SOMETHING STRONG FOR A HANGOVER.

If Milwaukee is the Beer City, wouldn't that be useful?

While we knew Milwaukee had some good coffee options, best coffee city in the U.S.? That is a surprise.

But according to the ranking website listwithclever.com, Brew City is the top coffee city in the country, coming in before Portland at 2, San Francisco at 3 and Buffalo at 4.

The ranking weighs variety of coffee shops as well as the best prices. The website states their top 15 coffee cities have an average of 18 cafes per capita, an average about 1.4 times compared to average U.S. metros.

And yes, the tradition of hand-the-transfer-out-the-window lives on.

Milwaukee, according to the ranking, deserves to be first because it is "best at balancing affordable brews with a growing coffee scene."

They note the city's low cost of living gives cafe owners the "flexibility they need to create a unique experience for cafe-goers." And the city's coffee scene allows new faces to break into the specialty coffee scene, "making it America's best coffee city," according to the ranking.

Milwaukee residents spend about $926 per year on coffee, about 1.5% of their annual income. That makes Brew City one of five cities where the cost comes in below $1,000, according to listwithclever.com.

Summer, and perhaps a return to road trips, is coming.  There's something jarring, though, about basing a city's coffee credibility in part on the price of a cappuccino, either as a raw number or as a share of local average annual earnings.

IS APPEALING TO THE BASEST CRAZIES THAT WISE?

The Democrats have been doing what they can to antagonize what we used to understand as mainstream Americans for years: deplorables, insurrectionists, science deniers.  That sort of playing to the faculty lounge has collateral effects, and Ruy Teixeira suggests those effects won't be good for Team Jackass Donkey.

Asians are worried about public safety and leery of a Democratic party that has become associated with “defund the police” and a soft approach to containing crime. Another is that Asians, like Hispanics, are a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy, a viewpoint increasingly identified with Democrats. They are far more interested in how they and their families can get ahead in actually-existing American society.

Which brings us to the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats are becoming increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools—all areas where Asian children have excelled.

These demographic aggregates bother me. "Asian" includes people from the subcontinent and the 'stans and China and the neighboring islands and peninsulas whose traditional writing uses characters, but don't call them Chinese. You can do similar disaggregations on "black" or "Hispanic" or "white." And there are plenty of opportunities for those recent arrivals to put that academic excellence to work.  Glenn Loury, who knows a thing or two about human capital (and technology diffusion) called attention to those opportunities.

Let them come. I mean, in fact, that’s the only way we’re going to survive the challenge of the Chinese behemoth going forward another generation or two, because if I look at what’s going on in the legacy population — white and black — of the United States of America, I see a lot of mediocrity, I see a lot of laggardliness, I see a lot of decay and corruption and so forth, of people not realizing the full human potential […] I don’t know what the alternative is.

He made those statements in the middle of a conversation with traditionalist law professor Amy Wax, who saw in the immigration that same Democrat plot to change the demographics so better to win elections, never mind that "soft on crime" and "your business is not essential" and "you can afford to pay more taxes" aren't exactly winning arguments with law-abiding or successful people.  She raised a slightly different objection to importing human capital.

It doesn't mean that the influx of Asian elites is unproblematic. I actually think it's problematic. I think it's because there's this danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country, and what does that mean? What is that going to mean to change the culture?

I'm inclined to bet on emergence. People emigrate to the United States because living here is less unpleasant than staying where they came from. As long as the new arrivals buy into the country, and the country buys into the new arrivals, the cultural changes strike me as more likely to be for the better than not.  Take it away, Fiona Harrigan.  "When we welcome foreigners to our soil—either because of the persecution they are fleeing or the skills they bring with them—we preserve our competitive edge and ensure that the best ideas and talent can prosper within our borders."

NEW LIFE FOR THE ROODHOUSE DOODLEBUG LINE?

Once upon a time, the Gulf Mobile and Ohio Railroad got to Kansas City.  That was close to a withered arm of the property, originally built by Baltimore and Ohio subsidiary Chicago and Alton in order to get a better division of the revenue.  Wabash similarly built to Kansas City and Omaha with something similar in mind, which is why you see Norfolk Southern there.  In no case were the railroads that passed through Kansas City en route to Chicago (I'm looking at you, Santa Fe) willing to short-haul themselves to the benefit of Wabash or the Alton.

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY RATES AN INSTALANCHE.

Not in a good way. Northern Illinois University officials party maskless while forcing mandates on students.  Our student representative to The College Fix has receipts.

In one instance (pictured) President Lisa Freeman went maskless while cheerleaders and band members were forced to wear masks.

The university and alumni association deleted most of the albums, videos and photos after Fix inquiries.

A January 11 email [click over -- Ed.] from Yolanda King, the law school’s associate dean, criticized the bare faces she saw while on campus.

Meanwhile, if you're College of Law nomenklatura, you get to shed your Biden muzzles at the "holiday" reception (which we used to refer to as the Christmas party.)

Let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

Cassandra Hill, the law school dean, is in the middle of faculty and staff. At the end of the row appears to be law school Chief of Staff Melody Mitchell and to Hill’s immediate right is Kellie Martial, the assistant dean. At the far right on the end is librarian and Assistant Professor Matthew Timko.

The Fix identified the faculty using the College of Law’s directory, though not all employees have photos.

King did not respond to requests for comment on if she attended the luncheon and the potential she violated the university and state mask mandate. Dean Hill did not respond to a request for comment either.

It's not enough that high university officials defy Illinois's corona tyrants, they cross state lines and defy Michigan's.

That's the president with the director of athletics, Sean Frazier.

Freeman enjoyed a breakfast buffet in Detroit before NIU took on Kent State in the Mid-American Conference football championship at Ford’s Field on December 4. Despite an alumni association admonition that all events would follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines requiring masking indoors, Freeman’s bare face is visible in some photos.

Meanwhile, the continued virtual learning isn't.

One law school student, required to take online classes, said the mask situation is part of a broader problem of the university not serving its students: “[T]his time the administration…has gone too far.”

The student decried the quality of online learning he and his peers have experienced at NIU thus far, citing a general lack of preparedness and professionalism by both students and professors when classes are online, and valuable time wasted on arguments over people not turning their cameras on and general technical issues.

Should university officials explain, we'll cover it.

THE VALUE OF INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY.

When you hive off too much of it, you get into trouble.

On the other hand, if a forest fire takes down a major viaduct, it helps to know where some spare spans are.  Let's start with a picture.

The first train rolls across the repaired Dry Canyon Bridge just 34 days after the span sustained severe damage from the Lava Fire. Reconstruction of the bridge was one of the topic’s of UP’s presentation Thursday at the NRC Conference in Phoenix. 

