anti-war protests in the U.S. "There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos."

Dementia Joe is trapped.  His Justice Department is still holding people who trespassed in and disrupted day-to-day political activities in the Federal Capitol: should he shout out a Right on! to people occupying landmark buildings at Columbia or UCLA, the Trump ads would write themselves.  I mean, when Al Sharpton sees it?

“How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side, say January 6 was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on, on college campuses, you can lose the moral high ground? Sharpton asked.

That's when Mika Brzezinski had a meltdown. "Good Lord, don't make a parallel to January 6th!" co-host Mika Brzezinski said in response. "For some reason, that's not allowed." Whoops, she just said the quiet part out loud — you aren't supposed to be saying that, Al!

Never mind, that column notes, that Morning Mika brought the same thing up a day earlier, and probably got mugged by Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow for her transgressions.  Red State's Nick Arama continues that column, pointing out that, yes, people of the loudmouth left are all about "contextualizing" their antics, complete with court intellectuals who will view "revolutionary" violence, such as Palestinian advocates brawling with Jews, as somehow different from "reactionary" violence, such as Palestinian advocates brawling with Jews.

Sharpton's statement was nonsensical because they don't have the moral high ground — people on the left have been behind riots and anti-American actions for decades. The anti-Americans' actions on campuses now are right in line with the history of the left and indeed involve some of the same people involved in prior such actions/movements. And they particularly don't have the high ground because now, while people were locked up for Jan 6, people involved in riots such as against the Trump inauguration didn't suffer anywhere near the harshness of approach/prosecution.

Take it away, Jake Johnson.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said Thursday that "President Biden's claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."

"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses, he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests," Mitchell added.

Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wrote following the president's remarks that "the best speech of Biden's campaign was in June 2020, amid the nationwide protests against the murder of George Floyd."

"He could've given a very similar speech today, if only he thought the same rights and principles applied to Palestinians," Duss added. "In June 2020, Biden criticized violence but also refused to paint the protests with that broad brush. He acknowledged the root causes, the pain driving them. He could've made some effort to do the same today, instead he chose to amplify a right-wing caricature."

Countering suggestions that criticism of Biden could harm his reelection chances against former President Donald Trump, Duss pointed to an old social media post in which he explained: "One of my concerns here is that Biden is undermining his re-election. In addition to being morally and strategically awful, I think his Gaza policy is alienating and demobilizing constituencies he will need."

The problem is, he cannot simultaneously please the communist and corporatist factions of his coalition, not on the subject of jihadi terrorism.  If there are any Henry Jackson-like Democrats left, Donald Trump and the Republicans offer a national security value proposition they could get on board with.  There are limits to a Democrat appeal to the Hamas fan base in Minneapolis or Dearborn.  And, yes, if you're going to invoke the Pettus Bridge or the Boston Tea Party, you well might have to acknowledge the Obama era Tea Party and the trucker convoys of the 1970s.

Better, perhaps, to be an empty suit.

Biden chose to bring up "Islamophobia" and "discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinians," putting those things on equal footing with the violent calls by those groups for a "global intifada" and a genocide against the Jews.

It's cowardice personified. He just couldn't bring himself to address the actual issue at hand. Instead, he tried to play both sides, something he and other Democrats lambasted Donald Trump for regarding Charlottesville (and Trump didn't actually say what they accused him of).

Six more months of campaigning season.  Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and pop the popcorn and keep the Sprecher chilled.

THURSDAY TERSE THOUGHTS.

My occasional Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster offers links he categorizes as "Worthwhile Reading, Viewing, and Listening."  No bons mots, no quotes, just the links, ma'am.

THE LATTER DAY COW AND CALF.

Years ago, railroads considered all sorts of approaches to make use of the full power of a diesel engine at low speeds by putting additional traction motors on a ballasted booster unit called a "slug" with the motors permanently connected in series.

You’re at trackside, eyeing an approaching CSX train. The roar of working diesels increases, but it’s oddly distant, given that the engines are so close. The lead unit grinds by, eerily silent but for the humming of its traction motors, followed by two others making all the familiar diesel sounds. What’s going on? The first unit was not a locomotive at all, but a slug.

