HOCKEY THE WAY IT USED TO BE.

Milwaukee Admirals beat [Iowa] Wild, coldest game in AHL history.  "The teams played outdoors at the United Heroes League in Hastings, Minnesota as part of Hockey Day Minnesota."  The Wild scored the first two goals, the Admirals the next three, with everybody getting ninety seconds of extra outdoor time.

Years ago, my dad scored some points with his future father-in-law watching my mom's brother play in an outdoor game in Green Bay.  Might be that after December 1944 in Belgium, a chilly night properly bundled up and fed to watch hockey held no terrors.

HERE COMES THE WEEKEND.

Let's go into the weekend and see January off with a collection of encouraging headlines all posted recently.

1.  UN Chief Guterres Warns of ‘Imminent Financial Collapse’ as Trump Pulls Funding.
2.  Alberta Separatists Accused of ‘Treason’ After Secret Meetings With Trump Officials.
3.  Protest Culture Is Annoying and Un-American.
4.  (Related to 3) Visiting Wacko World.
5.  (Understanding 3 and 4) 'Suicidal Empathy': Is the West Committing Suicide-by-Compassion?
6.  (Related) The Yappy Little Dog Syndrome.
7.  The ‘Doomsday Clock’ Ticks Down Again — Here’s Why That Is Good News.
8.  A Proper Insurrection.
9.  Goodbye, California.

Follow the links if you want elaboration.

WRINGING OUT THE ATMOSPHERE.

In the summer of 2023, there was more water in the atmosphere, which affected summer humidity.  "That volcano, it transpires, was at just the right depth to superheat water enough to push through the water pressure at depth and boil off into the atmosphere. More water in the atmosphere, more humidity, more air you can wear, and in corn country the evening aspiration of the corn plants manifests itself."  Atmospheric water can be an effective greenhouse gas, that is, until the next rainfall.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS?

Islamic fundamentalism has not turned out well for Iran.  The currency has no exchange value and the hydohijab industrial complex apparently failed to recruit the right sort of rain dancers.  Now the rulers have shut down the internet to keep news from getting in and out, and that, as a byproduct, prevents any commerce from taking place.  Thus, Rick Moran argues, "Iran Has Entered a 'Doom Loop' Thanks to the Internet Shutdown."

Our President might be more respectful of the interests of local governments than his predecessors, as the naval task forces might be on the move in order that Air Force assets not overfly countries that have their own gripes with Iran but seek neither war nor internal unrest.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have informed Washington that they will not allow their airspace to be used for an attack on Iran. It hardly matters.

American military assets, including the deadliest weapons platform on Earth, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, along with several guided missile cruisers have officially entered CENTCOM's area of responsibility somewhere in the Arabian Sea.

On January 19, 2026, the Lincoln transited the Strait of Malacca westbound. By January 26, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed the strike group had officially entered the Middle East region.

I doubt whether all that firepower is for show. You don't send the Abraham Lincoln strike group from the Indo-Pacific region to the Middle East on a pleasure cruise.  These ships are going to war sometime in the next few days.

Why now? It may be that U.S. advisors have judged the Iranian regime to be teetering on the edge of collapse and that one good push will bring the whole rotten edifice down.

It's a long shot, to be sure, but it's an opportunity that may not come again anytime soon. It may be a gamble worth taking.

I remember similar talk about Operation Iraqi Freedom likely to go well (yes, the Ba'ath government was gone within a month, but what came next was neither expeditious nor amusing) and "one kick will knock the rotten structure down" might sound better in French or German, but implementing it was another matter.

WHAT ARE THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?

Did a man die in Minneapolis on Saturday because a federal official didn't handle the pistol that man dropped properly?  Does that even matter?  Before Saturday, Cato's Walter Olson was already claiming "In Minnesota, ICE Is Assaulting the Constitutional Rights of Citizens."

It is crucial to grasp, though, that ICE and Border Patrol also routinely violate the rights of US citizens, both the naturalized kind and those born right here. With the Minnesota campaign of recent weeks, these assaults on citizens’ rights appear to be multiplying rapidly.

Until lately, the citizens most visibly targeted for abuse have often been reporters and protesters. Members of those groups have been repeatedly attacked while taking pictures of ICE actions in a nonobstructive way or protesting nonviolently, in what looks very much like a practice that is being tolerated by policy.

He concludes, "Many advocates of constitutional liberty have begun pushing back against ICE and Border Patrol’s incursions on the Bill of Rights. More should join them."

Despite incoming foul weather and Conference Weekend in professional football, another protest put down with force in Minneapolis has brought people out.  Paul Krugman asks, "Was This a Murder Too Far?"  He suggests it is, because of the wide range of people crying foul.

Centrist Democrats, who have spent weeks trying to ignore Minneapolis so they could talk about the price of eggs, are finally taking a stand and appear ready to vote against another round of DHS funding. And several Republicans are now speaking out.

The NRA and other gun groups are now calling for a full investigation of Pretti’s murder, angry that the DHS justifies the execution of Pretti because he was, entirely legally, in possession of a gun. Even Fox News’ s Maria Bartiromo, a tireless Trump cheerleader, sounded patently skeptical when questioning Kash Patel about DHS’s outlandish claims.

The first post-Pretti execution poll, from YouGov, shows that ICE’s brownshirt tactics are evoking a wave of anger, shame and revulsion across America. People who have seen videos of the shooting overwhelmingly say that it was unjustified. Calls to abolish ICE have gone from the fringe to the center, with a plurality of Americans supporting them.

Does this mark a tipping point? Or will the revulsion simply fade away, as it did after Good was killed? I think that this time is different, for several reasons.

Well, politics is the only "respectable" art in which compromising your integrity for the sake of a talking point is normal behavior.  It gives Paul Krugman free rein to sneer at people he disagrees with, or finds disagreeable.

I believe that a significant number of people brushed aside the murder of Renee Good because she was a woman — at a time when right-wingers are still dismissing opponents of fascism as “gangs of wine moms” — in a same-sex relationship.

Second, while the video evidence on Good’s killing was clear if examined closely, it did need close examination to reveal that she was simply murdered. The videos of Pretti’s killing don’t need close examination. That sound you heard Saturday was millions of Americans, myself included, crying out in horror as we watched agents repeatedly shoot a man who was already restrained.

His closing sentence expresses the sentiments that prompted the questions introducing my post.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor answers my "Does it even matter?" with a better question.

Even if you are a reader who thinks that protesters should keep their distance from ICE, or maybe you think that they shouldn’t be protesting at all, please stop and consider that none of this is justified, and that we should expect any law enforcement entity to behave professionally and to de-escalate, not as both of these incidents indicate, lash out in anger at US citizens exercizing their constitutional rights.

Ask yourself, upon watching any of these videos: Is there any defensible reason that ICE couldn’t have just walked away?