Union Pacific photograph retrieved from Trains.

That's right, just over a month, and several of the spans in place at the time of the fire, as well as all the crossties, and, as you see, the walkway, had to be replaced.

The project, which replaced a major fire-damaged trestle in Northern California in 2021 — about a month faster than was originally projected — has been much discussed and is justly held up as a matter of great pride by UP [see this article on the railroad website, and “Analysis: Union Pacific bridge repairs …,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 10, 2021].

But Shane Keller, the railroad’s senior vice president of engineering, provided some additional details on the work on Thursday during his presentation on UP’s capital plan for 2022 at the 43rd National Railroad Construction & Maintenance Association Conference — like the information recalled by one veteran employee that helped speed the project along.

The project required replacing 18 of the 19 spans of the 1,200-foot-long, 150-foot-tall bridge. Those spans measured 80 or 40 feet. The 80-foot sections were rebuilt on site. But what about the 40-foot spans?

“One of our more seasoned individuals said, ‘Back in the 80s, we took out this bridge in Nebraska,’” Keller said. “’And those spans are sitting in Cheyenne, Wyo., right now, in the weeds. And we were going to scrap those this year. Why don’t we have somebody take a look at those?’”

A review showed those spans were still structurally solid. “We had to modify a few things,” Keller said, “but we ended up taking the spans that we took down in 1980 and ended up reinforcing them and putting them up on this bridge. All the spans that are on top of the towers are actually from an old bridge we had a long time ago. We said it was going to take 60 days to get it open, and we did it in a little bit more than a month.”

On the investor-owned railroads, the incentives align in such a way to get the bridge repaired and back in service more quickly.

A MODEST ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT.

The formula I like to use is that a government ought be symbiotic, rather than parasitic, on the human interactions that support it.  Unfortunately, I only came up with it after retirement, and never field tested it on students.

The idea is out there all the same.  Here's Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux on taxation.

Someone might pick a nit by insisting that, if some of the tax revenues extracted from the corporation are used to build infrastructure, to subsidize genuine education, to supply an honest court system and effective law enforcement, or even to pay customs officers who shield a corporation from foreign rivals, then the state does indeed provide effort to improve the firm’s return. Yes.

But almost none of the tax revenues are so earmarked. Many of these revenues are used in ways that are either not at all helpful to the firm from which they are extracted, or are positively harmful to the firm – such as, for example, when the tax revenues are used to fund customs officials who obstruct the firm’s access to lower-cost or higher-quality inputs supplied by foreign sellers. Realistically – and even if the state were to use every cent of the tax revenues in socially valuable ways – the value that the firm derives from the use of tax revenues extracted from it is generally much less than is the value that those funds would have produced for the firm had they not been taxed away.

Suppose that a thief each month steals $1,000 from the mom’n’pop store that you own and operate. Suppose further that this thief then, each month, spends $100 in ways that produce some positive value for your firm, and spends the remaining $900 doing magnificently wonderful charitable works all across the town, but works that yield to your firm no value. Under these circumstances, the thief is effectively a shirking partner – a partner who gets from your firm more in value than he or she contributes to it.

The first paragraph identifies government functions that might be symbiotic with the goals of that business.  The second paragraph is a challenge for additional research: might the loss in private value be more than offset by gains elsewhere in the civilization?  The third paragraph is a tougher challenge: is the use of public money for charitable works a form of parasitism, a sop to rent seekers, or something else?  My formulation is admittedly less subtle: when I had parasitism in mind I had the sort of low corruption, log-rolling, and rent-seeking that is the ordinary stuff of politics.

WHEN THE BENEFICIARIES OF ROAD SOCIALISM HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

Last August, which was Australia's winter, that continent's gear jammers organized a rolling protest against the corona tyranny there.  Today, we update C. W. McCall.

It's now winter in Canada, and we've got ourselves a convoy, eh?

No wonder Joe Rogan says Canada is in “revolt” — no blood, no violence, just a massive “NO!”

America, where are you? Can’t we, too, do something like this, which is non-violent, liberty-oriented, and incredibly powerful?

One more thing: As you look at those truckers, remember that non-violent protests by shipyard workers in the Polish city of Gdansk started the domino effect that pulled down the entire Soviet Union.

We have the free states, and those serve in part as a safety valve for people who have had too much of the technocrats' micromanagement.  In Canada, apparently, the professional-managerial class in Ottawa calls the shots, and that's not going well everywhere.

Few events in modern times have revealed the vast chasm that exists between the ruled and rulers, especially as it pertains to class. For nearly two years, the professional class has experienced a completely different reality than the working class. In the US, this only began to change once the highly vaccinated Zoom class got Covid anyway. Only then did we start seeing articles about how there is no shame in getting sick. It appears that in many countries, the working class that was forced into early confrontation with the virus are saying that they aren’t going to take it anymore (and many are playing that song to make the point).

It’s a massive workers’ strike but not the kind of communist dreams. This is a “working class” movement that stands squarely for freedom against all the impositions of the last two years, which were imposed by an overclass with almost no consultation from legislatures. Canada has had some of the worst, much to the shock of its citizens. The convoy is an enormous show of power concerning who really keeps the country running.

The convoy is being joined by truckers from all over the US too, rising up in solidarity. This is easily the most meaningful and impactful protest to emerge in North America. It is being joined by as many as half a million Canadian citizens, who overwhelmingly support this protest, as one can observe from the cheers on the highway along the way. Indeed, it’s likely to break the record for the largest trucker convoy in history, as well as the most loved.

The Polish government finally ran out of ways to placate the dockers in Gdansk. The past two years of corona tyranny quickly exhausted the truckers' patience right from the beginning. If indoor dining is closed, what happens to the rest rooms and shower stalls at the truck stops? (That's just for openers.)  We'll see whether this is, as Jeffrey Tucker claims, truly a saeculum-rocking event.  "This is setting up to be one of the most significant clashes in the world in the great battle between freedom and those governments have set out to crush it."

I wonder how the Zoom class in Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto will react when their spawn whine about there being no oranges.

Supply chain issues are already causing shortages north of the border. Canada imports almost 90% of its winter fruit and vegetables from the U.S. Now that unvaccinated American truckers are no longer allowed into Canada, Canadians are starting to feel the crunch. That doesn’t seem to have had an impact on approval of the truckers, though, as thousands are showing their support. Holding a sign is nice but some people are preparing food for the truckers.

Britain's corona tyranny is coming to an end. Denmark's less intrusive mitigations will be ending. Why are North Americans still letting the likes of Justin Trudeau and Anthony Fauci call the shots?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

There is no end to the nonsense.  Are people who have body armor less likely to go shopping in Chicago?  Plus a few refreshers on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes.