A slug is a vehicle used for moving trains, having traction motors and added weight (or “ballast”) but no prime mover or generator. The electric current for its motors is provided by a “mother” unit, a standard locomotive fitted with cable connections to feed current to the slug.

Without a power source of its own, a slug cannot move by itself and is not a locomotive in the strictest sense of the word.

Slugs enable a more complete use of a locomotive’s power output than would otherwise be possible. A locomotive has more power than it can use for tractive effort at low speeds — at a certain point, the application of more power only makes the wheels slip. By spreading the power over the additional wheels of a slug, greater tractive effort can be had.

Slugs are most effective at low speeds. Since their introduction in the 1940s they have found wide use in hump yards, where entire trains must be moved at a walking pace during classification.

The "cow and calf" locution originated with end-cab switchers, where, to reduce the expense of the slugs, the builder left the cab off.  That configuration also offered better visibility over the hood of the calf.  Some railroads with heavy yard switching duties slaved two calves to one switcher, and rural-minded rails took to referring to the combination as a "herd."  Norfolk Southern use a thundering herd in Bellevue.

Brian Schmidt photograph retrieved from Trains.

TODAY IN SOCIALIST WISHFUL THINKING, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS EDITION.

Last night, the New York Police Department ended the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia with enough forces in reserve to end another insurrection at City University of New York.  I really don't want to relive the Sixties and Seventies in my sixties and seventies, but there it is.  Complete with the Spockian adolescents.

Students reported that police used tear gas, which is banned in war, on demonstrators.

"Tonight, my university called in a militarized police force—armed in riot gear, with guns drawn, deploying weapons banned under international law—to attack teenagers," Lea Salim, a student member of Jewish Voice for Peace-Columbia/Barnard, said in a statement. "All because Columbia refuses to divest from the Israeli military and its genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza."

Never mind that Hamas could have avoided all the trouble by, oh, not attacking that music festival in the first place, or, once they figured out the Israelis were serious, returning all the prisoners, surrendering the ringleaders, disbanding their government, and inviting the Kuwaitis, who have some experience with beachfront property, to be trustees for Gaza.

TRADING UP?

At the beginning of April, we called attention to the flight from Northern Illinois's men's basketball team.

Xavier Amos, a player with solid Chicago prep credentials, will be suiting up for Wisconsin.

That announcement came one day after Central Arkansas guard Camren Hunter committed to UW. Amos took visits to Virginia and UW.

Amos, 6-foot-8 and 215 pounds, should help fill the void created by the departure of Tyler Wahl, who played five seasons at UW.

Although Wahl was a terrific defender and rebounder and a dependable post presence, his season-high mark for three-point shooting was just 29.4%. Amos can score around the basket, but his No. 1 asset offensively is the ability to shoot from the perimeter.

With the transfer protocols, recruit-redshirt-develop might give way to wait-let-the-mid-majors-develop-transfer.  The effect of that business model on the emergence of those four major conferences irrespective of the NCAA remains to be seen.

THERE CAN NEVER BE ENOUGH OF THAT GRAND ROMAN QUALITY.

A Guardian travel writer did a Grand Tour of public baths and swimming pools in Europe.

Stepping into the lobby of Gellért Baths in Budapest is like stepping back in time. Having resisted the temptation to look at photos of the baths online, I was thrilled at my first sight of the spectacular art nouveau interior.

Art Noveau? Judge for yourself.

The article includes illustrations of public beaches and a variety of indoor swimming pools.  Book yourself a Grand Tour and pack the sun-screen.

Doesn't the Gellért tepidarium get you thinking about going for a train ride?

One might be a testament to the Dual Monarchy, the other a testament to The Pennsylvania Railroad.

THE ANSWER TO A BAD SPEECH CODE IS NOT AN IMPROVED, MORE REPRESSIVE SPEECH CODE.

I was not a fan of speech codes thirty years ago, when the lunatic notion that words are violence first infected higher education in a serious way.  My stance has always been "Justice, freedom: still contested territory. Whether it is black or Palestinian or male lives that are being diminished by the administrative ethos, it is the administrative ethos that is wrong. If there's no chance to play with controversial ideas in the university, where do they get played with?"  I'm sympathetic to arguments that the invocation of "civility" might be a polite form of censorship, and there are myriad ways in which that conversation-ender can be applied.

WHEN DID THE EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM HAPPEN?