His continuation is correct in part, incorrect in part. "Annoying law enforcement is actually a First Amendment right. The notion that instead of being protected speech, it carries the death penalty without trial is the stuff of authoritarian nightmares."  The "annoying law enforcement part" might not be correct.  Rich Schapiro of NBC News breaks that down in "One called it murder. Some need more information."  By all means, read it in full.

UNSHAKABLY CONVINCED OF THEIR SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE.

Thus does historian Niall Ferguson contemplate the sort of Trump-skeptical intellectual whose priors are so tight you couldn't push a needle through with a jack hammer.

Three things are especially striking. First, they never look back and ask: “How good were my previous judgments of Trump? How did I do last year? Did I anticipate how much Trump would achieve in the first 100 days? Did I wrongly predict that his tariffs would crater the economy and cause inflation? Did I fail to anticipate the air strikes on Fordow? Did I fail to foresee the deal that got the Israeli hostages out of Gaza?” And so on.

Second, most of these people do almost no serious research. They talk to no one in the administration. They don’t even talk to the many well-informed people who are not officials. They form their overconfident judgments by reading newspaper articles and social media posts.

Finally, Trump’s full-time haters are incapable of considering the possibility that, like any U.S. administration, this one might get some things wrong and some things right. They unthinkingly assume that everything Trump does is bad. And, when someone says that a particular act was effective, they say: “You’re in favor of everything Trump does!”

The point about all judgments on political acts is that they are necessarily conjectural. That is why you can’t be wedded to them with partisan fanaticism. I think it’s possible that what the Trump administration is doing will work, in the sense that the net effect will be to weaken America’s principal adversaries, especially China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. I also think Trump has already galvanized America’s principal allies in Europe and Asia to get their acts together and stop free-riding.

And, yes, there is a real possibility that things could go terribly wrong.  And yet, in the realm of international affairs, Team Trump's foreign policy platoon are saying, publicly, what many previous foreign policy types thought but never said.

Successive Republican presidents, but also numerous Democrats, have found European leaders sanctimonious in their attitudes and reluctant to shoulder their share of the costs of defending their own continent. I know this because it’s in the official documents. I’ve also heard it from the mouths of former national security advisers and secretaries of state. The difference is just that Trump and his colleagues say out loud what their predecessors said in private.

That comes as a shock to people who don’t know much history. Indeed, it scandalizes Europeans to hear their leaders insulted. Hey, welcome to reality. This is what Americans have thought about you for years.

And have you ever considered, for just a second or two, that they might actually be right?

There's probably a second reason for the smug intellectual types to carry on as they do.  The Trump campaign, if it has a coherent organizing principle, has, from the beginning been about assuring the Militant Normals that their suspicions about the smug intellectual types—who, recall, keep getting things wrong—are correct.  It's not as much about disagreeing with Our President on principle as it is about discrediting him as a messenger.

PUNISHED FOR BEING CHARITABLE.

I'm not alone in asking the eleemosynary institutions to dial back the clutter.  Six years ago came this complaint.  "It's really annoying, so close to the end of the Festive Season, and before all of my Festive Season gift checks have even been cashed, to receive mailings labeled 'Renewal Notice' or laid out in the form of a government notification, with a request for another contribution."  And yes, I have stopped sending money to some organizations whose causes don't excite me as much, particularly for pretending to be sending an invoice along.

LET THE QUARTERBACK CONTROVERSY BEGIN.

The Pittsburgh Steelers indeed did hire former Packer and Cowboy coach Mike McCarthy as their fourth head coach since 1970.  There might be a few academic hires from 1970 still in the common room, but there are freeway flyer adjunct faculty with longer times under contract than most coaches these days.

Part of the reason those guys could stick along so long was their relative youth as coaches. They could coach a long time and still not be overly old.

McCarthy is in a different boat, a very experienced head coach but one with a lot more years under his belt.

That doesn't mean it will or won't work. It's just an interesting breaking of the trend.

McCarthy is from Pittsburgh, which certainly gives him bonus points here.

Now, everyone wants to see if he'll bring Aaron Rodgers back to rekindle their relationship from their Packers days.

From there, Pittsburgh will hope to start winning playoff games again, something that hasn't happened there in about a decade.

I'm not sure "rekindle their relationship" is what either the coach or Steeler management had in mind.  Billy Heyen with The Sporting News reports that Aaron Rodgers is currently "a fan of McCarthy."  Danica Patrick was not available for comment.

MACHINE LEARNING GETS WORSE?

In these irregular Saturday bridge columns, the theme of the algorithms getting either me or the virtual declarer into an untenable position sometimes comes up.  In more serious situations, people are discovering artificial intelligence algorithms getting high on their own supply writing ever more fanciful scenarios.  Consider this game declared by the East bot.

That's pretty slim resources for East to be inviting a game in Hearts with twelve high card points and West pinning that game on an interior sequence.  It's my obligation to open, which I start with the ♠ Ace.  Dummy comes down, if an algorithm counts losers there are no Spades to lose, that low ruff might take care of a natural Heart loser, there's a Diamond loser, and with those Clubs on the board, its one chance is to establish that Club sequence after knocking out the ♥ Ace and drawing the remaining trumps.

BOURGEOIS NORMS.

It's very simple, according to columnist Jeff Jacoby:  "Lose your virtue, lose your republic."  His complaint is immediately about the destructive effects of the current unchecked president on Constitutional order.

The Trump phenomenon isn't an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.

Mr Jacoby has been on record as opposing previous presidents declaring themselves unchecked, to the approval of members of their factions.  Donald Trump, though, is the system.  Years of posturing by people claiming to be sophisticated about either the obsolescence or the oppressiveness of bourgeois norms made the current pass possible.

The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.

But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. For built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.

Where are the academic, or libertarian, or Republican, or Democrat voices calling for a restoration of bourgeois restraint?

BILL BLUM'S KINSLEY GAFFE.

The concluding paragraph of his predictable Common Dreams lament about what happens when sanctuary city officials refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities by, oh, handing over illegal aliens being held on local criminal charges, includes an admission that ought to be obvious.

The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Yes, the country's fate remains open, and yes, for the moment I am restricting my participation in lawful collective action to voting for local officials who will help the federal immigration authorities enforce the federal immigration laws.

We can talk about making legal immigration pathways less burdensome when Common Dreams types and their establishmentarian enablers in coastal media and Democrat caucuses stop treating four years of open border policy as fait accompli.

WHY NOT DESIGNATE FIRST CLASS AS A QUIET CAR?

Stateside, Amtrak's Acela, when it runs, functions as a rolling gated community offering only business and some sort of premium seating, I suppose to justify the extra fare compared with Amtrak's Northeast Regional trains that make additional stops and offer primarily coach seats with a few business class seats at one end of a snack car, or perhaps that's to separate the people too full of themselves from, you know, plebeians.  How very European.