1.  Nobody is interested in winning elections.  "What in God’s name do Biden & Harris think they’re doing by telling Trump to hold their beers?"  That will not turn out well.  "Republicans should take a very long look at where this shift has taken place, too. This is not a mandate for more MAGA, but instead a cri de coeur from the center for a true governing party. Democrats’ overreach and this result should be an object lesson for GOP leadership too."

2.  Yes.  "For the sake of their mental health, students deserve a path to normalcy."

3.  The second time as farce?  "Biden, whose Senate career epitomized don't-rock-the-boat establishmentarianism, is governing like a cross between socialist Bernie Sanders and incompetent Jimmy Carter."

4.  Party activists do a lot of damage on school boards.  "If there is one overarching criticism I would make of conservative voters over the years is that there is too much focus on federal officeholders and far too little on local candidates."  That criticism rings true more generally.

5.  We are, all of us, underemployed compared with our great-grandparents, simplified.  "Simply put, if you’re reading these words, your way of life is the simplest that humans have ever lived."

6.  All in vain?  "Americans have sacrificed enough of their human rights and of their livelihoods for two years in the service of protecting the general public health."

7.  As it was in the beginning.  “Progressivism has become the abdication of personal responsibility.”

8.  Innumerate cruelty.  "The CDC uses a four-level system of coronavirus travel warnings. Destinations are generally moved to the highest tier if they sustain infection levels of more than 500 new cases per 100,000 people over 28 days, though authorities also take testing and the trajectory of new cases into account as well." A test with good power against type I error might produce a time series with that level of false positives.

9.  Logic Is an Enemy … Truth Is a Menace.

10.  The problem with maximum differentiation.  "You can measure the health of the [political] parties by the degree to which crazy ideas are taken up by powerful people."

11.  The corona tyrants won't allow it.  "Biden needs to avoid the Lucy-and-the-football dynamic that has characterized policies during this pandemic – the sense that you, the citizen, have never done enough to prevent the spread."

12.  Even if firing the corona tyrants would hurt Donald Trump?  "Biden doing sensible deals with Manchin and Sinema on tangible areas of agreement, instead of castigating and alienating them. Insisting that our election system is, in fact, solid and legitimate. Celebrating the re-opening of schools. Firing the heads of the CDC and FDA, after their appalling performance during Covid."

13.  Science is a process.  It involves dissent from, and, yes, the occasional denial of, received wisdom.  "In their Talmudic approach to the pandemic, posing questions of questions and questions of other questioners, they are instead voices that have sought to uphold the past 400 years of scientific tradition and practice, rather than overturn it."  But the grants industry is censorship per se.  "In science, centralization has created a harmful uniformity and herd thinking that hinders the free exchange of ideas."

14.  That is, when it's not the connivance of the political class against taxpayers.  "Thus, the perfect definition of bipartisanship: It’s brilliant and thoughtful when a nominally Republican senator forces leftist policies on America; it’s a sign that Washington has failed when a nominal Democrat attempts to keep the left from going over a cliff."

15.  Borderline insanity.  "Democrats Care More about Ukraine’s Border Than Ours." Yes, and "Ukraine’s borders should be inviolate but ours should not?"

16.  The epidemic is over now.

17.  My chili works like this.  "If you do try the reaper, wait a few moments before saying 'oh it's not too bad'. The heat is delayed a bit and then it hits you."

18.  Soft on crime, soft on counterterrorism, turning the children into neurotics.   Tell the woke mob to buzz off. "The real danger for Democrats is not that democracy won’t work but that it will."

19.  Is too much voting a drag on civilization?  "What makes a strong democracy is not just a large number of votes, but a large number of informed voters."

20.  Too many Diversity Weenies.  "[C]an we really have an academic community when some members feel free to viciously perpetrate political attacks on students, professors, staff members, and administrators?"

21.  Some government actions are unconstitutional, but nobody dares say so?  "Apparently so, because on Friday, over more than two hours of argument in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, lawyers pushing the Supreme Court to delay the regulation circled and sidled rather than state clearly that the rule, OSHA, the Biden administration, and the entire federal government represented a mockery of our constitutional order."

22.  Those are his good points.  "Biden’s first year in office was marked by a series of self-inflicted disasters and failures, including his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worsening COVID pandemic that he promised to end, inflation, high gas prices, the border crisis, his executive overreach, his increasingly authoritarian behavior, his intentionally divisive policies, and his declining mental state."

23.  The latest variant of corona ought to be the new birth of freedom.  "Let’s resolve to be the rowdy, difficult, ungovernable mess that we always have been."

24.  The elected king.  "A lot of what Biden wants to do — the authority he is seeking from Congress, and the authority he tries to exercise by executive orders and federal lawsuits — is to obstruct those policies from taking effect. His big push on voting and election law is explicitly aimed at preempting numerous state laws passed in the past year, many of which are already targets of lawsuits by his Justice Department. Ditto abortion law and vaccine mandates. Hardly a day goes by without news of some Republican governor or legislature doing something, and Democrats and their media allies declaring, 'This must be stopped!'"

STOP APPEALING TO THE IRRITATED RUMP.

The latest mumbled wisdom from the coot claiming to be president is “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”  The snarky thing to say is "Not being a senile coot."  It worked well enough to turf out Donald Trump, didn't it?

But it would be helpful if both major parties came up with policy proposals that appealed to voters who don't spend every waking hour on the latest supposed gaffe.  Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo suggests a way forward that, if you strip out the polemics, might be a good first step.

Treating all persons as individuals, not as part of a subset of Americans, is the means to vanquish group injustice. Though a stifling political class represses duty, honor, wholesomeness and faith, these traits are the heart of America: Their beat is strong for those who have ears to listen. We are for them.

Republicans realize freedom is in jeopardy, for the self-anointed ruling class that bankrolls the Democratic Party to cloak their own greed does not understand liberty. These usurpers pocket the hard-earned money of citizens or print it, causing inflation, the most regressive of taxes. The cost of basic goods ─ food, gas and shelter ─ constitute the greatest proportion of wages for working Americans who do not have letters after their names.

He concludes, with a question the coot lacks the capacity to answer, "Will you change course, sir, or will you preside over the collapse of our principles, our traditions and our civil society?"

I repeat, strip out the polemics.  It does little good for Democrats to suggest that people who vote against them are deplorable or bent on insurrection, or for Republicans to suggest that people who vote against them are criminal or bent on collecting more transfer payments.

Consider Reason's Steven Greenhut, who is no fan of the false binary I have often urged readers to reject.  "Republicans always are better on balance than the Democrats, so I need to join their side and fight—even when they promote idiocy."  Well, sometimes all the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can't even do that.  The same is often true of Republicans.

