I was stopped at the railroad crossing to allow a 30-car freight train to go by, and it was the contents of the train that were noteworthy.
All the railroad cars were open flatbed cars -- no boxcars. The flatbeds were depressed in the middle, which is a common configuration when hauling super-heavy vehicles like tanks.
Half the flatbeds were empty, and of the remaining flatbeds, they were loaded with military vehicles. I saw no tanks or mobile rocket launching systems, but I did see a number of heavy military transport vehicles.
What caught my eye was that these came from the German military! I could tell that by the license plates they bore.
He conjectures that the empty depressed-center flats were along for loading somewhere in Poland. It's unlikely those tracked vehicles were headed for an exercise: did he see contemporary Lend-Lease in action? Or were the German tracks headed for Poland to free up Soviet-era Polish tracks for onward shipment to Ukraine?
2. E-T-T-S, generalized. "Nurse Ratched is now the national poster psycho for these people."
3. Life is a cabaret, old chum. "[N]o one in the mainstream media wants to talk about how Monkeypox is spreading because that would mean having to denounce the gay orgy scene."
4. Fast times at Swamp Middle School. "There isn’t a high school clique in America more conformist than our elite class."
5. Yes. "[A]chieving diversity by getting rid of standards is counterproductive."
7. Weimar America? "The decadence and rot within the Pride community has been evident for some time."
8. Withdrawyour sanction. "[T]he academic life of the mind may not be worth the hustle and grind."
9. Higher education's excess capacityproblem. "[T]here are too many schools that continuously offer a poor return for the majority of students who enroll."
10. This is Biden's America. "America, the most powerful nation in the world, is now comparing itself to third-world countries to make itself look favorable."
12. Justturf them out. "Politicians grabbing power isn’t anything new, but keeping Americans in a heightened state of panic to do it is unwise."
13. Recovery begins when Joe Biden loses his job. "I want to wish Joe Biden a speedy recovery from COVID. And I want to wish America a speedy recovery from Joe Biden."
14. Good. "[Florida's Brightline] will begin tests at speeds of 110 miles per hour."
Many years ago, Northern Illinois graduate and Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert wrote into one of the pork-barrel transportation bills that epitomize bipartisanship funds to buy lands for future expansion of Northern Illinois University. A new graduate student apartment complex halfway to Rockford and some rotaries eventually sprouted there.
The president recently advocated for a gas tax holiday, which would save drivers only a few dollars over a few months. It also does not address the core problem. We don’t need a gas tax holiday. We need a gas tax reset: an overhaul of transportation funding. We must free our infrastructure from the grip of big oil and car-centric planning by handing highways over to the states and redirecting the federal gas tax to support bottom-up Strong Towns initiatives.
The Highway Trust Fund is running such a massive deficit that the gas tax couldn’t meet its needs even if it were five times higher—and what is doled out is allocated without reference to the metrics that matter most, like how well projects connect people to jobs, services, and one another. The driving metric is, simply, more vehicle miles (pun intended). To the detriment of state budgets, the federal transportation system incentivizes states to build road after road without regard to future costs of maintenance, operation, and environmental impact. This model of car-centric planning is exactly why, when energy prices spike, even the president has few good options to lower costs for Americans.
The solution is devolution. Congress should leave highway taxation and spending to the states. We should commensurately remove federal red tape and regulations on highways, beyond a minimum standard of safety, so that states and cities can use their dollars to address local mobility with organic solutions. The federal gas tax should remain but be used, instead, to subsidize locally sponsored projects that promote walkability, micromobility, and transit.
Those remarks are part of a longer conversation, available as audio, between Strong Towns and Representatives Auchincloss, a Democrat, and Wisconsin's Mike Gallagher, a Republican. Here's the Strong Towns pitch.
Right now, federal gas tax revenue incentivizes states to build and build without thinking about the compounded costs of maintaining an ever-expanding roadway, which are paid for by our children in the form of federal debt. Eliminating that revenue stream eliminates that unsustainable incentive. Third, a transparent account of the costs of maintenance will make it more likely that states implement strategies like congestion pricing and improved alternative mobility options, like cycling lanes, rail, and on-demand transit. The transition will be disruptive to politicians and bureaucrats, but the net effect will be a lower carbon footprint, better mobility, and more walkable downtowns.
I know I'm repeating myself: on current trends it will be the Democrats, particularly the noisiest self-styled progressives, who will be most desirous of Constitutional protections, and that cannot come soon enough. What is now crazy, "A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have though of such a crazy idea?," will be the establishment's talking point.
Not yet, though, at least if you're associate justice Elena Kagan. "Elena Kagan Claims 'Legitimacy' of Supreme Court Is at Risk When It Strays From Public Opinion." Yes, that's click-baitish. Here's how Reuters reports the justice's remarks.
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan said on Thursday that it would be a "dangerous thing for a democracy" if the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court loses the confidence of the American public.
Speaking in public for the first time since the court's momentous ruling last month that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, Kagan stressed the importance of the justices staying in their proper roles as judges and not dictating public policy.
That's interesting, since it has been the constitutional conservatives, going back at least as far as Richard Nixon and his "strict constructionists" or perhaps even earlier, to the school desegregation cases involving intact bussing, or the Miranda rulings, making numerous claims to justices and judges legislating from the bench. Was the justice unaware that in so doing, the Court might have been out of touch with public opinion, but at the time, doing so in a way that appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of coastal cosmopolitans?
"I'm not talking about any particular decision or even any particular series of decisions, but if over time the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that's a dangerous thing for a democracy," Kagan said at a judicial conference in Montana.