A French railway company has faced a backlash after offering a new child-free section in its premium carriages.

Starting this month, weekday TGV trains running to and from Paris have a new and exclusive area of first class known as Optimum, which some have accused of discriminating against passengers under 12.

SNCF, which provides the service on its main Inoui brand of express trains across France and into Germany and Luxembourg, says the new category is intended for “frequent travellers, often business travellers, who want to enjoy greater comfort”.

The state-owned organisation promises: “Exclusive comfort in a fully dedicated first-class carriage, with seating arrangements designed to preserve your privacy, for a calm journey, ideal for working or relaxing.”

The secret for a calm journey is divulged deep in the detail: “To ensure maximum comfort in the dedicated space, children are not permitted.”

The company's defense of its policy is vintage technocrat.  “Our Optimum offer occupies less than 8 per cent of the space on a TGV Inoui and only from Monday to Friday. This means that 92 per cent of the other seats are available to everyone – and 100 per cent on weekends.”  Additionally, the deluxe car is at one end of the formation (these days, that means marshalled next to the power car, no more open-platform observation with a bar attendant) precluding those plebeians, particularly the puerile plebeians out of the car.  I suspect that the Optimum seats are not configured as a quiet car, as there are probably deals to be made thereon.

These days, the European operating companies offer competing service on the same metals, and on the Paris and Lyon service, Italy's Trenitalia also offer trains, with something that sounds like a quiet car.

SNCF now faces competition with Italian state rail firm Trenitalia on the prime Paris-Lyon route. Trenitalia offers an Area de Silenzio area that “allows passengers calm, without any noise”.

Trenitalia is silent on whether children are banned from this space.

Discretion is the best part and all that, although perhaps premium fares have the effect of keeping the family groups out of the premium seats.  The article does not explain whether the Area de Silenzio is posted as a specific car, in the manner of Stateside quiet cars.

LIFE IMITATES THE BABYLON BEE.

As professional football's regular season ended and the ritual sackings of coaches commenced, we noted them recognizing that coaches enjoy a form of tenure.

The Babylon Bee is not wrong in its satire.  "Losing Football Team Excitedly Introduces New Coach Just Fired From Other Losing Football Team"  The stock photo accompanying the article is of Mike McCarthy, who went from winning a Super Bowl with America's Team to coaching a Dallas Cowboys team that was excused, a couple of years ago, from the playoffs, by America's Team.  Subsequently, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked Mr McCarthy to clean out his desk.  But his name might still be on this off-season's dance card.

And lo, it has come to pass that Mike McCarthy might be on the dance card of the team America's Team beat in that Super Bowl.

When Mike Tomlin left the Pittsburgh Steelers, it seemed to increase the odds Aaron Rodgers would leave, either to retire or pursue a new team.

But the latest head coach rumors coming out of Pittsburgh, involving Mike McCarthy, could change things back in the other direction.

McCarthy was Rodgers' head coach with the Green Bay Packers when they won a Super Bowl.

And it sounds like McCarthy is one of the favorites to end up with the Pittsburgh gig.

What transpired in Green Bay in the years after that Super Bowl win was not pretty.  I wonder how much of that history Doug Whaley, former general manager with Buffalo and current general manager of the springtime United Football League, knows.

Former NFL GM Doug Whaley spoke on 93.7 FM in Pittsburgh to break some of this down.

He was asked whether Rodgers and McCarthy would make sense as a pairing.

"Absolutely, no doubt," Whaley answered, then continued. "Then they can seriously put a plan together and say, let's get a quarterback."

The suggestion from Whaley, it appears, is for Rodgers to spend one year with McCarthy as his starting QB so they can figure out where they are going next at the most important position in sports.

Yes, Mike McCarthy has experience as quarterback coach, and yet a transitional quarterback working with what might be a transitional coach to quickly develop a new quarterback might get ... interesting.

FRIDAY WILL BE A SNOW DAY FOR CHICAGO OFFICE WORKERS.

No longer do railroads employ legions of extra men to shovel out switch points and service the heaters.  Thus when cold and snow are on offer, management prefers to avoid diverging moves where practicable.  "With severe cold forecast for the Chicago region, Metra has made the decision to operate reduced schedules on all its lines on Friday, Jan. 23."  The reduced schedules are for the most part the Saturday schedules, hourly or two-hourly for much of the day, with very few expresses and none of the Elmhurst or Congress Park turnback trains, and McHenry is out of luck.

TOLERANCE STILL MEANS TOLERANCE.

In a world structured by emergence, too many constraints on talking about that emergence goes wrong.

I've complained, previously, that "limiting dissent from the orthodoxy is more important than constitutional principle."  I've also long been of the view that "if the Good Ideas of Smart People were that persuasive, there'd be no serious debate about their Correctness."  None of which deters Smart People from making the case that Incorrect Thought be shut down.  "Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict."  It's the usual stuff: arguments that protect a position that the advocate doesn't like becomes a defense of oppression.  "Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo."

Read the article, dear reader, you'll see some of the usual suspects, as well as some surprises.  The problem, though, is that powers conveniently appropriated to suppress bad speech by your standards becomes powers your adversary might be able to appropriate to suppress your speech.

For the most part, Cold Spring Shops have called attention to the abuse of authority in academic circles, with the intellectuals' enablers of the donkey party also in for a scolding.  We've noted as well that politicians of whatever stripe seek to use whatever power they can wield to trim the narrative to their liking.

A WELL-DESERVED HONOR.

Timothy Taylor has edited The Journal of Economic Perspectives since its establishment in 1986, and the American Economic Association have recognized his work by naming him a Distinguished Fellow of the Association.  Well done.

All editions of Economic Perspectives are on the public access side of the Association's web site.  It is that time of the spring semester for senior thesis and capstone paper writers to get cracking on their projects and they really ought be using that resource rather than Wikipedia or Pajamas Media or even Cold Spring Shops!  Oh, Perspectives regularly offer imponderables, too.

CAN DONALD TRUMP TAKE "YES" FOR AN ANSWER?

In "Trump's Greenland Folly," John Hinderaker notes, "I have often said that, while Donald Trump sometimes says dumb things, he rarely actually does dumb things. His current policies toward Greenland, sadly, are an exception to that rule."  To the editors of The (Not Detroit) Free Press, the Greenland initiatives are "Trump’s Dangerous Greenland Game."  Reason's Eric Boehm describes Our President's Greenland gabbling as "The Least Popular Idea in American Political History."  I think that's in the unpopular a priori category; we did have an amendment establishing alcohol prohibition, the only one repealed in full.

WHAT STANDARD CONSISTENCY?

The Green Bay Packers will continue with the same management team going into the 2026 season.

Matt LaFleur and Brian Gutekunst are set to lead the Green Bay Packers for years to come.