Yes, metropolitan suburbs were the site of the party’s greatest down-ballot reversals during the Trump era, in congressional and legislative seats. These losses cost the GOP control of the U.S. House in 2018 and somewhat reduced the party’s power in state capitals (although Republicans still comprise 55 percent of state lawmakers, down just two points from their 2016 share, and continue to control many more state governments than Democrats do). Contrary to the hopes of Democratic leaders and to the fears of their GOP counterparts, however, these Trump-era losses in metropolitan areas did not constitute a lasting partisan realignment. The suburbs remain intensely competitive — and Republicans are feeling increasingly confident that they’ll snatch back many of these lost seats in the 2022 midterms. If they do, it won’t be by peddling conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. It will be by employing tried-and-true conservative messages on taxes, crime, schools, and other issues that matter most to soft partisans and swing voters.

There are, however, positive things that an opposition party, not necessarily the Republicans, might advocate.  Victor Hanson offers a list of ten such things.   "Lots more might be included in any such agenda (e.g., moving agencies like the FBI out of Washington), but God limited his commandments to 10, and humble Republicans should keep that consideration in mind."  More importantly, there might be six or seven of the items on that list that more than a few Democrat-inclined voters could go along with.  Unlike Divine Word, politics is about creating something practical, and getting three quarters of the cake is better than having the cake fall any time it's not perfect.

Then Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes, whose Bulwark sometimes skews more pro-Democrat than "recovering liberal," rediscovers his recovery with four broad items: schools (the presidency is irrelevant, closed schools are red-pilling a lot of so-called progressives); crime; voting (how long ago was a regular talking point on his Milwaukee radio show that voters should be prepared to demonstrate that they are who they claim they are?); and language (which is not the cadences of the faculty lounge.)

Who knows, a partisan appeal that doesn't let the irritated rump call the shots might make the false binary look less false and more like gradations of generally decent choices.

I'd still prefer for elections not to be advance auctions of such large policy bundles, but one thing at a time.

WHO ARE THE POOR PEOPLES' LOBBYISTS?

Is anybody surprised that rent-seekers captured public provision of roads?

U.S. transportation policies prioritizing automobile use over public transit are leaving the poor and people of color behind, exacerbating inequality and the climate emergency. That's according to a new report published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The ISP report—entitled How the U.S. Transportation System Fuels Inequality — notes that "for decades, the federal government has allocated about four times as much funding to roadways as it has to public transit such as buses and subways."

"This policy choice has consequences for racial and economic justice, the environment, and more," warns ISP's Basav Sen, the paper's author.

The report reveals that while the extent of U.S. roadways measured in lane-miles increased by 9% between 1990 and 2020, "public transportation systems have an accumulated maintenance and repairs backlog that is estimated by different sources as between $90 billion and $176 billion."

That deferred transit maintenance is a rounding error in the deferred maintenance on those lane-miles, judging by how much money the road socialists (rent-seekers is the politer word) have appropriated for full federal funding of roads and bridges that state and local governments have not been able to properly maintain.

Yes, you can rile up the True Believers with a riff on "women genderquestioning and minorities hardest hit."

According to Sen: "When transit systems are poorly maintained, the frequency and reliability of service suffers, making transit a less viable form of personal transportation. Faced with unreliable (and for as many as 45% of people in the U.S., nonexistent) transit systems, people often have no choice but to drive a personal vehicle to get to work, medical appointments, the grocery store, or anywhere else."

Tou might even be able to make the argument in equity that older, mechanically less reliable and probably less well-maintained cars that poorer people make do with put poorer lives at risk.  The essay (wisely, I submit) doesn't go there, although it hints at the regressive transfer that public provision of roads manifests.

"U.S. transportation policies privileging roadways and personal vehicles over all other modes of travel have not served the economic and transportation needs of all," he adds. "They are a public subsidy for disproportionately white, wealthier households, at the expense of the rest of the population."

The report contends that "transforming U.S. transportation policy priorities from its current overemphasis on (and excessive funding for) roadways at the expense of all other forms of transportation will clearly serve the needs of people of color and low-income people by providing them more affordable and accessible mobility choices that don’t require them to own cars."

You have to dig some, though, to find a simpler explanation than Privilege or Institutional Racism.

Industry lobbying pressure, backed by political campaign donations, are a major impediment to change, the report shows.

"Political campaign contributions by the oil and gas industry over the last five election cycles (2012 through 2020) have totaled $485 million, including $140 million in the last election cycle alone," Sen writes. "In the current (2022) election cycle, a huge share of oil and gas money has gone to just one politician — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va). The industry's campaign contributions to Manchin are nearly four times their contributions to the next highest recipient."

"Manchin was part of the group of senators who came up with the bipartisan infrastructure bill... which continues the long-standing practice of allocating a disproportionate share of funding to highways at the expense of other modes of transportation," the paper notes. "Clearly, fossil fuel interests are rewarding him for serving their interests."

It is too much to ask of a columnist for a socialist tract, who has an Enemy of the People in the form of Senator Manchin to call out, to grasp the notion that a government in a position to deliver favors is going to deliver favors.  The public roads and waterways have long been a federal project, all the way back to the American System of Internal Improvements, and there are still people who labor under the delusion that these can be paid for out of general revenues.  I'm still waiting for the penny to drop.

What Washington mostly subsidizes is rent-seekers, including the infrastructure lobby, and it gets a lot of those rent-seekers. Indirectly, Washington subsidizes traffic congestion, and it gets traffic congestion.  Perhaps in ten or twenty or a hundred years it will occur to somebody at the Post to suggest that the roads be run like a business.

Heck, there might even be areas of common cause among the lobbyists the poor people do have, the mass transportation industry, crunchy conservatives, and libertarians.

PASSING THE TORCH.

Two of my ferroequinology colleagues of long standing are making career moves.

Rob McGonigal is retiring as editor of Classic Trains.

Rob has spent nearly a quarter century building the readership and the reputation of a truly great magazine. Not ever being on his staff, I’ve delighted in picking up every issue and encountering it afresh, just like all of you. I’ve been engrossed, entertained, even thrilled by what’s been in its pages. Once in a while, I’ve even had the privilege of being one of Rob’s writers.

Mike Schafer is retiring as editor of Passenger Train Journal.

I remember an afternoon in 1981 when Schaf and I were putting PTJ together in the rented basement of an insurance company in Waukesha, about the only digs Publisher Kevin McKinney could afford. I was working nights on the Milwaukee Sentinel copy desk and coming out to PTJ during the day, often bringing our family dog, a female named Zorro. The basement was spacious, plenty of space for a dog to roam.

You'll have to click over for the rest of the dog story.

Both Rob and Mike will continue to write about things that run on rails.  Let there be clear tracks ahead.