Somehow, the Republic survived the "Impeach Earl Warren" campaigns of the early 1960s. I suspect it will survive the current "Impeach Clarence Thomas" campaign, such as it is. Perhaps it would be wise for the justice to understand that being at some remove from Popular Opinion, irrespective of what the pollsters are reporting, is part of her job description.
"Overall, the way the court retains its legitimacy and fosters public confidence is by acting like a court, is by doing the kinds of things that do not seem to people political or partisan," added Kagan, who has served on the court since 2010.
Kagan, who dissented in the abortion case along with the two other liberal justices, added that the court "earns its legitimacy by what it does, by the way it behaves."
Stacey Matthews of Legal Insurrection would like the justice to re-take middle school civics. "That she doesn’t seem to understand this integral part of her role while holding a lifetime appointment to our nation’s highest court is very scary."
Courts earn their legitimacy by enforcing legal standards in a consistent way. Otherwise, mightn't Miranda or school bussing have gone away long ago, as neither of those polled well?
[T]here’s [New York] Times’ resident “conservative,” Bret Stephens. He says he was wrong about Trump supporters. Not Trump himself, mind you, but his supporters, and that some of the things Stephens wrote – such as this one, in his first column about Trump – were counterproductive: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
You can summarize Stephens’ July 21st column this way: he says he shouldn’t have called Trump supporters stupid losers even though they are stupid losers. But they’re losers who have been wronged by the Democrats and Obama and so there was a reason they were willing to support an insurrectionist bigot like Trump and didn’t realize – unlike Stephens, who realized and still realizes – how absolutely terrible Trump was and is. But by putting them down, he alienated them and thereby lost his chance to persuade them to change their minds about Trump and see as Stephens does. He should have empathized with them more.
The Neo-Neocon post includes numerous excerpts from Mr Stephens's act of contrition. She includes a meditation on the ways in which Mr Stephens might have checked his privilege, to use a locution.
So these angry losers – losers compared to people like Bret Stephens, society’s winners – were also stupid to back Trump, but because of their anger it was understandable. That’s what Stephens failed to understand.
It’s really quite something, isn’t it? How condescending someone can be while thinking he or she is being understanding, all the while understanding very little about the actual Trump versus the Trump monster the left created and someone like Stephens agreed with because Trump was obviously so very “appalling”?
I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
Yes, exactly, and spokesmen for the Jarrett regency encouraging people to purchase electric cars or take the bus bespeaks a similar cluelessness. But I've come to expect that from Democrat court intellectuals. Apparently, so does Neo.
I’m here to tell Stephens – not that he’s listening to me – that he has no hope of persuading a single Trump supporter of anything whatsoever excerpt his own cluelessness and arrogance. And I doubt he convinces anyone on the left of anything, either.
Even though Stephens considers himself to be in the persuasion business, he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s basically in the “preaching to the choir” business as well as the “token conservative in a leftist outfit” business. Of course, in his failure to persuade he is hardly alone.
Unfortunately, that's depressingly common: does anyone else remember Mrs Carter suggesting Ronald Reagan's appeal was making what we now understand as Normals "comfortable with their prejudices," no doubt to the Earnest Nodding of Heads everywhere in the Official Region.
By 2015, however, the 1,691,004 million freight ton-miles recorded were 128% more than the 1970 figure, more than double. In short, at least part of the stress on the current U.S. rail system could be described as trying to put 23 pounds in the proverbial 10-pound bag; something has to be changed to make this work.
By the way, although I won’t get into detail about it here, capacity, in terms of System miles, has declined during the same 45 year time period, from 196,479 to 93,628, roughly a 50% reduction. Yes, I’m aware that a lot of this resulted from the pruning of economically unproductive lines, particularly at the formation of Conrail; on the plus side, the line to service the Powder River basin was built during these times, and more recently, the BNSF added capacity to its Abo Canyon choke point.
However, overall rail capacity has declined during the same period that traffic has more than doubled. I can’t imagine that the airlines and truckers would not have acquired significantly more capacity had the same traffic increase occurred in those industries. In short, it certainly looks like what the rail industry needed during this period was more investment in its fixed plant; maybe not on a one-for-one basis versus the traffic growth, but considerably greater than zero, as opposed to the absolute decline that occurred.
That dirty word “investment” brings up another current issue: the almighty operating ratio. In reality, this is a simple piece of mathematics: expenses divided by revenues and woe to those that can’t get down to the mid-double digits. In reality, there actually are two different ways that a low operating ratio can be achieved. The obvious one is to decrease expenses, while maintaining the present traffic and revenues. The other is to increase traffic, and therefore, revenues. Either, or both in combination, can be used to achieve the desired result.
The first approach, though, comes to grief when shippers tire of unreliable service, whilst the second only works until somebody responds to "do more" with "how?" Then mix in some passenger trains, underwritten with public money.
So, who gets the priority? A passenger train that has run on a freight railroad since 1971, or relatively new freight business that the sales group has just drummed up? In reality, this will continue to be a problem until one of two things happen: either the passenger train goes away, making its present claim to time on trackage a moot point, or investment will be needed in additional fixed plant to restore system fluidity.
This will be neither quick nor cheap, but done right, sound investment could produce revenues that exceed the expense, and even the operating ratio bean-counters will be pleased, eventually. For that matter, an example of a sound investment that continues to be effective can be found in Ron Flanary’s article “Rat Hole Revisited”, also in the NS special issue. I suspect that the current NS continues to benefit significantly from the money (wait for it…) invested by the Southern Railway in this portion of back in the 1960s.