After nearly a week of negotiations, the Packers signed LaFleur to a multi-year contract extension that will guarantee he won’t go into 2026 with just one year left on his deal. At the same time, the Packers were also close to completing a contract extension for Gutekunst.

PackersNews confirmed the status of both deals and learned that executive vice president/director of football operations Russ Ball would also receive a contract extension.

Terms of the deals were not available and it's unclear whether LaFleur and Gutekunst will have matching years on their contracts.

Apparently headquarters had been inclined to continue irrespective of how the wild card playoff game turned out.

According to a person familiar with the talks with LaFleur, Gutekunst and Ball, the Packers' front office structure is staying the same. All three men will report to President and CEO Ed Policy, who made the decision to extend each of the three men's contracts.

The structure has been in place since 2018 when then-President Mark Murphy decided that the general manager would not have total authority over the football operation as had been the case since general manager Ron Wolf was hired in 1992.

LaFleur’s future with the Packers seemed like it was in question after the Packers suffered an embarrassing wild-card playoff loss to the Chicago Bears on Jan. 10. It was the third time in the past four playoff appearances that the Packers bowed out of the playoffs in their first game.

However, according to a source with knowledge of the talks Policy had with his leadership, there was no hesitation about bringing LaFleur back. As NFL Network had reported prior to the Packers' playoff loss to the Chicago Bears, the final game would not have a bearing on LaFleur's future.

It appears Policy had already decided that LaFleur would remain as head coach provided the two were able to reach a contract agreement. Although it took a week to get the deal done, it appears that it was mostly because Policy had three contracts to negotiate and not because there was any hesitation from LaFleur or Policy.

The challenge is always whether the turmoil of a coaching change and subsequent rebuild (Admiral Gallery's description of a command change at sea being akin to removing one head and grafting on another applies to coaching changes, irrespective of whether it's an internal promotion or the coaching square dance) is worth doing.

Part of Policy's decision was whether seven years was enough time for LaFleur to lead the Packers to a Super Bowl. Despite a 76-40-1 regular-season record, LaFleur has gotten the team to the NFC championship game twice, but no further.

Policy decided the Packers could win a Super Bowl under LaFleur.

At the end of Coach LaFleur's second season, we noted,

Every so often, a team management does go all in on making a Super Bowl run, and Tampa might have done so making Tom Brady the de facto director of personnel, and perhaps that will work out for them (this year) and perhaps the reckoning with the salary cap and free agency will not haunt them for ten seasons.  On the other hand, how often might a management make a big splash on free agency only to wind up with an angry locker room and no playoff appearances to show for it?  We know what the standard is, and being regularly in the mix is a better sort of frustration than regularly being out of the mix.

The Tom Brady - Rob Gronkowski farewell tour ended with a championship in Tampa Bay, but has anyone heard from them lately?  Or would you rather be the Bears, still shuffling after forty years?  The Vikings, going zero-for-Bud Grant?  The Lions, still carrying the curse of Bobby Layne?

MAKE THE COINAGE RESPECTABLE AGAIN.

The United States Mint will be issuing multiple semiquincentennial coins.  It's all too much for Outside the Beltway's James Joyner.

It has been quite some time since I routinely carried change in my pocket or, indeed, used coins. Unlike 1976, I suspect these coins will almost entirely be for collectors and those looking for souvenirs, rather than circulating currency.

I also suspect the floated Trump coin is merely trolling than something we’ll actually see. But the administration has certainly flouted longstanding norms before, so I won’t be absolutely shocked if it rolls out.

Certainly, given the anti-DEI tenor of the campaign and the administration, I’m not the least bit surprise that “woke” coins got canceled.

Outside the Beltway operate in the conventional establishmentarian lane, seasoned with what passes for academic skepticism these days, plus a pinch of Trump derangement, and that passage is in character.

WOKE RUINS EVERYTHING.

A Canadian musicologist, James Deaville, linked to by The College Fix, offers an essay (in something called The Conversation, I don't know if that qualifies as a Minimal Publishable Unit) describing It's A Wonderful Life as "A Christmas classic that reflects bigoted ideas about ‘proper’ music in the 1940s."  He could have stuck to the musicology, perhaps coming to grips with director Frank Capra and the soundtrack composer never collaborating again.  Instead, he has to inject contemporary sensibilities that might have not been relevant immediately after the War.

The movie’s soundtrack — including contributions by Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin — plays a central role in It’s a Wonderful Life, underscoring problems and tensions beneath the surface. Some depictions of music and sound beg analysis around how these reflect racist ideas about “proper” musical, social and community norms.

Perhaps those depictions "begged" analysis in the sense that nobody would have perceived any cause to offer any, or perhaps the phrase the professor seeks is "provoke analysis," or "prompt me to inject my sensibilities," because that's what a lot of people who claim to be intellectual do these days.

AFTER SIXTY YEARS OF MODEL CITIES AND THE GREAT SOCIETY.

A holiday honoring a prominent civil rights leader ought be occasion for taking stock of the reforms his movement called for.  Let's visit the North Milwaukee neighborhood.

It is deeply troubling that the only Black-owned grocery store on Milwaukee’s north side is now at risk of closing, just six months after Pick ’n Save shut its doors. Now residents are facing yet another blow: Aldi has announced the closure of its northwest side location, giving the community just a two-day notice. This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

Each closure widens the food access gap and deepens food apartheid across our city. When corporations exit neighborhoods like ours, they do so quickly and quietly, protecting their bottom lines, not community stability. Short notice is not accidental, it is strategic. It limits public response, avoids accountability, and leaves residents scrambling to meet basic needs.

The authors, urban lobbyists Melody McCurtis and Nateya Taylor, use language deeply troubling to Tyler "Zero Hedge" Durden.  "This go-round, the media is replacing their loaded 'food desert' term with 'food apartheid'. Because, hey, when there isn't a World War II or full blown civil rights style crisis on the media's hands to all them to argue their ideologies...why not just invent one?"  In his view, "Grocery stores operate on thin margins and avoid areas where safety is a liability."

MORE LIKE A COACHING SQUARE DANCE THAN A COACHING CARROUSSEL.

Thus did a Milwaukee news analyst describe the annual ritual of unsuccessful head coaches cleaning out one office only to fill another.  The Babylon Bee is not wrong in its satire.  "Losing Football Team Excitedly Introduces New Coach Just Fired From Other Losing Football Team"  The stock photo accompanying the article is of Mike McCarthy, who went from winning a Super Bowl with America's Team to coaching a Dallas Cowboys team that was excused, a couple of years ago, from the playoffs, by America's Team.  Subsequently, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked Mr McCarthy to clean out his desk.  But his name might still be on this off-season's dance card.

A losing football team excitedly announced today it had hired a new head coach, who was just fired from a different losing football team.

Though the team's previous coach was also hired from yet another losing team, the general manager felt confident the new loser coach would stop the losing.