I recently watched the newly released Civil War, which has provoked all sorts of commentary, including complaints about promotional posters depicting scenes that didn't make the movie.  "The first was that they depicted scenes that do not appear in the film. The other is more controversial, and that is how these graphics were clearly AI-generated."

Face it, dear reader, journalists attempting to get from New York to Washington without going through Baltimore isn't like chronicling the 34th Wisconsin marching from Cairo to Savanna; never mind that getting Abraham Lincoln through Baltimore to be sworn in was pretty fraught in the spring of 1861.

What were the plate tectonics by which a new confluence of the north and south branches of the Chicago River cleaved Marina City in two and moved them to opposite Union Station?  In the movie, somehow Chicago and much of New York remain intact, while there's a battle over unspecified objectives near Pittsburgh?

A RECKONING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION'S VALUE PROPOSITION?

Nine years ago, the Ivies might have been able to get away with their foolishness, while institutions not so venerated bore the consequences of breaking the social contract.

That's long been a theme of mine.  "We find ourselves in a situation where universities are failing at their mission, and the People's representatives are questioning our efforts."  The Pope Center's Jenna Robinson now asserts, "All over the country, university campuses are out of touch with American culture."  She goes on to list ten ways in which higher education breaks the social contract.  The root causes include higher education admitting unprepared people and calling it access, and fostering a self-despising multiculturalism that denigrates the very institutions and traditions that make skeptical inquiry, including self-despising multiculturalism, possible, while celebrating all sorts of transgressions against mainstream America.  And yet ... it's more of the politically correct atrocities at the institutions that have the U.S. News problem.  Until people figure out that it's the interaction of the ambitious students at those institutions that provides the value added, trendy curricula or not, though, there's precious little incentive for the curriculum committees and the administrators to do anything differently.

Those politically correct atrocities have accumulated, though, in such a way that the Ivies might have piddled away their primary selling point.  Four essays raising that possibility came to my attention last week.  In chronological order, first came Nate Silver.  "The Ivy League and other elite private colleges are losing esteem — and they deserve it."  That's got Friday short take written all over it, but for his elaborations.

Just go to a state school. The premium you're paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that's worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.

Put another way, the Ivies have undermined the case for U.S. News selling those rating guides.

I've long maintained that those U.S. News guides exist because so much of higher education has gone down the rat-holes of access, assessment, remediation, and retention, and kids with ambition (or pushy parents?) buy those guides in order to identify institutions where students might pick up a respectable education (or at least validate their ability with a signal.)  "The issue, however, is precisely that the U.S. News rankings exist because at the margin, many parents and students seek an experience more like Harvard (or Wisconsin before it went sports-mad) and less like a diploma mill. Institutions of higher education that fail to grasp this point may be reinforcing social stratification."

That post continued with an observation on the state of higher education that neither Nate Silver nor the others who made similar points, with or without building on his post missed.

The U.S. News problem exists, though, partly because potential students understand that having a soul to sell might still be a better circle of hell than dealing with people having so much fun with beer-'n-circus that the notion of a soul never occurs to them. In addition, Professor Deresiewicz suggests students avoid the Ivies and the soulless students by considering ... the hundred or so private liberal arts colleges that are out of the top twenty?? That's clearly the upscale audience that has sent their spawn to Harvard Prep Day Care in the first place, and scant consolation for the parents of promising kids from the wrong zip codes.

It might be that for the moment going to a state flagship university with aspirations is an improvement over Woke Catechism at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or Oberlin.  Mr Silver is for the moment of that mind.

Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse.

In principle, that's valid.  In practice, bailing on the Ivies involves risks.  "Now, if we could get the land-grants and mid-majors to recognize that they are in the same business as the Ivies, and turf out all the irksome special education impedimenta that keep U.S. News selling those ratings ..."

Here's the problem:  George Will wrote a dyspeptic column, "The leakage of universities’ prestige amid protests is most welcome," in which the prestige dissipates all at once.

Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic educations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public-university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.

Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”

The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.