A time of more expensive motor fuel might be as good a time as any to think along such lines, particularly if the cheap sources of fossil fuels are beginning to show exhaustion.
Like many other more conventional bourgeois intellectuals, Žižek fulminates against those who dare contest the official narrative about the war in Ukraine, provides political cover for present and future machinations of actual imperialism, and, inciting the further escalation of the war, moves the needle closer to a global conflict of unfathomable consequences.
Žižek brings to this sordid business not only his distinctive brand of spittling buffoonery, but also the influence he still retains among sections of the pseudo-left, particularly in academia. As sober and dull as the reactionary initial theses of his articles may be, what follows them is extraordinarily fanciful: pseudo-philosophical ramblings involving everyone from John Locke to John Lennon, contorted historical analogies according to which, for example, “leftists” who “show understanding for Russia” are like those who advocated neutrality between Nazi Germany and the Allies prior to 1941, and more.
First, they said the name change was part of an effort to “distance themselves from the works of J.K. Rowling, who has increasingly come under scrutiny for her anti-trans positions in recent years.”
Second, they said the name “quidditch” is trademarked by Warner Bros., and, as a result, the sport’s broadcast and sponsorship opportunities have been limited.
I have to wonder about those "sponsorship opportunities." There used to be an active quidditch club at Northern Illinois University, and your tax dollars paid for the construction of an intramural sports complex, including a quidditch pitch, that has mostly lain fallow the past few years. But no doubt some diversity deanlet will place a priority on renaming the pitch on the relevant signage.
Even the name sounds pathetic. For the love of all creatures great and small, is there anything that the woke generation can touch that won’t go up in ashes or immediately turn a depressing shade of grey? Who in the hell wants to play quadball? It sounds like one of those games elementary school gym teachers make up to keep the little monsters busy so they can sneak out for a smoke. Hey, kids! Who’s up for quadball? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, talk amongst yourselves.
Fine, I want team jerseys with a two-peckered faun as the mascot! I'm not sure whether that's too transgressive or too classical a reference for the crowd that plays the game, as self-selected for Humorless Scold status as they might be.
Quidditch, now quadball, has “developed a reputation as one of the mostprogressivesports in the world on gender equality and inclusivity,” U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch said in December, “in part thanks to its gender maximum rule, which stipulates that a team may not have more than four players of the same gender on the field at a time.”
Just wait, the Grand Handicapper will no doubt add a rule stipulating at least one person on a mobility scooter to a side! Who knew there were so many "alleged adults who seem to be simultaneously suffering from arrested maturation and broomstick envy?"
It's all too much for Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg. "So, the 'sport' wants to distance itself… …from the woman who created it, in her own mind, from whole cloth, as part of a bunch of fantasy novels about a teenage wizard?"
To the true believers, though, that's being annoying. Consider Common Dreams contributor Miles Kampf-Lassin.
In 2020, voters elected a president who promised an agenda of lifting up the working class by redistributing wealth downward, investing in social programs and tackling the climate crisis. Progressives have worked relentlessly to help Biden deliver on these pledges, while right-wing Democrats have stymied him again and again. The crisis facing the administration is on their hands, no matter what the mainstream pundits try to tell you.
No, that platform wasn't a winner, but keeping the Common Dreams faithful fired up is what matters. Yes, the Sanders people wrote the platform the Democrats ran on, but that redistributing wealth downward hasn't turned out so well.
Most lower- and middle-income Americans drive cars or trucks as part of their daily commutes; they cannot resort to urban rail, let alone the “work from home” that has become a post-COVID hallmark of the professional-managerial laptop class. Bank account–busting gasoline prices directly cut into stagnant wages, affecting blue-collar families’ very ability to put food on the table.
Yes, and in the cities, the rapid transit isn't the safest place to be. And, according to Josh Hammer, the green bundle comes with the soft-on-crime, Weimar bundle. "Yet, amidst these remarkable challenges confronting the American people, the Biden administration and Democratic Party elites would rather focus on the overarching imperatives of climate change hysteria, abortion up until birth, and a faraway war in Eastern Europe that has become utterly disconnected from the American national interest." None of which interests Mr Kampf-Lassin, although he can grouse about being ignored.
If the chattering classes were serious about assessing the reason for Biden and the Democrats’ shrinking poll numbers, they would place blame on the real culprit — an unwillingness among the party establishment to take bold action to address the issues facing the country, from a broken healthcare system to economic plunder of working people by the super-rich to bought-and-paid-for politicians acting on behalf of their corporate funders.
By instead chiding the Left, these commentators are repeating the tired ritual of treating progressives not as partners in Democratic governance, but rather as whiny children who should stay quiet while the adults among the party elite take charge.
Well, no, the corporatist mixed economy has a lot more opportunities for grift and rent-seeking than any sort of socialism, let alone a devolution of federal powers. So far, though, the party establishments, Democrat or Republican, have not yet figured out how to engage in more conventional bipartisanship. Maybe Mr Kampf-Lassin and Mr Hammer can find common ground.
The priorities of the modern Democratic Party are comically out of touch with those of the American people, who simply want safe communities, stable prices, secure borders, and to be left alone by the COVID-era biomedical security state. Democrats don’t talk about any of that, at best — and they outright impede those prerogatives, at worst. The transformation of the Democratic Party from a one-time working man’s labor party into today’s identity politics–driven woke monstrosity did not transpire overnight, but that transformation is now complete. And the result is unseemly.