BRACKETS, BUSTED.

One side of the bracket reads like it might be a holiday basketball tournament, until you get to that score.

The [Baylor] Bears, who were undefeated throughout the entire regular season earned the number one overall seed in the bracket as well as a first-round bye. After beating University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in round two, the Bears narrowly dodged an upset bid by this year’s “Cinderella” team in UNLV by winning 8-to-7 in the semifinals to advance to the championship game.

The other side, though, suggests something else is going on.

The [Northern Illinois] Huskies, likewise, were one of the division’s top teams earning a 3 seed and first-round bye. The dogs were left unchained as they came out ferociously in the first two rounds taking down in-state rival UIUC 9-to-6, and routing UCSB 11-to-5 in the semifinals.

Then Northern Illinois got the best of Baylor. "The NIU Chess Club edged the top-seeded Baylor University Bears Chess Club to take first place in division seven of the Collegiate Chess League tournament."

It transpires that the Collegiate Chess League is one of the electronic sports competitions that have become a thing in higher education recently.  There are eight divisions for competition, which might explain the presence of known basketball schools in the Northern Illinois bracket.  The Ivies and the like, who are not factors in basketball or football, don't seem to be participating in that league, although some of the usual suspects from the Big Ten and Ivy aspirants did play.  In DeKalb, though, there are opportunities for networking and excellence that appear to continue into this year.

“I definitely look forward to every Monday when we meet,” senior chess club member Sean Quirke said. “They’re really nice people and very welcoming to everyone to get involved into the tournaments and playing chess in general.”

Looking forward, the Huskies are ready to take the program to the next level.

“We’ve got the same league, it starts Feb. 12 and 13 and it’s going to be every Saturday from noon to 1 p.m. And then on Feb. 5 and 6, we have another tournament that’s online for college students, so looking to do well on both of those,” [club vice president Ace] Frieders said.

Good.  I wonder if anyone aspires to competing in a higher division, something the athletics department aspires to and I wish the academic departments would think seriously about.

BAD SCIENCE AND FAULTY MODELING.

Alex Berenson might be a troublemaker who occasionally says crazy things, and yet, he's the most public face calling attention to the mindless extrapolation that characterized the corona panic two years ago.

The idea behind locking down a whole country originated in 2005 from a teenager named Laura Glass, the daughter of computer scientist Robert Glass, who “made a model of the way school and business closures might slow the flu” for her school science project. Her father expanded on this idea with more models, which Berenson notes “were essentially not based on real-world data” but nevertheless gained support among public health officials.

Bad models predicting mass deaths justified keeping most of the population locked down and masked for the next few months. Berenson traces much of this to the original projections of Neil Ferguson, which suggested that “over 2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons would die” and “destroy the hospital system” if these countries didn’t lock down. Even after most people understood that these models were wildly false, the Covid hysteria promoting social distancing, lockdowns, and masking “quickly became the most aggressive propaganda machine that democracies anywhere had conducted since World War I, if not ever.”

As the virus became increasingly politicized, it became increasingly difficult to accurately measure or understand. Unless one devoted his whole waking life to the task as Berenson did, it was nearly impossible to get a straight answer about how dangerous the virus really was and who was most at risk.

What might have been worse was the lack of self confidence betrayed by public health officials who could not be seen eating humble pie.

In this dark cloud of media bias, bogus modeling, and scientific half-truths, devastating decisions were made: indoor and outdoor mask mandates, locking down schools and universities, and extending lockdowns. For anyone paying attention, it was evident that these measures were ineffective and destructive, but the media “couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth if it was ideologically inconvenient.”

Instead of learning more about Covid as time progressed, Americans and the rest of the developed world seemed to learn less.

That might be "public health officials," not the population more generally.  That slowness to revise ukases on the basis of new information, however, is the kind of thing that makes references to pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes more popular than might otherwise be.

A NEW QUEST FOR THE OAK ISLAND TREASURE HUNTERS?

In the past few weeks, the Oak Island crew have been getting excited over turning up a bow bulkhead and a few fragments of oars from a rowboat in the swamp.  But now they have to stop digging in the swamp to give the freshwater spring that keeps it wet a chance to refill it, in order to use that fresh water to sift through the dirt they expect to dig out of their ten foot caissons that might, by brute force, reveal whatever remains of what might have been dug into Oak Island.

In the Walker's Point neighborhood of Milwaukee, however, there's legend of a hardware store built atop a shipwreck.

Twenty feet below the building, according in part to an 1874 report, rests the hull of the wrecked schooner Cincinnati.

The steamship collided with the S.S. Milwaukie and was stripped for pieces before being dumped on what is today solid ground. But to create that ground, the ship had to have layers of oak ties laid atop it, mixed with layers of sand and cement. A three-layer stone foundation separates the structure from the supposed ship.

That same 1874 report, written in a boosterish style, notes that Nazro’s new hardware store was “the largest hardware store in the world” when completed. Its location was just a couple blocks from the now-long-gone Milwaukee Union Depot railroad station.

Yes, once upon a time, the 100 block of South Second was waterfront, and the "Union Depot" that article refers to is the Reed Street passenger station, which was about where The Milwaukee Road later built a freight house.

There are no legends of Cincinnati having been buried there to conceal Spanish treasure, or secret machine tool parts purloined by Milwaukee machinists.

THE ICE CREAM IS THE 4-H PROJECT.

No matter how annoying Packer special teams or Washington's professional managerial class are, there's always reason to celebrate county fairs, particularly those where the 4-H projects are a big part of the event.

In America's Dairyland, part of the preparation for the fair is creating new flavors of ice cream.

Cedar Crest Ice Cream Flavor Contest photograph retrieved from WTMJ TV.

As the competition is under the auspices of an ice cream company, what these kids came up with will be on offer come summer.

The Knellsville 4H Club in Ozaukee County is learning the sweet rewards of victory.

The Club was the Grand Prize Winner of the Cedar Crest Ice Cream Flavor Creation Contest. They've won an ice cream party and have been awarded $500.

Their winning flavor, Haystack, features vanilla ice cream with layers of peanuts, caramel and crunch candies. Entries were judged by a panel of ice cream experts chosen by Cedar Crest.

Leaders with Wisconsin 4H say the contest was a great opportunity for 4H youth to work together and develop something unique. This year's winning flavor will be available for purchase this summer. The annual contest has led to other great flavors, like Wisconsin Campfire S'More, Deep Woods, and Deep Space.

Used to be, you were showing off if you put peanuts, bits of crunch candies, and caramel syrup atop two scoops of vanilla.

REALITY BATS LAST.

Scott Jennings of CNN is mugged by reality.

