MESDAMES Y CABALLEROS, LE CANADIEN PACIFIQUE DE MEXICO.

The merger of Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern and its Mexican properties is complete, and the company has released a new herald that preserves as many elements of the Canadian Pacific herald as are practicable.

The CPKC logo is a modification of the logo CP introduced in 2017, an updated version of the railway’s heritage shield, beaver, and maple leaf. The CPKC logo replaces the words Canadian Pacific in the golden circle with the initials of the three railways that make up CPKC: KCS, CP, and KCSM. Bold red CPKC initials replace 1881, CP’s founding date, in the gold ribbon at the bottom of the logo. And the 1881 now sits atop the maple leaf, the symbol of Canada.

How hard would it be to bound that herald with an octagon, Kansas City Southern's herald shape of long standing?  Or would that call up too many thoughts of the squabble over who gets the Roodhouse Doodlebug Line?  That's for another day.

The golden spike driving ceremony commemorating the merger took place in Kansas City, which is in the Canadian Pacific orbit because The Milwaukee Road originated as a granger railroad gathering Chicago traffic from Kansas City, Omaha, and the Cities, only to attempt to be a ratemaking transcontinental railroad, and when that failed, it became a Soo Line property, which gave the Soo Line the opportunity to sell some of its tracks off, and those, along with the former Illinois Central Gulf, became Canadian National's, and thus did CNR become the railroad with the most trackage in Mississippi, as well as wanting to reclaim the Roodhouse Doodlebug Line.  It's almost easier to trade Aaron Rodgers.

Let's close the week and the month with recognition that some other wag had thoughts of CPdeM in his mind.

That's all until next week.  Operate safely at all times.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Wer zuletzt lacht? "The Packers did a marvelous job in sending off an almost-40-year old QB, who said he was '90%' retired just over a month ago." Moving on.  Rodgers breaks Favre's record for longest Midwest Goodbye.  There are standards.  "For all those MVP awards, Rodgers led the Packers to one Vince Lombardi Trophy."  You know my position.

Meanwhile, Dementia Joe has a job to finish.  "They've created a mentality of despair among young Americans, who look on as crime soars but hear nothing but a drumbeat from liberal media outlets about how bad the cops are."  In their despair, though, they may see no better choice, being compelled not to propose new pronouns being the alternative to forcing others to use them.  "Using the power of the state for cultural engineering is now something opposed to progressivism."  Or perhaps everything is fine.  "The inner workings of those in the Biden White House seem quite opaque to me, except for their unrelenting leftism, destructiveness, and incompetence. Half of America seems cool with that, though."  Or not?  "You guys literally created this."  We know.  "Apparently not satisfied with merely damaging America, he aims to destroy it."  With an asterisk on the understudy.  "Being the historical 'first' whatever really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to the average voter, especially if you keep demonstrating that not only are you really, really bad at what you do."  The worst is yet to come.

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

EVOLVING IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR IMPROVING.

Here it is, the end of April, and now comes Book Review N^o. 1, George Will's The Conservative Sensibility.  It's another book I engaged with extensively, as my end-notes and underlinings indicate.  The book might better be understood as The Libertarian Sensibility, at least that's the impression I got.  The preface spells out where Mr Will intends to go, complete with his acidulous tone, e.g. (p. xvi) "We can dignify our present disputes among small persons of little learning by connecting them with great debates about fundamental things."  The libertarian case emerges at p. xxv, with "One lesson of the twentieth century is that the comprehensive politics of the integrated state promises fulfillment but delivers suffocation."  The book has a 2019 publication date: there is nothing from the past three years of fifteen days to slow the spread that would lead me to think otherwise.  At page xxxi, he notes, "Understanding the limits of the possible is a prerequisite for avoiding misplaced confidence, of which there has been an abundance in the last half century of governance."

From there, everything else is elaboration.  Although I flagged all sorts of passages reinforcing all manner of things that I have carried on about at length for years, let me limit my observations to a few.  That the conservative sensibility is in fair part libertarian is present in Mr Will's allusion, page 100, to the Tragic Vision.  "Since the New Deal, the government has become steadily more ambitious.  Americans have not, however, become more content with their government."  The Tory part of his personality surfaces at page 195 with "[D]emocracy produces unfortunate results because voters views are foolish but honored.  Often the problem is not that government is unresponsive but that it is too responsive."  That's why we have constitutions, page 200, "Although constitutions are adopted in order to enable orderly social change, their primary purpose is to conserve what should not be changed, at least not quickly and easily."  The impatient vanguardists will always be with us, and they will sound off about the expediency of the moment.