The dog that is the Democratic Party is manipulated by a multifaceted tail that is a grotesque fusion of criminal adulation, Gaia worship, Malthusian radicalism, eugenicist lust, and a gender ideology downstream of the worst excesses of American academia. Maybe that will play well for certain Upper West Side and West Hollywood voting precincts this November, but it won’t play very well in real America.
American Thinker contributor Thomas Lifson asked, "Are the JFK assassination lies finally coming apart?" His clickbait paragraph follows.
If I were reading instead of writing this blog post, at this point, I would be worrying that yet another boring recitation of arcana from the mountains of evidence was about to be presented to me.
But excerpts from a new book about to be published on the assassination blew my socks off. It contains what looks like solid evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that Kennedy was killed by a bullet fired from in front of his limousine, one that entered the car through the windshield. Lee Harvey Oswald's purported location in the Texas School Book Depository was to the side of and behind the car, so he could not have fired a bullet that entered the car through the windshield.
Um, no. No serious killer, and the point of all the Kennedy assassination lore is to come up with symmetry, Somebody Important wanting the President of these United States dead, meaning A Serious Killer. "There are dozens upon dozens of historians, journalists, physicians, ballistics experts, witnesses and like-minded researchers, as well as a seemingly bottomless pit of documents, supporting [moviemaker Oliver] Stone’s firmly held contention Kennedy was the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy and that the investigation into his assassination was a sham."
But no professional killer would attempt a shot through a toughened windshield from in front of a motorcade, with all those eyes looking forward. Lee Oswald could have set up for a coming-on shot, and even he had the sense not to expose himself that way. Yes, an accurate shot through an unreinforced wing window during the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo becomes a clue, or perhaps a distraction, in Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal.
The claimed entry shot in the limousine windshield? That's in a work called "The Oswald Letter" by Thomas Lipscomb and Jerome Kroth. If Mr Kroth is the same person that Vincent Bugliosi refers to as Jerry Kroth, that's an author with a long record of selling claims about Outfit involvement in the Kennedy assassination.
James Altgens took one of the most famous photographs of the assassination from his position midway down Elm Street. As a professional press photographer, Altgens got his exposure and focus just right. The result is a photograph of incredible detail which has been determined to be coincident with Zapruder frame 255. Of great importance is the fact that the Altgens photo shows the windshield of the limousine undamaged at this point.
Altgens also took a second photograph, seconds later after the limousine headed into the darkness of the underpass. It shows the tell-tale damage to the windshield just to the side of rear-view mirror where a later FBI investigation found the windshield cracked but not penetrated. Lead residue was found on the interior surface of the windshield. From this comparison of photos, it is possible to infer that the windshield was hit from the rear by a bullet fragment at some time after Zapruder frame 255. This fact establishes a parameter for any attempted reconstruction of the crime.
[Glass consultant Chris] Barry decided to conduct simulations to determine if this finding was correct since laminated glass in particular was not discussed in the report. He got some old laminated windshields and set them up in his basement. All tests were conducted facing the inside lite of glass.
At first, he fired a low mass lead fragment at low velocity. The result was no fracture to either of the lites. During the second test he shot a high mass lead fragment at high velocity. Both lites of glass were fractured. In the third test, Barry shot a medium mass lead fragment at medium velocity. Only the outer lite was fractured.
No second gunman, and who knew laminated glass would break differently being hit by something hard at different speeds?
No second gunman, not on the grassy knoll or the railroad bridge, or popping up from a manhole.
A second irregular Saturday bridge column on the theme of getting the bidding right dealing with an algorithm. Again, it worked out.
West deals. Partner bot open is conventional, from among the choices the simulation gives me, Two Spades was the more accurate response; then the algorithm wanted to go for more than a game in Four Spades. The program explains Five Diamonds as a cue bid suggesting some Diamond winners; from among the choices my Five Hearts is another cue, and the algorithm's Five Spades is yet another cue, no ♣ Ace (which I have) and the algorithm wasn't greedy when I went to Six Spades.
The opening lead was the ♣ Four, fourth highest, win on the board and take stock. With ten Spades, there are no Spade losers; there could be a Heart loser, although once trumps are drawn, there's a discard to a Diamond from the board and no other Diamond losers, and no Club losers. And so it went: draw the trumps in two rounds, ♣ Jack to the King on the board, now the two high Diamonds on the board pick up that Heart loser, and the remaining tricks are all forced.
Addison DelMastro makes the point one way. "How do you get suburbanites and small-town Americans to embrace car-free streets? Have a festival!" He continues with food for thought. "When easy parking is your major selling point, maybe you don’t really have all that much to sell."
It might be, as he concludes, that closing streets for art markets or the like is for special occasions.
It’s not that towns can really be exactly like this all the time. It’s more that we have a hard time imagining any alternative to driving everywhere, spreading out homes, and treating classic urbanism as a sort of open-air museum to visit once in awhile.
I almost wonder if our attitudes about work and leisure don’t have something to do with this. It’s almost as if we don’t do this more often because we like it; perhaps we view it as a slightly sinful indulgence, after which we have to get back to real work.
Or maybe it’s just that the convenience of quick travel and easy parking is very hard to give up—even when giving it up can give us so much in return.
A typically popular beach area that lies alongside a busy and active street in Pewaukee is raising some concerns.
Pewaukee village board president Jeffrey Knutson says the board looked at ways to make the area safer, including lowering the speed limit and installing speedbumps. Except, he says, that may not be enough.
"There's been a lot of near misses with people jaywalking across the street and also little kids running across the street," said Knutson.