“The nice old moderate Grandpa who just wanted to help everybody get along and compromise is not what we got over the past year,” Jennings explains. “He has no mandate, really, to do much of anything,”

The only mandate was: “Don’t do anything drastic or stupid,” Jennings said, “yet everything about this agenda is extremely drastic. And he’s been angrier than I think people expected, he’s been more divisive, he’s been more partisan. You look at the issues. We built five years of coverage on Trump out of Russia, COVID, and democracy. The president, in his press conference, invites Russia to invade Ukraine. We have more [COVID] deaths under Biden than Trump. And now we have the president and the vice president question the legitimacy of the 2022 election? Are we any better off on these issues that we crucified Trump over?”

Jennings finishes Biden off by noting a recent poll saying only 28 percent wanted Biden to run again and fewer than half of Democrats, “This is a disaster.”

What motivates a politician? Might it be money? Social media companies limited what we could report on Hunter Biden's laptop. Ideology? "C'mon, man, do I look like a socialist?" To adhere to an ideology requires a level of intellectual agility that we didn't see in the much younger Joe Biden.  Conscience?  From a shameless serial plagiarist?  Ego?  Yes, particularly if presidential historians fill what's left of his brain up with visions of Franklin Roosevelt shepherding transformative legislation through, or Jack Kennedy bawling out governors.

WHY IT MATTERS.

I've sometimes suspected Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers of contemplating a political career.  As of Saturday, his off-season began, and the team, and Packer Nation, are again contemplating the succession.  But even before that game, his "unfiltered interview" with ESPN included a dig at the current president, "When the president of the US says, 'pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ it’s because him and his constituents, which, I don’t know how there are any if you watch any of his attempts at public speaking, but I guess he got 81 million votes" to the predictable razzing or cheering.

That interview also included a clarion call for the freedom of expression.

"When in the course of human history has the side that's doing the censoring and trying to shut people up and make them show papers and marginalize a part of the community ever been [the correct side]?" Rodgers said Thursday. "We're censoring dissenting opinions? What are we trying to do? Save people from being able to determine the validity on their own or to listen and to think about things and come to their own conclusion? Freedom of speech is dangerous now if it doesn't align with the mainstream narrative? That's, I think first and foremost, what I wanted people to understand, and what people should understand is that there's censorship in this country going on right now."

That's a point not well understood by supposedly educated people who took their Critique of Pure Tolerance too seriously.

What matters, dear reader, is the Aaron Rodgers story before he opted to dabble in public life.

The colleges where Rodgers wanted to play football had no interest in him, most of them convinced any high school football played north of Sacramento wasn't worth the effort it would take to scout. Florida State wouldn't even look at him. Illinois told him he could walk on. When he sent Purdue some tape, someone on the staff replied with a polite letter explaining their lack of interest that contained the line: "Good luck with your aspirations in college football." The innocuous line enraged him. Rodgers highlighted it and stewed over it for years. His favorite band, Counting Crows, became the perfect soundtrack for his ruminative teenage brooding.

The interest he did have was from Division III schools such as Occidental College, Lewis & Clark and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. He contemplated quitting football entirely. It wasn't until Craig Rigsbee -- the burly, affable head coach at Butte Community College -- begged Rodgers to play for the Roadrunners, the junior college just south of Chico, that he figured out his nontraditional path forward.

"His mom said, 'No son of mine is going to junior college,'" Rigsbee said. "I said, 'Look, our general ed classes are the same as they are anywhere, whether you're at Stanford, Cal or Harvard. The War of 1812 doesn't change just because you're at Butte College. Those classes will transfer anywhere in the world. Your degree isn't going to say Butte College.'"

Those general education classes might have been more useful at Butte than at Stanford, Cal, or Harvard, because the professors at the latter might have tweaked their course outlines in such a way as to try out more of their own research, to the expense of what might be general knowledge.  More to the point, the story suggests, yet again, that there is more professional mobility in sports than there is in other, supposedly less frivolous endeavors.  I suspect, though, that Butte credits are more likely to transfer to a California State or University of California property than to Harvard or Stanford.  Not that many Harvard graduates are suiting up on Sunday.

A year after leading Butte Community College to a 10-1 record, Rodgers was playing at Cal. Two years after that, he was a first-round NFL draft pick. It's a story that's been told many times, but it's one that is crucial to understanding him. Chico and Butte are where he learned to trust his own instincts and learned that knowledge could come from anywhere. It's where he drifted away from what he considers the dogmatic religious views of his family.

Yes, knowledge can come from anywhere, and perhaps that organized sports seems more open to talent no matter where it develops than business, where a degree from a state flagship university might be the key to success, and both of those seem much more open to talent no matter where it develops than the Coastal Establishment, with their Yale Marries Harvard wedding announcements that read more like a press release announcing a merger, or perhaps the bloodline of a racehorse or a champion dog.  And don't get me started on the academic hiring pecking order.

Ask yourself, dear reader, why there is more respect for the athletic arts than there is for the political arts.  And let Aaron Rodgers be himself.

MODERNIZING THE BONNER RAILWAGON.

Some creative types with Space X experience have been thinking about providing retail intermodal by putting containers on battery-powered bogies.  Union Pacific seem to be interested.

The concept under development by Parallel Systems would see intermodal containers carried by pairs of powered battery-electric wheelsets, moving in “platoons” of cars, but capable of splitting off to individual destinations en route. The company went public with its plan this week, saying it has raised $49.55 million for construction of the vehicles, as reported by CNBC, Fast Company, and other media outlets.

“We are interested in the Parallel System’s technology. We are familiar with it, and it is of interest. It’s of keen interest,” Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz told investors and analysts on the railroad’s earnings call Thursday. “Candidly there are a lot of hurdles in front of that technology for deployment. Having said that, it could potentially be a game-changer if it proves out to be effective and workable. So I’d say keep your eye on it. We’re keeping our eye on it.”

The Parallel Systems proposal also merited interest from Ars Technica and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, to a skeptical Instalanche.  The Ars Technica description provides the bridge between historical railroading and the proposed method of moving individual containers.

Parallel Systems isn’t just taking an existing freight train and swapping its diesel-electric locomotive for a battery version. Instead, it’s taking the traction motors and distributing them to every car on the train. It’s how many electric passenger trains operate, but it's a system that has been slow to migrate to the freight world.

Parallel Systems is going a step further, though. Each of its rail vehicles consists of a battery pack, electric motors, four wheels, and a package of sensors that allow it to operate autonomously. And since a large portion of the world’s freight is shipped via 20-foot containers, Parallel Systems is using the containers themselves to complete the car, bridging the gap between the sets of wheels at either end of a train car, also known as bogies.