"This will change everything," announced general manager John Ryans. "With seven wins and twenty-nine losses over the past three years, our new coach knows what it takes to win. He also knows what it takes to not win. He's got that knowledge, and bringing that knowledge is huge. With our group of players who generally lose, plus a new coach who's been losing, we've never been in a better position to not lose."

According to league sources, all of the losing football teams are once again participating in the annual mandatory coach swap. "This time will be different, I know it," said local fan Marcus Denison. "He really was the best coach available, because the coaches that win didn't get fired. He may be a loser, but he's lost in very different ways than our old coach. I think it's going to be a great fit."

At publishing time, one unlucky coach was left at the end of the annual coach swap, thus becoming the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

It's a ritual common in organized sports.  How many baseball teams did Dave Bristol or Leo Durocher or Gene Mauch or Harry Walker manage in their careers?  Sparky Anderson, who had two very good runs with the Reds and Tigers cracked wise about enjoying a sort of tenure.  And Ned Yost couldn't secure the main prize in Milwaukee but subsequently did so with Kansas City.

ENABLING THE OVERSCHEDULED CHILDHOOD?

Strong Towns contributor Noah Toumert asks, "Why Do Cities Build Sports Complexes Instead of Neighborhood Fields?"  Maybe because the helicopter parents think of the local playgrounds as dangerous places, and the authorities crack down on unsupervised play as tantamount to neglect.

Perhaps, as Mr Toumert contends, the sports complexes are a way of showcasing the city as a destination, rather than as, oh, a place to live.

Large sports complexes are attractive to city governments because they are easy to explain. They arrive with economic impact studies attached: hotel nights, restaurant spending, regional visitors. They come with clear capital budgets, naming rights, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. They can be photographed from the air and branded as evidence of investment. A $30 million complex feels like progress because it is visible.

Neighborhood fields, by contrast, don’t always photograph well. A lit mini-pitch on a residential block looks like maintenance instead of transformation. Ten small investments scattered across a city do not produce a single moment of political credit in the way one large facility does.

In the end, cities are not only responding to community need; they are responding to the logic of governance. Centralized projects are legible to councils, donors, and the press. Distributed infrastructure is quieter and harder to narrate. The result is predictable: cities optimize for visibility rather than proximity.

Beyond politics, sports complexes solve a series of administrative challenges. They centralize scheduling, liability, maintenance, and security. They allow recreation departments to manage sport as a contained activity rather than a diffuse one. Insurance is simpler, permitting clearer, and staff can be concentrated in one place.

All of those things might be true, subject, however, to the caveat that such projects, like any other local improvement built with Other Peoples' Money, turn into liabilities when time comes to do the maintenance and security.

ADVANCED, OR NOT-SO-ADVANCED, TRIBAL SOCIETIES.

In "What's the Matter With Minnesota?," Michael Barone develops the argument that European social democracies might better be understood as advanced tribal societies, with an emphasis on Minnesota.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and its neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It's still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast.

Or, Cynical Me notes, perhaps putting a bureaucrat in charge of bailing out improvident relatives is a good thing.  "It's your third cousin once removed that your taxes are supporting.  That might not be so easy once enough immigration changes the dynamic between tax payer and benefit recipient."  So it has been going in Denmark and Sweden.  Here's where that led, ten years ago.  "Europe's migration problem is worse to the extent that the self-despising multiculturalists enable third worlders to continue to behave badly and not prosper, and in like measure, provide evidence of the absence of cosmic justice and cause for further social reform. In the United States, migrants become mascots for ward-heeler politicians."

Mr Barone doesn't quite go there, but he's tiptoeing along the sideline.

Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress on those dimensions. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.

The strength of these United States is in its origin as a creedal, not a tribal, nation.  Yes, let Minnesotans, or residents of any other state, buy into the aspirations of their new neighbors.  At the same time, let them encourage those new neighbors to buy into the ways that have persisted as the creed emerged, including high conscientiousness culture and bourgeois norms.

BY WAY OF COMIC RELIEF.

The Order of Perpetual Misery are at it again, with perpetual scold Stan Cox unleashing another jeremiad.  "How to Save the World: Give Up War, Cars, and Leaf-Blowers... and Unveil the Stars." The thinking becomes even more wishful in the subtitle. "It’s imperative that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon."  Imperative, huh?  Well, I suppose a guy with a beard worthy of Nathan Forrest would want to keep up the skeer about a climate emergency that isn't.

The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.

Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.

Imagine, dear reader, what the total weight of stuff would be if all those Third Worlders who used to eke out a living on a dollar a day had to devote their higher earnings to buying the radio or record player or land-line telephone they might have purchased but for the current generation of entrepreneurs having provided the same capabilities with a much lower material intensity.  Economists don't have a good grasp of economic growth in the sense of more stuff and more people, let alone what it would look like with rising living standards shared among fewer people using advanced stuff.  I note, further, that an increasing share of what we used to understand as the middle classes are participating both in the growth, and perhaps treating the noise of those leaf blowers as a tolerable consequence.

THE LOGIC OF DEATHBED CONVERSIONS.

A heavenly news report from The Babylon Bee.  "At publishing time, Scott Adams had been moved into a shared cubicle with French philosopher Blaise Pascal."

DONALD TRUMP SEEKS FRIENDSHIP OF DON CORLEONE.

Populist froth is populist froth, no matter who peddles it.  "Trump pushes a 1-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates."  Dear reader, for all the happy talk about bipartisanship and gauzy memories of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill quaffing a few after hours, bipartisanship is the political class doing dumb things.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to rein in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long.”

Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.

Hours before Trump’s post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.

If the lender can't price the risk premium in the finance charge, he can either refuse to make the loan, as the article notes is the case in states with existing usury laws, or increase the penalty for late payment.

Does anyone seriously think that when Our President and Fauxahontas agree on something, that's a course worth pursuing?

One irony in the calls for price caps from a certain type of populist, whether on the (nominally) left or (nominally) right, is that price levels are, in some respects, as representative of popular opinion as it is possible to get.

Should prices be set (directly or indirectly) by countless interactions between countless people, or should they be set by someone in government — in Washington — who supposedly knows best?

Oh well.

Yes, that's all standard stuff, as will be the predictable consequences for people with credit scores lower than the cruising speed of a Lear Jet.

If Donald Trump’s promise to institute “a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%” were to be measured in an opinion poll, it would likely prove extremely popular. Bolstered by the usual demagoguery, mawkishness, and indignation, the question would be abstracted into the heady realm of theory, and its opponents would be cast as the dastardly handmaidens of greed. In all probability, the public would be 80–20 in favor of the move — perhaps even more.

If, by contrast, Donald Trump’s promise to institute a one-year, 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates were to be implemented, it would provoke a populist backlash on a scale that we have not seen in the United States for a while. There is a reason that unsecured loans carry high rates when granted to risky debtors, and that reason does not evaporate in the face of good intentions or disgruntled rhetoric. If, in a fit of wide-eyed ideology, the president or Congress elects to change the law, they will create a set of ineluctable knock-on effects for which, before too long, they will be harshly blamed. In a matter of weeks, 80–20 would become 20–80.