That's why the board is now looking at the possibility of removing parking spaces along a portion of Wisconsin Avenue.
"By taking out the parking we're going to eliminate people from jetting across, and jaywalking, not only from the parking area but also from the beach," said Knutson.
The parking spaces are occupied almost all day (and there might be traffic congestion with cruisers waiting for those spots to open up) but some business owners fret about how losing a parking space in front of their shop cuts down on casual traffic.
It might be that a Pewaukee beach area where beach goers don't have to play Frogger might be more conducive to window shopping, Let's see, in a university town far from any beaches, whether providing more outdoor space in front of businesses along the high street, whether the casual shopping and browsing increases.
That term refers to the combination of highway construction, zoning, planned-use developments, and mass-produced housing that shaped residential patterns in the United States after the War. In aesthetic circles, there's a lot of sentiment that it's all a mistake. "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal." From that perspective, "Paradise Drive" might be ironic. "Perhaps that way [of living and interacting] was made possible by cheap oil, and it's unsustainable, or perhaps its current existence will influence the innovations to be induced by no-longer-cheap oil." And cultural-studies types had ample material to spin their theories of oppression. "Silly me, to think that those images were simply the reality that came after the morale-building propaganda during the world war. And that the efforts during the war produced The America That Worked(TM)."
Much of that criticism uses the Futurama urban form as a foil. In reality, the expressways are never as uncongested as the working models, and the high rise housing is more like a khrushchoba or theprojects, although there was a recent spate of commercials for exercise equipment featuring people showing their stuff in front of floor-to-ceiling windows in urban condos to the amusement or seduction of people with similar windows.
It might be, though, that it wasn't the Futurama that sold people on suburban living, it was General Electric's Carousel of Progress.
The closed captioning on that recording of the Disney version is amusing, isn't it?
That vibrant future, however, was planned, rationalized, top-down (much as the arrangement of exhibits on the midway is). As far as the Carousel of Progress, there was something sad about the 1960s vintage home, in which Mom and Dad and the kids had all sorts of General Electric appliances, but they'd packed the grandparents, who, as residents of the earlier vintage homes, delivered a line about things being as good as they ever could get, setting up the appliance commercial in the final act.
Some of the 1965 content has been tweaked in the nearly sixty years since I saw it, and no doubt there are women of the fevered brow who would lose their temper the moment the 1900 era male head of household started the audioanimatronic spiel. But, upon reflection, there might have been something in the idea of your own house being tricked out with ever better conveniences. "The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys." That should have occurred to me years ago. "[Henry] Ford [stocked his Greenfield Village with] all sorts of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods to highlight improvements in the lives of ordinary people. His 'history is bunk' quip is a comment on the emphasis of ordinary historians of his time on Important People and Important Events."
Or, thinking about my frontier ancestors as the Age of Steam came to America's Dairyland,
The Francis Hopkins family certainly might think of a world in which people complain about sixty hours as the nearest thing on Earth to Heaven. Their aspirations, however, might have been to no more than ownership of 160 acres free and clear, with a frame house and a windmill pump replacing a log cabin and a windlass well. What intrigues, though, is that the popular term for that aspiration was "competence", which connoted "sustainable."
There's also mention, in the Disney version of the Carousel of Progress, of the "horseless streetcar," referring to early incarnations of the electric streetcar. The streetcar suburb, we have noted, is an emergent phenomenon that still has a lot of potential for urban development.
Perhaps it is on the people who would undo the Suburban Experiment to present a value proposition that involves more than fit people showing off in front of their windows, the way the modest aspirations of General Electric's animatronic homeowners did.
Even the brightest among you could benefit by a modicum of repetition. "[N]egative unintended consequences are the hallmark of progressive ideology." That's something Ronald Reagan grasped, long ago. "Want to know why working-class voters of all races are abandoning the Democrats? It’s because the Democrats have abandoned working-class voters."
The weekly round-up of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
A contributor to World Socialist Web Site reveals a state secret. "European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede."
That's always been the case with climate panics: there's a protracted January thaw, which sometimes happens, or a heat wave, which is as much part of July and August as the corn tasselling and some baseball fans getting frustrated with the local nine.
Sometimes, you have to look for the lying with statistics. Case in point: a local weather yakker put up a visual of July average temperatures over the past fifty years that showed an up-trend, and used that as evidence of "climate change." (It used to be "global warming," but those yakkers are more likely to show the past thirty days' of a month of above average temperatures than below average temperatures, and hope we don't notice.) That time series looks different if you show the past hundred years (many of the all-time high temperatures still date to the Dust Bowl years) and a chart from a rural weather station, if there is one, is likely to look different from one at a major airport near an urban heat island. Love the albedo of tarmac!
The avatar of Leon Trotxky offers a similar distraction. "Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius." What's the start date? The end of the Medieval Warm Period? Does it include the Little Ice Age? Does nobody understand a fundamental methodological point? "Science progresses by making sense of the anomalies."
Never mind that, though, the solution to any social problem, real or imagined, is always the same.
Workers and young people must draw the necessary lessons from the inaction of capitalist governments across Europe and the world against wildfires and global warming. The struggle against climate change and to protect the environment is a political and class struggle. As is the case with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war and inflation, the only solution to global warming is a direct assault on the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class and the socialist transformation of world society.
Never mind that attempts at such transformations quickly lead to a falling-out among the vanguardists.
The Huskies had the ninth-highest team cumulative grade point average in NCAA Division I for the 2021-22 season at 3.681. This is the fourth consecutive year NIU is on a WBCA Academic Top 25 Honor Roll and the second that the Huskies are in the top-10. NIU was seventh in the nation in team GPA in 2021.