Here’s how it works: two vehicles position themselves far enough apart to support the container, which is lowered by a crane. The vehicles then use their short- and long-range cameras to navigate the rails. Because each rail vehicle has everything it needs, it doesn’t have to be part of a long train. In theory, one container supported by two Parallel Systems vehicles could move from origin to destination by itself. In reality, though, they’ll likely end up traveling in platoons. (Parallel Systems doesn’t call them trains because the individual cars aren’t coupled.)

The Institute's writeup explains how platooning by these latter-day merchandise despatch cars differs from the drafting behavior of truckers.

In a traditional platoon, efficiency is unequal since the leader takes the brunt of the aerodynamic forces to make things easier on all of the following vehicles, and obviously rotating leaders won’t work on rail. But Parallel Systems’ vehicles can go bumper to bumper and push each other, meaning that overall energy use can be equalized. Neat!

I made that interurban reference for a reason, dear reader.  The North Shore Line's Electroliner had the seating capacity of three heavy interurban cars, but because it was lighter, it had only eight of its ten axles powered.  There are some constraints of traditional motor control circuitry that contributed to providing them in groups of four.  A train of three powered heavy interurban cars had twelve axles powered, and it had a higher balancing speed than the Electroliner.  Why?  The lead car split the wind, and the additional motors on the following two cars had more oomph to overcome the wind resistance compared to the Electroliner.  But adding a fourth car didn't add more speed, as the current draw of four more motors on a trolley wire of fixed capacity worked against them.  The Parallel Systems people are aware of that problem.

“We think our platoon sizes are ideally between ten and 50 cars,” Matt Soule, CEO of Parallel Systems, told Ars. “With ten, you’re sharing the aerodynamic load over multiple cars, and the benefits of that kind of asymptote out around ten cars. But on the business case side, in terms of serving the volumes that might be there, we think moving in platoons of up to 50 is the max.”

"Asymptote out" is that balance speed phenomenon.  But if your platoon is fifty platforms, aren't you really in the realm of a train, as commenters on all the posts have noted.

NO FRENCH TOAST, NO PROPER BREAKFAST ABOARD.

That's been where I stand.  "Railroad French Toast predates Amtrak, and there used to be regional variations in the railroads' recipes (yes, each dining department had its own recipes, and regional food items). And cutting costs by antagonizing passengers doesn't seem like a sensible business strategy."

There are people at Amtrak who recognize, within limitations, the reality of my claim.

In passenger train advocacy circles French toast has come to symbolize what is right and wrong about dining aboard Amtrak.

When it is available on the breakfast menu passenger train advocates tend to be pleased. When it is not, they are upset.

Over the years French toast has come and gone from Amtrak dining car menus.

It made a comeback in traditional dining cars on western long-distance trains last summer and is now available on the menu of eastern long distance trains, too.

It was one of a number of additions that Amtrak quietly made to its flexible dining menu last year that increased the number of hot offerings for all meals.

But not all French toast is the same. Just read the menu descriptions for it on the traditional and flexible dining menus.

It's not wise to make Passenger Rail advocates angry, and yet the people managing Amtrak seem bent on continuing to do so.

What the menus don’t say is that in traditional dining cars the French toast is created on board by a chef. In flexible dining cars all food is created off the train by a catering company and heated onboard.

Some passenger train advocates are still angry about Amtrak’s downgrading of dining service aboard eastern long distance trains starting in June 2018.

It was widely viewed as a cost-cutting move and resulted in fewer choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Further ruffling the feathers of passenger train advocates has been the limiting of dining car service to sleeping car passengers on all trains. Coach passengers were left to buy whatever is available in the café car.

The situation is not much better for lunch, for dinner, for coach passengers on any train, or for passengers on the eastern trains.

ANOTHER FRONT OPENED AGAINST J.B. PRITZKER'S CORONA TYRANNY.

I'll keep pointing out how ineffective and deadly it has been.  Twitchy found another way.  "Illinois high school student mocks the state’s mask mandate in the best way possible."

Watch this Illinois high school student use the power of satire to fight back against the state’s mask mandate. Her first line is, “Thank you for teaching students that our own mental health is much less important than making triple-vaccinated adults feel safe” and it just gets better from there.

Check it out.

This gal. Satirical HERO!pic.twitter.com/9RzOvq0uYK

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) January 19, 2022

Some of the responses suggest the young lady is being disrespectful.  I submit, dear reader, that after the past two years of school boards treating the parents disrespectfully, those boards brought it on themselves.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS.

There's a reason human players agree on bidding conventions in bridge, in order to do such things as count the number of aces and kings the declaring partnership has.  It's been a regular observation in these irregular bridge columns that whatever artificial intelligence is coded in the simulation does some odd things in the bidding.  Consider this position.

It was my turn to "deal," and thus to open.  Balanced hand, minimum point value, protection in the short suit and in two of the other suits.  The Two Spades overcall suggested strength in spades, partner bot properly passes on nothing.  East bot can't support Spades, and I don't understand raising to Three Hearts given that there's a defender with two to five of each suit, but it's too early to call for aces.  Then it gets bizarre.  Four Diamonds rather than three or four Spades?  Five Clubs rather than calling for aces with Four No Trump?  Then Five Hearts with that hand?  I see at least two tricks, and if there's a void in Diamonds, I can promote that ♥9.  The businesslike thing is to double, and here we go.  Because East first named Hearts, I open.  Cash the ◆Ace and the ♥Ace and ♥King, business taken care of, with no more trumps visible on the board.  When East got around to drawing trumps, I got rid of the ♥Five under the ♥Queen and the ♥Nine picked up another trick.  Perhaps the algorithm learned something.

A STOPPED CLOCK THAT'S PROBABLY WRONG.

The "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has become a way for people to use their prestige as, well, nuclear physicists, to lend authority to doomsday predictions of the lunatic left more generally.

The clock is set each January by the bulletin's Science and Security Board (SASB) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. They warned Thursday that humanity is "at doom's doorstep," which "is no place to loiter."

"100 seconds to midnight reflects the board's judgment that we are stuck in a perilous moment—one that brings neither stability nor security," said SASB co-chair and George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni. "Positive developments in 2021 failed to counteract negative, long-term trends."

If those developments "failed to counteract" shouldn't the clock be set closer to midnight?

Never mind that, there are talking points to push, and a revolution to foment.

The bulletin offers 13 specific suggestions that include setting new limits on nuclear weapons and establishing no first use policies; accelerating decarbonization, including shifting money from fossil fuels to pandemic-recovery investments that favor climate mitigation and adaptation; and collaboratively identifying and implementing "practical and ethical ways to combat internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation."

The clock announcement sparked a flurry of demands from outside experts and activists, including the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and Global Zero, a worldwide movement also advocating for the total elimination of such arms.