When Trump and his acolytes imagine a 10 percent limit, they seem to envision the current system, unchanged but for that small detail. But this is absurd. Interest rates are inextricably tied to exposure. To restrict the ceiling to 10 percent APR is to inform banks that they may charge no more than 0.83 percent interest per month to anyone, irrespective of their financial history. The result of this would not be some lofty 10-percent-for-everyone paradise, but an extremely selective universe in which only the most secure candidates were accepted. Within a month of the new rules, most new applicants would be turned down, longstanding credit limits would be lowered, and existing customers who exhibited even a modest pattern of delinquency would have their accounts canceled on the spot. One does not have to try too hard to imagine how this would play out on social media, in the press, or in November’s midterm elections.

With the spring semester getting under way, David Henderson offers a refresher course.  Put simply, whether Donald Trump is proposing it, or Elizabeth Warren is proposing it, interest rate ceilings comprise "A Progressive Plan That Aids Loan Sharks."  Other entrepreneurs in the poverty industry, such as payday loan and check cashing shops, pawn shops, and the sort of durable goods dealer who will hold your cash without paying interest until you've brought enough in to buy that recliner, will also get to wet their beaks.

If you think late fees are predatory now, wait until they're capped.

YOUR INTEGRITY OR YOUR LIFE'S WORK.

Ever since the second coming of a Trump presidency, higher education types have protested that the administration is conditioning its financial support on obeisance to that administration's policy goals.  Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long understood what Reason's Jack Nicastro put bluntly.  "Federal Funding for Universities Comes With Strings. Now Trump Is Pulling Them."  His focus is on the appropriability of patent royalties: yes, on occasion federally sponsored research comes up with commercially successful things.  His concluding paragraph, however, notes the broader implications of Our President's actions.

Getting the government involved in subsidizing higher education was always a Faustian bargain. The Bayh-Dole Act may have supported the tenfold increase in university patents in the two decades following its passage, but it did so at the expense of attaching government strings to academic research. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is now tugging on them to cow academia into compliance with its political agenda.

As if the other government strings didn't have the same effect.  The post's title comes from a Rikki Schlott essay, "How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts," which ran in The (Not Detroit) Free Press midway through the Jarrett regency, during which the foundations and the national endowments shared a common view of what was True and Beautiful.  Choreographer Lincoln Jones got the equivalent of a "recant or be excommunicated" missive from Pope Linus the people who write the checks.

“Fundraising felt impossible,” he added. “The requirement on grants comes down to this: If you don’t agree with this very particular and recently adopted approach to social justice, we won’t fund your art. Behind the scenes, so many people in the arts world told me just to say the words.”

“Every time I spoke to funders, the first conversation was about diversity. It just felt like, okay, this is how you get funding now. Honestly, it felt like somebody was holding a gun to my head and saying, ‘Your integrity or your life’s work.’”

That bargain—pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy or stick to your mission and risk your career—is one now faced by many in the world of American fine arts.

I mean, when the director of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Obama presidency, Rocco Landesman, recognizes there's a problem, there's probably a problem.

Landesman, 75, who has produced multiple Tony-winning shows including Angels in America and The Producers, said he worries about what is happening to the world where he has dedicated his entire life and career.

“We’re taking first-rate artists and making them into third-rate political activists,” he said.

“Art is supposed to unsettle us; art challenges what we feel about ourselves,” he continued. “But most of the art today affirms commonly held views of our society. You either fit in or you perish.”

The same thing might be happening to decorated laboratory scientists in universities you might have heard of, according to Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner.

There is nothing unlikeable about any of the scientists whose stories Blonigan and Liu tell. They are justly proud of what they do, and of their devotion to science. As someone who spent a multi-decade research career in a never-ending scramble for funds and living with perpetual uncertainty, I feel their pain.

Nevertheless, they are in the grips of a prideful delusion: that they are valued as scientists, that the funding, privilege, and prestige they enjoy have been conferred on them so that they might advance science, and that what they do is valued by their universities as science. They are blind to the reality that they are galley slaves, chained to the oars, valued not for the science they do nor for their good intentions, but for the revenue streams they generate.

Doubt me on this? Here’s a thought experiment. Decide to dedicate your career to an intellectually promising line of inquiry that doesn’t cost much money to pursue, or even better, that can be funded without grants. What do you suppose will happen to your academic career? Here’s my hypothesis: you will soon have no academic career.

And where is nemesis in all this? Pull away the mask, and her identity is revealed. Nemesis is the mighty river of federal research funding, roughly $100 billion that streams into universities nationwide every year.

Note further, dear reader, that any institution of higher (cough!) learning that wants to participate in federally funded research or performance or guaranteed student loans must comply with, you guessed it, government guidelines.  Cynical Me suggests that the guidelines, pre-Trump, enforced agreements among the universities that the universities could never reach among themselves.

THOSE URBAN-RURAL POLITICAL DIVIDES.

Downstate Illinois would just as soon have nothing to do with Chicago.  Inland and mountain Oregon and Washington resent the political aesthetic of Portland and Seattle.  There might be Minnesotans asking Paul Bunyan to chop the Cities off.

Now consider remarks one Representative Daniel Sickles made in Congress.  “Secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South. There is no sympathy now between the city and the State of New York ... nor has there been for years.”  Yes, that's the same Daniel Sickles, political general, whose impetuous behavior on 2 July at Gettysburg almost lost the battle, but for the First Minnesota plugging the gap.

MIGHT THE ROOM BE FILLING WITH EMPTY SHELLS?

That's a parable from four years ago.

[I]magine a room full of whole peanuts, with kids let loose to eat the peanuts while they're required to leave the shells in the room as they eat. Early on, it's easy to find the whole peanuts, but as the room fills up with shells, it's harder to find them.  Locating exhaustible resources is like that, and we even have a Hotelling principle for the pricing of exhaustible resources that ought manifest itself if peak oil is indeed at hand.

Peak oil might not be upon us just yet, and yet, notes Paul Krugman, Our President's Venezuelan oil play might be failing its market test.  "None of the oil executives were willing to make specific commitments to invest in Venezuela, although some of them talked about possible increases in Venezuelan production."

A WELL-DESERVED RETIREMENT.

Yen Ching to close after 4 decades in DeKalb.  The family business serves good food, and some years ago they moved from downtown near the railroad crossing to near the university.

After being in DeKalb for nearly 44 years, Yen Ching has decided to close its doors.

The restaurant is owned by husband and wife John Yin and Marilyn Yin. Their only other staff member is Marilyn’s sister, Caroline Zinger. John serves as the sole chef, while Marilyn manages the restaurant’s finances and paperwork.