That's long been a tradition at Northern Illinois; I believe that every player that suited up has ultimately graduated. That noted, the challenge I posed last year remains to be completed. "Now show me that all the Navy SEAL training you've been reporting on all summer turns into extending a ten-point lead at halftime." The team had a seventeen point lead in the second half of the opening game of the conference tournament, and ... were excused by Ball State. Season tickets will go on sale soon, but count me out. Perhaps if I see some performance by mid-January I'll check them out.
In addition, I continue to wonder how effective the all-woke-all-the-time stance the team seems to take on social media and on game days is at building the fan base.
Thank you, Senator Warren, for exposing these very scary, very predatory “pregnancy centers.” It’s worse than we could have imagined. Just watch. pic.twitter.com/u6bvnwiEr7
Gov. J.B. Pritzker has tested positive for COVID-19 just days after traveling to Florida to deliver an address that is once again stoking suspicions he’s considering a run for president.
The governor’s office on Tuesday said Pritzker received a positive result during his routine COVID-19 testing regimen “after being notified of several close contacts testing positive.”
Pritzker, 57, tweeted that he is experiencing mild symptoms and is being treated with the antiviral medication Paxlovid.
The potbellied dictator was exposed but didn't catch a case a few months ago. But he's engaging in the same ritual that everybody else who gets the corona shots engages in. "The Democratic governor, who is fully vaccinated and double boosted, is following U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines by working from home. It’s the first time the governor has contracted the virus."
Pritzker is an inherited money dolt. He's impressed not a single person who knows him, but he yet spent more than $171 million of his family's money to get a job that he does not seem to enjoy and certainly isn't very good at. J.B. Pritzker is one of the last people on Earth who should be running anything and yet somehow he's convinced himself he's going to be the next president.
Convince, or at least thinking about it enough to go to New Hampshire. "Imagine the consultant who convinced J.B. Pritzker to leave his collapsing state and head to New Hampshire because really, you're going to be president, J.B." Humph. I hope there'd be some crusty live-free-or-die Yankee to make some caustic observation about the abortion sanctuary state the governor would like to make in Illinois.
Illinois ranks third in net migration. New York's in the middle, between California and Illinois. The Chicago-Naperville area lost 107,000 people just last year. That's one of the highest losses for any metropolitan region in the United States. L.A. and San Francisco also right near the top of that list. So, again, if you want to judge someone's success, ask yourself, are people moving to the place that person governs or are they running at high speed in the other direction?
Illinois and California are in the second category. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois loses a resident every 4 minutes. Now, how many people is that? Well, over a year. That's the equivalent of losing the entire city of Springfield, which is the capital of Illinois.
There's more in Tucker's column, he even reminds us that the pobellied dictator issued a ukase limiting recreational boating to no more than two people in a boat. "Under J.B. Pritzker, Illinois has become much poorer, much more dangerous, and much less free."
If nothing else, a primary effort by another member of the Chicago Combine would be amusing.
Florida's Brightline have been calling attention on social media to the delivery passage of the next two sets of Siemens diesel trains, ready to go into service once trains begin running from Miami to the Orlando airport station, at this writing they hope that will be early in 2023.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's resurgent East Broad Top recently took delivery of the first of four new steamcoaches. "Although constructed of modern materials, the car resembles EBT’s circa-1890 rolling stock used during the first half of the 20th century." The builder has had practice building similar steamcoaches for the White Pass and Yukon tourist railroad that meets cruise ships at Skagway, Alaska.
Although the railroad was mostly left fallow after its 1956 closing, the passenger service had been reduced from the Depression on, and the passenger car fleet was smaller at that closing than it once was. "Additionally, EBT’s roster contains three 19th-century wooden-body cars, but they are well-worn and are in various stages of restoration." Some of those cars once ran on a Boston area commuter railroad, and they were rendered surplus by an electrification.
The Hamilton coaches are patterned after, but don’t exactly mimic, EBT cars No. 14 and 15, which the line bought secondhand from the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad in 1916. The other existing EBT coach is No. 8, also bought from BRB&L the same year.
If you want to see Boston area wooden coaches in action, you have to go to the East Broad Top for a narrow gauge one, and a Boston and Maine coach or two are still in action on the (standard gauge) Strasburg Rail Road.
I understand there are some Siemens coaches and diesels similar to those Brightline purchased going into regional service on Amtrak, but they're not exactly calling attention to it.
The city of Chicago is violating the civil rights of its residents by relocating polluting businesses from white communities into Black and Latino areas that already are overwhelmed with environmental and health issues, federal officials have found after a nearly two-year investigation.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is demanding that Chicago change its unlawful planning, zoning and land-use policies so they don’t discriminate against communities of color, according to a letter HUD sent to the city.
If Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration doesn’t agree to work on a plan to overhaul its processes and policies, City Hall could lose hundreds of millions in federal housing money.
That's the Jarrett regency's Department of Housing and Urban Development, meaning Chicago Combine politicians pulling Brandon's strings, getting into a woker-than-thou tussle with the local Combine politicians.
At the center of the tussle is a business relocation where a prima facie case of gentrification might be present.
The investigation was sparked by a complaint from community organizers who challenged the city’s role in the planned relocation of the General Iron metal-shredding business from mostly white Lincoln Park to a majority-Latino Southeast Side community surrounded by Black neighborhoods.