He's pushing things too soon.  We've replaced hereditary aristocracies with credentialed meritocracies.  Over time, the institutions that have the U.S. News problem have evolved into tack-rooms from which a few people can draw the boots, spurs, and saddles to ride mankind; and that evolution is in part perceived quality, with Mr Will suggesting that perception is slipping, and part an abdication of the "higher" part of higher education by institutions including that "large public university," where the graduate might hold the degree, but might not have been held to any sort of rigorous standards.  That, dear reader, is why U.S. News sells those guides.

Consider also Joanne Jacobs's reaction to Nate Silver.  "I'd imagine that Wall Street firms would be wary of hiring students who hate capitalism."  And yet, will they come recruiting at Iowa or Northern Illinois or Marquette?  If not, why not?  Regular readers will recognize the answer, it follows at length below the jump.

END THE CENSORSHIP. DEFUND PUBLIC BROADCASTING.

Excessively Earnest People can't stand being mocked, which makes two recent calls to derail public radio's gravy train, that is, if one can speak of a gravy train funding an organization that caters to vegetarians and other thenthitive thouls.  News flash: those thenthitive thouls are chumbolones.

I’ve come up with a positive alternative:

Que the Pan flutes and the bird sounds from the Amazon rain forest. Yes, the time has come.

And, added plus, “free” public television with programming set up by a corporate board of prominent American conservatives including the scholar Victor Davis Hanson, radio broadcaster Dan Proft, Tom Bevan co-founder of Real Clear Politics and University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Charles Lipson.

For example, we’d have President Joe Biden, accompanied by those Pan Flutes playing the theme of Cmdr. McBragg, telling the story of Joe’s heroic Uncle Ambrose being devoured by cannibals in New Guinea. Whether it happened or not. You can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs, right Walter Duranty?

And lengthy panel discussions on “It’s the Economy Stupid” about how much things cost at the store, what they cost now and how great things were BJ (Before Joe) and droll comedies from Britain on the humorous antics of liberal chumbolones, and sad dramas from Britain about sad middle-class depressives.

We’ll have sports too, from 24-hour fly fishing to 24-hour soccer that often ends 0-0, and city apartment terriers killing alley rats.

We’ll call that one about the rat-killer “Prince of the City” along with a kid’s cartoon show on the heroic “Prince” protecting a multi-racial family from cartoon rats.

To fund it all, we’ll invoke a complicated hidden federal tax scheme replete with complicated grants and call it just a bunch of “grants” that are all much too intricate for Americans to bother about in Congress. So I hope you’ll never get to the bottom of it and the money keeps flowing in to support my elitist fly-fishing documentaries and scoreless soccer.

Dear reader, you might protest that John Kass has mixed some of WLS Radio's programming in with any evening on Fox News, only he's hit up the taxpayers, rather than the purveyors of pillows and diet supplements, to keep the show on the air.

OPEN WITH RESTRICTIONS.

Toward the end of March, our post on the ongoing process worship accompanying the clearing of wreckage and reopening Baltimore's harbor noted hopes of having a shipping channel available within a month.  And so it has come to pass.  "According to Coast Guard Sector Maryland, the status of the port is now 'Open with Restrictions.' A new, fourth, Baltimore temporary channel to the port, the Fort McHenry Limited Access Channel, is now open."

Shallower draft ships requiring less vertical clearance have been able to pass under the approach spans on either side of the Francis Scott Key Bridge's main spans that were knocked down.  There's enough of the fallen span removed that part of the main channel is again available for use, although Dali has not yet been moved.  The first ship through had tugs fore and aft and probably underwent a serious inspection of the engineering spaces before she sailed.  Mariners have been notified that transits might have to be suspended whilst crews prepare to move the ship.

“We’re working to strike a balance between enabling temporary access to support commercial activity and undertaking necessary measures to fully reopen the Fort McHenry Channel,” said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. David O’Connell, Captain of the Port and Federal On-Scene Coordinator, Key Bridge Response 2024. “This limited access deep draft channel will provide a window for five of the deep draft vessels currently unable to depart the port as well as some smaller deep draft vessels to transit. Meanwhile, the Unified Command personnel continue to work full speed ahead to safely and efficiently finish operations.”

The current 2,000-yard safety zone around the Francis Scott Key Bridge remains in effect and is intended to protect personnel, vessels, and the marine environment. No vessel or person will be permitted to enter the safety zone without obtaining permission from the COTP or a designated representative.

Translation: don't go joyriding in there with your cabin cruiser for a look around.