There are periodic autobiographical observations in Conservative Sensibility: not about the Cubs or American Flyer as I have on occasion teased, but did you know Mr Will is proudly atheist?

If you have a conservative or libertarian disposition, dear reader, Conservative Sensibility offers plenty to make you check your premises; if your disposition is technocratic or vanguardist, ask whether Mr Will offers evidence that might make you revise your priors.  The book packs a lot of points into its pages; this is not something to read casually on a rainy afternoon.

Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.

REALITY COMES FOR THOSE AFFORDABLE HOUSES.

Remember this lament?

Nobody in Washington is regulating lending rates, and creditworthy people probably know something about shopping around, and lenders know something about adverse selection, particularly after 2007-2008. Could the revised origination fee schedule perhaps lead to less lending to the people the Wise Experts are hoping to help? Redlining, aided and abetted in the name of equity, anyone?

The machinery of redlining is still there, even though nobody will own up to it.

Neighborhoods were classified by four colors: grade A, green, for "Best”; grade B, blue, for "Still Desirable"; grade C, yellow, for "Definitely Declining"; and grade D, red, for "Hazardous."

This practice of redlining became illegal in the 1960s when The Fair Housing Act made explicit racial discrimination in housing transactions a criminal offense. Since then, property appraisers and lenders do not refer to maps with redlines circling minority neighborhoods to determine neighborhood values, or a person's ability to obtain a mortgage.

However, the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), which teaches appraisers how to categorize a house’s value (which in turn represents an individual's ability to obtain a mortgage), still relies on a similar, if not the same, color code to inform both appraisers and assessors about home categorization and true value.

This is a slide from an IAAO course teaching the fundamentals of real property appraisal to both appraisers and assessors. It breaks down homes and neighborhoods into four color categories to represent what is called the “Neighborhood Lifecycle.” They are green, representing growth; blue, representing revitalization; yellow, representing stability; and red, representing decline—quite closely mimicking the practiced colors and categories of redlining maps.

There are still plenty of margins along which the appraisers can operate, whether they're sensitive to their biases or not.

“I think where the nuance comes in is the appraisers will always say, ‘Well, you know, there's lots of variables, we're looking at current sales, etcetera,’” said [Urban 3 analyst Joe] Minicozzi on how the appraisal system relies partly on opinions and calculated guess work to determine a home value. “But they're never going to admit the fact that they were trained on that damn map.”

“I understand,” continued Minicozzi. “Maybe these are relevant inputs that you have to know if a neighborhood is declining or improving from an appraisal standpoint, but that means something. And shouldn't we be curious about the colors? Why is it these four? Why not six different colors?”

You can change the colors, you can change the number of the colors on the map, but you can't change the margins along which house buyers and mortgage lenders optimize.

“[One thing] we found in the analysis is that they have these things called neighborhood codes,” said Minicozzi, who found his local neighborhood codes on the Buncombe County GIS Map under the “property card” category. “And the ‘neighborhood codes’ seem a lot like ‘judgment calls’ on the neighborhood. So, it's like, where did the [neighborhood code] map come from?”

In Minicozzi’s neighborhood of Montford, he says there are around 20 different “codes.” “And the neighborhood code doesn't match up with what you would think your neighborhood is,” he says. Homes within the same neighborhood, even homes right next to each other, can have different codes—which relate to the home’s value. The map below demonstrates the different levels of value, the yellow circle pointing out Minicozzi’s neighborhood of Montford.

Those codes affect both property tax assessments, which ought to be done on a regular basis, as well as property value appraisals, which require a set of comparable properties so as to be able to establish listing prices for sales, as well as value at risk for the lenders, and those are going to involve judgement calls, and they will do so no matter how socially conscious the assessor, the appraiser, and the loan officer might be.  A commenter has a more pessimistic take than I, suggesting that property values will be declining everywhere.

A FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL WEEKEND.