“These actions continued a broader policy of shifting polluting activities from white neighborhoods to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods despite the latter already experiencing a disproportionate burden of environmental harms,” according to the HUD letter, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
There used to be a serious iron and steel business in the vicinity of Goose Island, but of late, that's part of the enclave of fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World. The southeast side? (Yes, there is one in Chicago.) If you watch Chicago P. D., dear reader, whenever there's a shootout or a body buried in the shadow of the grain elevators, that's where you are, and that area has long been Exit Zero, and an afterthought for Chicago's ruling circles.
The city didn’t listen to residents on the heavily industrial Southeast Side who argued that they couldn’t welcome another polluting industrial operation, HUD said.
“The city ignored key substantive concerns throughout the process,” the letter said. “Disparities in environmental burdens and their health effects were well known by the city and raised by residents and experts, yet the city took significant actions towards the relocation without considering how the relocation would exacerbate those disparities.”
Despite neighbors’ complaints prior to the Lincoln Park site’s closing in 2020, Emanuel’s and Lightfoot’s administrations both dismissed concerns from Southeast Side residents, according to HUD.
“The city’s disregard for the Southeast [Side] residents’ concerns stands in contrast to the city’s receptiveness to the complaints of the Lincoln Park residents that the relocation aimed to address,” the HUD letter said.
Whether this federal case is a straightforward application of social justice principles or indicative of a faction fight between Combine people in Washington and Combine people still in Chicago remains to be seen.
On the eighth of June, by the dark of moon, here we were. "The Brewers got off to their best start ever during the first fifty games and as of this writing are half a game ahead of the Cardinals." Brewer closer Josh Hader has had a few difficult outings since then, most recently allowing three home runs including a walk-off grand slam to a Yastrzemski; and the hits kept on coming with the next night's relief pitcher committing a bases-loaded balk; and Sunday's bullpen game didn't turn out well. Thus, here we are, at the All-Star break, with the Crew half a game ahead of the Cardinals, because of rain in Cincinnati. That spectacular start? Gone to Giants and Cubs and Cardinals, all of it. "The Cardinals management understand that 'good enough' means capering on the field in late October."
When the Crew came within three outs of a World Series in 2018, the mind-set in Milwaukee at the All-Star break was still, "Had anyone told us at the beginning of the season that the team would be two games behind the Cubs and holding the first wild card, we'd have taken it." Last season, the mid-season standard was higher. There is still work to do, and with the three-city road trips all finished, and Milwaukee having eight more home games than the Cardinals from here to October, fans will be expecting victory.
By way of prologue, I'll note that a Milwaukee radio talker, early in 2019, which is to say, before any weapons-to-Ukraine impeachment inquiry, before any batches of bad bat soup came out of Wuhan, before arrests went terribly wrong in Minneapolis and Kenosha, before any emergency measures to allow people to vote without risking a coronavirus infection or a mugging went into effect: before any of that, the radio talker suggested that Joe Biden was precisely the kind of anodyne Democrat who could unseat, simply by being boring and not controversial in the likes of a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders, unseat Donald Trump.
I'll also submit that, for all the turmoil that did take place, whether in civic life generally or electoral campaigns specifically, the simplest explanation for the outcome of the presidential election strikes me as people who sat out in 2016 turned out in 2020; and in my view, they voted to gridlock the federal government and might have done so but for Mr Trump injecting himself into the Georgia senatorial runoffs.
This is a review of books covering the campaign dynamics, and as such, will offer nothing on the dynamics of that anodyne Democrat getting delusions of Lyndon Johnsonness with the results we are seeing around us. The comments on the books continue below the jump.
The emergency powers continue, as does the fearmongering. "[Wuhan coronavirus] deaths have remained relatively low, with an average of eight residents lost to the virus each day last week." The potbellied dictator, however, has not issued new destructive ukases.
Despite the troubling numbers, don’t expect Gov. J.B. Pritzker to step up COVID-19 mitigation efforts anytime soon. The Democratic governor — in the middle of a reelection campaign against state Sen. Darren Bailey, a downstate Republican who made a name for himself fighting Pritzker’s early pandemic restrictions — announced earlier this week that he’s lifting a vaccine mandate for students and faculty at colleges and other higher education institutions, which can still impose their own mandates.
Pritzker called it part of his plan “to carefully unwind” COVID restrictions while pushing for vaccination.
Put another way, at some level he understands that, Chicago Combine turnout notwithstanding, a return to the school-closing, old-people-killing ways of spring 2020 will get his political future unwound right quick. At the same time, he's been seeking to undo the effects of Illinois's corrupt business climate by inducing companies that want to encourage their workers to do even more for the company to locate in Illinois. "Pritzker wrote to the CEOs of several Texas businesses, including Dell and Hewlett Packard, to encourage them to move to Illinois after Texas passed a law restricting abortion access, Politico first reported." That might not work so well, as information technology workers are among the most able to work from home, and that class of workers has been leaving Illinois for other pastures. But maybe creating a less family-supportive work place will appeal to some bosses.
In his first year in office, Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Act, declaring Illinois the most progressive state in the country on abortion access.
“So as radical legislators in Texas functionally eradicate the autonomy of half the state, cutting off access to basic health care, family planning, and the freedom to thrive, I invite you to consider a new home base for your company – one that embraces the policies of the 21st century and aligns with your company’s values to ensure women succeed,” Pritzker wrote to the CEO of Oracle and others.
Somehow, "ensure women succeed" in the form of easier ability to terminate a pregnancy and get back to work doesn't sound like a winning recruitment pitch.