"Two years after the historic decision to move the clock the closest it's ever been to midnight, nuclear-armed governments continue to run unacceptable risks even while speaking to the importance of restraint," said Global Zero CEO Derek Johnson. "Words are cheap and time is short."

"As we sit at just 100 seconds to midnight, world leaders need to prioritize steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in global and national security, and prevent the risk that they will be used by accident, miscalculation, or unintended escalation," he said, adding that the ultimate goal is to "continue to turn back the clock through more ambitious agreements that set the course to the total, verified elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere."

What was it, six years ago, that the clock should have run out on climate grounds alone?  The warning on the original Earth Day was that we would be done by 2000; and no less than Al "so boring that his Secret Service codeword was Algore" Gore was on record that we would be done by 2016.  I even took a picture to confirm that we were still here.

The late Rush Limbaugh had his own "Algore countdown clock" and that might be why I got the idea for taking the picture.

I'll give David French the final word on doomsday environmentalists, even those moonlighting from their day job as nuclear physicists.  "We’ve taken them seriously for far too long. Now, it’s time to laugh."

CALIFORNIA HAS BECOME A DRAG ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE.

National Review's Andrew McCarthy notes that people in other states are now burdened by the law enforcement follies of Los Angeles prosecutors.

The train ambushes are just one part of the epidemic of robberies and retail organized crime plaguing California — not just in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco, and other commercial hubs.

Obviously, [Los Angeles county district attorney George] Gascón and, in general, California’s state government are disastrous. But what is the federal government doing about this? In many crime situations, the feds can seem superfluous, muscling in on matters that are chiefly local concerns. Here, however, we are talking about interstate and international commerce, the very foundation of federal criminal jurisdiction.

It's possible, as he goes on to note, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Transportation Security are working the problem, although when that blinking twerp who is playing Attorney General in the ficus's cabinet seems more interested in calling parents "domestic terrorists" I'm not optimistic.  But it's our corona tests and our epi pens and for all I know our exercise bicycles being delayed or going missing by the looting of containers.

The people of Los Angeles elected Gascón, so it is fair enough to observe that they are getting the kind of law “enforcement” they voted for. But the train robberies are a national problem that has ramifications throughout the economy — and the country is now having them at a time of rising inflation and empty store shelves. It is for such challenges that we have federal law enforcement. The feds do not need state or municipal permission to act — they can move on their own initiative, and in contravention of the woke prosecutors’ nonenforcement approach.

The Biden administration owes the public an explanation of what it is doing to end this dangerous and embarrassing siege.

The ficus isn't sentient enough to do that, and the blinking twerp will make a hash of it.

JUST DON'T MISS THE FIVE PIN.

Milwaukee television used to include a program called "Bowling With the Champs," and there are still places to test your skill, including the oldest sanctioned lanes in the country, still set by hand.  "Take it from the reporter who just may hold the record as the longest-serving Bowler of the Week columnist in the history of The Milwaukee Sentinel."  Be sure to bring money for the beer frame,  If you have a habit of committing the error noted in the title, it's likely you're buying.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We're still working off the backlog from the Festive Season closure, although it's likely we're caught up on the nonsense for now.

Stand by for more public health panic over the large crowds at the divisional round of the football playoffs.

FIFTY PRESIDENTS?

The latest mockery Our President has exposed himself to is his occasional what appear to be quips about "fifty presidents."  He's really calling attention to two system failures.  "Even an addled brain can call up some old hooks. Direct election of senators creates a class of individuals who fancy themselves future presidents. The 17th amendment is [one] system failure."  The moment direct election of senators became Supreme Law, that created a class of people who fancied themselves future presidents, particularly those representing the heavily populated states.  What the ficus is recalling is a cloakroom joke of long standing, one that the senators might sometimes use ironically about a colleague too full of himself, or perhaps as acknowledgement of facts on the ground.

Direct election means campaigning, and campaign fundraising, and the people who seek to influence politicians expect results.  Paul Mirengoff notes that might include the sort of people who argue with, but generally vote for, Democrats.  "Another possible explanation, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is that the left-wing donors on whom Democrats rely demanded that [Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer make a last stand."  That despite some of the other people whose votes the donors require possibly tanking their careers as a consequence.

Schumer forced a number of vulnerable Democrats to vote against the filibuster. Among the vulnerable Dems who did so were Sens. Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, Michael Bennet, and Catherine Cortez-Masto. One could add the two Georgia Democrats to the list, although Raphael Warnock was probably quite happy to cast his vote and Jon Ossoff isn’t up for reelection this year. (Schumer also caused Sinema to vote for the filibuster, which did her no favors. However, she’s probably finished at the end of her term in 2024 anyway, and I doubt Schumer wants to do her favors.)

I hope there are some libertarian populist Republicans in Arizona and Georgia thinking of ways to put forth candidates who aren't Trumpian crazies to replace Kelly, Sinema, Warnock, and Ossoff.  We were talking about two system failures, though.

The second system failure, also originating in the so-called Progressive Era, is the party primary.  There's a tradeoff at work.  State governments like open primaries, the better to bundle some local general elections and referenda with the state and federal party primaries, and the party bosses prefer to have only the believers advising as to the nominees.

The tension between the party establishments and the state governments, which manage the primary elections, is of long standing.  There's a passage in Theodore White's 1960 Making of the President about how crossover voting "verges on anarchy."  Maybe that's not so good for the party establishments, but if they had their way, wouldn't they prefer to be rid of primaries and caucuses?

That might still be the case even if the primary brings out a lot of true believers in pocket boroughs.  That might be what was on Mr Schumer's mind.  "Schumer is terrified that he’ll be challenged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the decisions he’s making as majority leader reflect that fear."  Gosh, will lightning strike me down if I suggest that choosing a party's nominee for the Senate comes down to placating that docked tail of party True Believers in a few precincts in New York City, in what is often a low-turnout election, even if bundled with local elections for school board, cable commissioner, or dog-catcher.  What could be less democratic than having current office holders behaving so as to stave off a primary challenge from a small tranche of the polity, whether that's the "progressive left" pushing the Donks or the "faith and flag" conservatives pushing the Pachs?  In New York, will the resulting senator really be able to represent the interests of the entire state, including the urban poor, the information technology workers, the remaining farmers, and contractors, in what is a very large state?  Note that the other senator from New York, Kirsten "second phoniest member" Gillibrand, who took one set of stances in the House and another (so much "opportunist tacking") to run for Senate.  It's possible that either of New York's current senators would have made the cut under the pre-Seventeenth Amendment method of being put forth by the state legislature.  Neither, though, would have to tack so opportunistically to the metro True Believers, and the country might have been spared much of the pain Mr Schumer has put it through in the past year.