Yen Ching is an Asian restaurant in DeKalb that offers authentic Chinese cuisine with items such as sweet sour chicken, egg drop soup and crab rangoons.

John Yin began working in his family’s restaurant at the age of 10, which made it second nature for him to manage an entire kitchen on his own. Although there have been other employees over the years, none ever proved to be a complete fit.

“We’ve had employees, but over the years we realized the easy way is to do it yourself,” Marilyn Yin said.

Even when things get hectic, as it often does at an eatery with a strong local following, the ladies manage to stay cheerful.  This year, the owners will be offering lunch Tuesday through Sunday and dinner each day.  The regulars, which include long-time DeKalb residents from all walks of life, wish them well.

YOUR RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.

Eight years ago, we called attention to National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke, noting how one Donald J. Trump's version of the Cult of the Presidency was reason for Democrat Keepers of the Cult to rethink the role of a strong central government.

There might be a general principle at work, and its emergence is encouraging.

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

There's more in that vein at the article. By all means, read and understand.

I cannot guarantee the reliability of links to National Review from eight years ago, it's hard enough to guarantee those week to week.

That "right to keep and bear arms" as a safety valve appears to have been discovered, recently, by people who until last week were probably all about banning assault weapons and all the rest.

Lmao the right reported me for... supporting the Second Amendment?

Learned my rhetoric from you, pookie! 😘 https://t.co/zUuIoElEmN pic.twitter.com/IovDU2q5ni

— Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ (@estherzelda0514) January 12, 2026

The Federal Constitution guaranteeing the right of revolution asserted in the Declaration of Independence is something acknowledged, more in sorrow than in anger, by libertarians, and it's embraced by patriot militia types as a license to hunt politicians.  I have not, as of this afternoon, learned of any such militias organizing to draw down on the antifa types.

YOUR HAMBURGER COMES WITH A SIDE OF MISOGYNY.

Remember "patriarchy and meat?"

Perhaps the Huffington Post writer has spent time in the fever swamps of cultural studies, in which the commercial butchering of animals becomes an example of the absent referent.

I was struggling to find a way to explain why people eat animals and why it is so difficult to discuss the issue. I realized that it was because of what I call the structure of the absent referent: Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.

Never in the history of intellectual endeavour has so much effort been devoted by so many to so little. From that we get The Sexual Politics of Meat, which I skimmed one lazy afternoon years ago, to be unimpressed by its efforts to treat housewives preparing roasts for their husbands and deer hunting as manifestations of the same hierarchy of dominion, but the author saw fit to offer a sequel, The Pornography of Meat, and the late unlamented Lingua Franca suggested there would soon be a new library category, "patriarchy and meat." Sometimes the only thing to do is to snicker.

Carol Adams is still at it, and Town Hall's "Ranty Amy" Curtis is snickering.  "She's hitting all the Leftist talking points like she's collecting woke Pokémon."  Sounds like the professor is still working off the same lecture notes from thirty years ago.

WHY URBAN POLICY ADVOCATES FAIL.

Last fall, we noted an essay by Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin, who was not a fan of making motorists miserable, and might have recommended that advocates of a certain stripe lose the smug.

His colleague Alex Burns didn't get the memo.

The Trump Administration continues to dismantle federal climate policy, and Biden-era goals are drifting increasingly out of reach. As the federal government of the world’s second-biggest polluter abdicates responsibility, state and local governments must accelerate the decarbonization efforts. This is especially true for the transportation sector, the country’s biggest emissions source, as state and local governments are key decision makers on highway and transit spending.

Unfortunately, even states that have pledged to take climate seriously are failing to reduce transportation emissions at the rapid pace that is needed. At the root of this failure is an unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers and meaningfully depart from a car-dominated transport system. As progress on climate goals falters, it is time for state transportation leaders to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: climate goals are not feasible without a swift and methodical reallocation of road space away from cars.

"Unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers."  As if defenders of the status quo or advocates of the proposition that the private automobile confers freedom of movement don't already think of urban transit advocates as a convex combination of smug and depriving people of their freedoms.  Moreover, Mr Burns's essay does nothing to disabuse people who think of bicycle lanes and road diets as deliberately taking road space away from cars.  Those are Desirable Features and Governments Aren't Doing Enough.

Supporting policy actions have focused on improving multimodal transportation options and promoting denser, walkable, urban land use. Projects that significantly impact cost and convenience for car drivers have been largely off-limits.

Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see any mention of treating the roads and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly.  Those policies impose costs but might improve convenience.  Can't have that, the streets have to be narrowed.

THE PILLARS OF TRUMP.

Our President has been musing about buying or annexing or occupying Greenland.  A polar map makes the island's strategic importance to North America clear.

Object Zero map retrieved from CDR Salamander.

During the Battle of the Atlantic and the Cold War, the ability of the Atlantic Alliance to keep track of naval activity in the Greenland - Iceland - United Kingdom gap was useful.  To the extent that being able to use the Northwest Passage for commercial shipping matters, keeping track of what's on those waters is easier with observers in Alaska, far northwestern Canada, and Greenland.  Note, further, that great circle trajectories of intercontinental missiles out of Persia or European Russia cross Denmark, making it a logical place to base anti-missile technologies that activate during the boost phase.

GOOD QUESTION.

Inside Higher Ed columnist Rachel Toor asks, "Can we in higher ed, the true 'life-long learners,' think hard about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit our mistakes without shame and then change and adapt to the world we all now live in?"

Perhaps the continued apologetics for all wokeness, all the time, have ceased to persuade.

Every scientist worth her NaCl knows a theory is right until it’s proved wrong. That’s why she keeps experimenting. But in higher education, we tend to treat our current crisis—declining enrollment, loss of public trust—as a “failure” of the market or demographics or even the political landscape. We rarely stop to ask if we are fundamentally wrong about the model we are using.

I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right.  That's not where she's going.

We confuse the aesthetic of academia—the gorgeous campus, the passionate faculty, the dorm-living young people that represents the small college liberal arts experience—with the institutions that serve the 70 percent of students who fall outside the traditional, fictional Wheeler ideal.

Watching this, I was reminded of a story my late uncle, Seymour Benzer, a geneticist at Caltech, once told me. He had been invited to Oxford to give a talk and was walking the quads with a colleague. They passed workers scraping soot off the ancient buildings. The witty Brit he was with turned to him and said, “We put that in bags and ship it to Yale for their buildings.”

It was an apt reminder that we’ve long mimicked the ancient Oxbridge model, importing not just the architecture, but the “soot”—the assumption that tradition itself confers value. That might work for elite institutions where students are buying social capital. But for the rest of higher ed? In today’s world, faculty who cling to their lectures and red pens don’t serve our current students.

We are busy scraping the soot off the past and applying it to the present, rather than admitting that the building itself might need a redesign.