On to the effects of the corona tyranny in Illinois.
A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways. With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changingthe way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.
The latest report from Sweden counts 2,528,166 infections, up by 17,236 from last month, and 19,170 deaths, a change of 154 from that report.
The latest report from Illinois counts 3,496,014 infections, an increase of 143,031 over last month and 38,737 deaths, adding 426 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month. There are a few more people in hospital, although there's no crush loading.
As of this afternoon, the state counts around 28.5 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they've updated their tally to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations. The state no longer counts the scary variants. The early June mix of infections is almost all BA.x strains of Omicron.
These posts will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.
Let me reiterate: if the potbellied dictator and the rest of the Combine are returned to office in November, Illinoisans can expect no sympathy from me when the retail taxes go back on, and go up, and the power goes off.
Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect. The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2. It's scant consolation that one governor issuing ukases smokes out a candidate who aspires to issue ukases of a different kind.
There's a Cold Spring Shops category, "corporate welfare for roadhogs," that calls attention to the folly of road socialism and the futility of hoping there is enough public money to provide convenient road transportation, either for commuters or for good. When I'm feeling particularly michievious, that category includes calls for special movement permits for any rubber-tired shipment in a trailer longer than 28 feet. It has to be tongue-in-cheek, as not even the most avaricious of rent-seeking railroad lobbyist has mooted the suggestion publicly.
All the same, there are days, like last Friday, a rainy day, when the call might appeal to people. "The Wisconsin Department of Transportation said all lanes of I-41 southbound have reopened after crews worked to clear a semi that rolled over earlier this morning." That was at Good Hope Road, northwest of Milwaukee, and any good hopes of getting to the office early got rained out, just like a baseball game in Chicago. Troubles for Milwaukee commuters, though, were not over. "A semi jack-knifed in the Mitchell Interchange around mid-day, causing a ramp closure from NB 94 to WB 894. The accident was cleared around 1:30pm." That article also noted, "The accidents were one of many on the interstate, which was impacted by the weather conditions." Proofreading appears to be a lost art, but so it goes under what passes for inclusive education these days.
Perhaps the truckers got surprised by some wind gusts and slick roads, or perhaps these crashes were consequences of road-ragey motorists cutting in and out in places where they oughtn't be going. (Separate the heavies from the light vehicles and a lot of that problem goes away.)
On the other hand, the heavies have to pay attention to where they're instructed not to go. "So why are huge trucks in Roseland driving right past signs saying they can't be on the road?" Roseland is in Chicago, and the possibility of some beaks being wetter than the roads cannot be ruled out. "Neighbors feel the companies don't care, because they're driving right past a handful of signs prohibiting trucks over five tons, and these are definitely over five tons. The group said it's raised the issue to their alderman and the city, but nothing's changed." The CBC Chicago team is "still waiting for answers" from Chicago's Department of Transportation.
Amtrak says that allowing CN to operate the lines would further hurt the already woeful on-time performance of its passenger trains operating on the former Illinois Central between Chicago and Gilman, Ill., as well as on the joint KCS-Union Pacific line between East St. Louis, Ill., and Godfrey, Ill.
In addition, Amtrak says CN would run more freight traffic – either additional or longer trains – over seven other line segments that currently host passenger service. These include a 250-mile portion of the former Illinois Central Chicago-New Orleans main line; three CN lines in Michigan; a short segment on CN in Memphis; as well as short sections of UP trackage in Kansas City and Springfield.
There's all of one Amtrak train on those Michigan segments; I forget the story behind Amtrak and the Reagan Administration going along with singling the Illinois Central main south of Kankakee and removing the automatic train stop that made the line good for 100 mph running; and at the moment there's only the much-maligned City of New Orleans and the one daily Carbondale turn on the section between Chicago and Gilman, where trains would head over to Springfield to get on the Roodhouse Doodlebug Line.
Amtrak’s July 12 filing with the Surface Transportation Board dredges up the long-running dispute over on-time performance of passenger trains on the former Illinois Central, even citing a 1991 Trains Magazine story that noted City of New Orleans on-time performance fell to 15% after IC single-tracked its main line in 1988 over Amtrak’s objections.
You'd think that a proof of concept for so-called precision scheduled railroading might include ... keeping the scheduled trains close to their schedule.
Amtrak pointed out that CN told the STB in 2015 that the biggest issue affecting the performance of Chicago-Carbondale service was a lack of capacity on the IC main line. Amtrak operates six daily trains over the line, including the City of New Orleans and the Illini/Saluki service between Chicago and Carbondale. (One of the Carbondale roundtrips is currently suspended.) CN sends 20 or more freights over the route each day.
Now, Amtrak notes, CN says that the Chicago-Gilman portion of the route has excess capacity that will enable it to handle two additional CN trains per day without interfering with Amtrak service. CN acknowledged that it has not performed a capacity analysis to measure the impact of additional freight traffic on Amtrak trains.
Those "capacity analyses" are often consultants messing around with fancier versions of Train Dispatcher, and the programmer's maxim, garbage in, garbage out, is still relevant.
The Jarrett regency: their incompetence is their diversity. They are a joke. "Has there ever been a less impressive crew put in charge of the agencies of the executive branch?" Even head-down on the beach. "[I]s there any more apt symbol of the Democratic Party in the Year of Our Lord 2022 than a queer, BIPOC Ivy League graduate with her head in the sand and her fat butt jiggling in the air?" But that's the Wokenkuckucksheim (the misspelling is deliberate, O Freunde) Our Progressive Betters live in.
The weekly summary of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