Higher ed in the U.S. has been one of our country’s greatest achievements. But maybe we can think about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit it without shame, and then learn and grow and change? Some of us must out of sheer necessity if we want to keep our jobs.

It's not the institutions that are selling that social capital that confront shrinking enrollments and opt to close down.  The U.S. News guides continue to sell.  I doubt that Ms Toor is seriously suggesting not bothering with providing at least the rudiments of that social capital to matriculants who for a variety of reasons do not seek admission at the elite institutions.

JUST WIN.

The irregular Saturday-only bridge column has previously featured some of the strange bids the algorithms make.  So it is with this recent simulation.

Those red lines around two of my bids indicate the algorithm is interpreting each of those as something other than "I have length and strength in Diamonds" and "I have support for your initial suit" followed by "I'm stronger than Three No Trump."  My closing offer was Six No Trump, and after an opening ♥ Five, off we go.  Note that in real life, the closed hand is North, and that player sees three top tricks in Spades; three top tricks in Hearts, and with proper play, an opportunity to discard that low Spade; five top tricks in Diamonds, which is convenient given there is one top Club trick, and playing either side for the King is taking a long chance.  That's the joy of playing no-trump contracts: cash your immediate winners and establish the defense's remaining little cards, or run a Jack or a Ten in order to knock out a higher card against your honors, and go down.

This game, no problem.  Win the lead in hand with the ♥ Queen, cash the remaining high Hearts, low Diamond to the Jack, run the remaining Diamonds pitching Clubs, cash the ♣ Ace, then the ♠ Queen and back to the ♠ Ace and King, and donate a Club to charity.

WORK DONE, WORK STILL TO BE DONE.

The Candy Cane Lane neighborhood of West Allis is several blocks of tract houses from the American High that over the years has developed a tradition of blinging out the houses for the Festive Season.

Residents along the DeKalb street north of Cold Spring Shops headquarters are not shy about illuminating their houses.  Householders on the adjacent streets have not yet gotten in on the fun, nor is this neighborhood as walkable as the gridded streets of West Allis.

There is enough traffic, both on foot, as I did to take the above photograph and a few others, and driving through, that Candy Cane Lane residents now solicit donations for the Milwaukee Athletes Against Childhood Cancer.  In the 2025 Festive Season, which properly wrapped up by Three Kings, the neighborhood raised over two hundred thousand dollars for that fund.  Sadly, Leo Avina, the young man who designed the 2025 TMJ4 MACC Star ornament, another part of Festive Season fundraising, recently lost his battle with rhabdomyosarcoma at the age of six.  R. I. P.

The 2026 Candy Cane Lane displays will begin Friday, 27 November, and the MACC Star campaign goes on.  Childhood cancer researchers never lack for work.

THE SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT CONUNDRUM.

When does borrowing for countercyclical Keynesian economics begin to work against itself?

Among the 47 studies that find nonlinear threshold levels at which debt begins to adversely affect economic growth, mean and median threshold levels can be calculated. The mean threshold level is 74% of GDP, while the median threshold is 73%. If we remove estimates from developing country samples to focus on the threshold level for advanced economies, the mean and median threshold levels are marginally higher, at 75% and 76% respectively. These estimates are largely consistent with prior estimates for advanced countries.

That's the money quote from "The Impact of Public Debt on Economic Growth: What the Empirical Literature Tells Us," an ongoing Mercatus Center round-up-cum-meta-analysis of research on, to put it loosely, when tax, spend, and borrow becomes counter-productive.

Understanding the relationship between public debt and economic growth is of paramount importance to both economists and policymakers. High and rising debt levels raise concerns about fiscal sustainability, intergenerational equity, and potential constraints on future policy space. On the other hand, fiscal stimulus funded by debt is often used as a policy tool during economic downturns, particularly in liquidity traps where monetary policy may be constrained. The key policy question, therefore, is not whether public debt is inherently good or bad, but rather under what conditions it becomes harmful to long-run economic performance.

Put another way, those policy issues that make teaching macroeconomics a futile struggle between the positive economics of income-expenditure models and the normative economics of policy tradeoffs will not go away.  And once public debt, a stock, rises to about three-quarters of gross domestic product, a flow, the anticipated magic multipliers and all the other policy tools lose effectiveness.

The United States Treasury?  Currently borrowing, in total, more than the annual gross domestic product.  What cannot go on forever, won't.

THINK OF THE DEANLINGS' SELF-ESTEEM.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, inside not-so-higher education, Austin Sarat asks, "How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?"

Here I stand, I can do no other.

Years ago, I learned about administrative bloat in a humorous way.  The acting chairman of my department reported that the ratio of full-time-equivalent students to faculty had increased in the department, because the number of faculty members had decreased.  He then noted that the number of vice presidents had increased at the same time, and in a quantity sufficient to lower the ratio of students to vice presidents.

To some extent, the perception of administrative bloat varies by discipline and worldview.  It's more likely to be pointed out by critics of the radical vision that captivates postmodernists, culture-studies True Believers, social constructionists, deconstructionists, and careerist conscience-cowboys.

Professor Sarat holds a chair in political science at tiny but influential Amherst College, and the office inflation there is too much even for him.

Amherst College, where I teach, recently changed the designation of its senior administrators, who were formerly called “chiefs,” as in chief financial officer, to “vice presidents.” We now have 10 of them, as well as 15 other individuals who hold titles such as senior associate, associate or assistant vice president.

Not too long ago, in the time before they became chiefs, our VPs would have been called deans, directors or, in the case of our chief financial officer, treasurer. (Indeed, some retain a dean title along with their vice presidential one—the vice president of student affairs and dean of students, or the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.) I respect and value the work that they do, regardless of their title. I know them and am aware of their dedication to the college and the well-being of its students, faculty and staff.

But, for a small, liberal arts college that has long been proud to go its own way in many things, including in its idiosyncratic administrative titles, that’s a lot of vice presidents and associate and assistant VPs.

Higher education poobahs have long been allergic to naming any responsible person a "chief," as in their minds that term has troubling connotation of buffalo hide robes and feathered head-dresses.  The vice-presidentialization of higher education, as the professor has it, though?  The proliferation of titles might give the lie to all that cheerful talk about institutions being student-centered.

That trend is a sign of a shift in power from faculty to administrators, who are focused on protecting and managing their college’s brand. It is another sign of the growing administrative sector in American colleges and universities.

Titles matter.

For example, the title “dean of students” suggests a job that is student-facing, working closely with students to maximize their educational experience. The title of “vice president for student affairs” suggests something different, a role more institution-facing, dealing with policy, not people.

Businesses face market tests.  Institutions claiming to offer the higher learning, not so much.  That the proliferation of deanlets has been going on for almost a half century while the skills of the graduates diminish suggest nobody is asking, "Is this assistant-to-the-associate-vice-president for student affairs really necessary?"