The story, and the mayor's lament, sound familiar.

[The mayor] said young criminals were carrying out their acts without any fear of the consequences.

"It has been described as real-life Grand Theft Auto. These kids can effectively do whatever they want with no fear of consequence."

The system of juvenile detention was unable to rehabilitate young offenders, [he] said.

"If we are going to put a child into juvenile detention - and no one wants to see that but at times it is necessary - they have to fix the environment that it comes from.

"That is the parents and the grandparents as well. They need to be looked after so everyone is educated.

"A we need more police on the ground and we need safe places for these children to go."

That could be a dispatch from Chicago or Philadelphia or Kenosha on a bad day, but it's not.

GREEN-NINETEEN, NEW YORK JOKER.

I wonder if Aaron Rodgers will use that snapcount in his new situation.  "Green Bay Packers agree to trade franchise quarterback Aaron Rodgers to Jets."  Let the succession commence.

Rodgers finishes his Packers career as the franchise’s leader in all-time passing touchdowns and second in passing yards behind Brett Farve, who similarly landed with the New York Jets for an unsuccessful stint late in his career.

The Packers have repeatedly expressed their confidence in quarterback Jordan Love, a 2020 first-round draft pick who has backed up Rodgers for the last several seasons. The 24-year-old has completed only 50 passes in his young career thus far with only three touchdowns to three interceptions.

Green Bay lost 13-7 against the Kansas City Chiefs in Love’s only NFL start to date — a game in which he threw for 190 yards, a touchdown and a pick.

That might be so. Let's see what additional practice time with the starters during spring practice and training camp brings.  (Follow that link for the salary cap ramifications and other minutiae.)

Sources familiar with the franchise’s thinking said the Packers’ confidence in Love has grown significantly in the past year, something general manager Brian Gutekunst indicated at the NFL scouting combine.

“He definitely needs to play,” Gutekunst said. “I think that’s the next step in his progression. I think he’s ready for that. Not every quarterback comes into this league ready to go out and play, and I think he needed a little time. But over the last year and a half, I think you’ve seen that’s the next step in his progression. He needs to go and play.”

The Babylon Bee got in on the fun. "Aaron Rodgers had asked if anyone had some psychedelics because he just sobered up enough to realize he had actually signed with the New York Jets."

R-E-L-A-X.

Fair winds, Aaron Rodgers.  Following seas, Jordan Love.  We all know what the standard is.

A GROUP COMPLAINT.

The New Neocon might not be familiar with the locution, E-T-T-S moment, but her "They call this progress" is surely a lament for that generalized decline.  She lists ten things, most of them dealing with contemporary information technology, and there's a lengthy bull session elaborating on those things, and suggesting a few more peeves.

I tend to use the self-checkout grocery lines, particularly if paper bags are available, because I then don't have to ask for paper (the default being that plastic) and I'm able to use fewer bags than the baggers do, even with paper, and load the heavy stuff on the bottom.  That has become a lost art among the paid baggers.

Charitable organizations that treat a contribution as an invitation to beg for more might get themselves cut off.

Clinics and eateries that have my contact information, just because you have the ability easily to send out a short survey after my checkup or coffee break, does it mean that you should?

That is all.

SPRINKLE SOME MALAISE ON THAT ICE CREAM CONE.

It's too soon to call a recession, but the portents are present.

The economy is clearly cooling, which is a mixed blessing for President Biden. Maybe it means weaker demand will finally get inflation under control. Or maybe it means the oft-predicted recession is actually on its way.

Retail sales dropped by 1% from February to March, a sharper decline than economists expected. That was the second drop in a row and the fourth decline in the last five months. Lower energy prices explain part of the falloff, which is good news. But every category was weak and there was no silver lining.

U.S. manufacturing output also fell by 0.5% in March, as U.S. and global demand for American goods softened. “Real consumer spending ended last quarter on a weak note and the handoff to Q2 is weak,” Oxford Economics reported on April 14. “The economic environment will become less favorable for consumers as income gains slow, excess savings run dry, prices stay high, and credit flows less freely.”

Consumer spending powers the U.S. economy, and when wallets grow thin, it’s worrisome. For now, there are a couple of mitigating factors. Retail sales mostly measure trade in goods sold at stores, and it’s well known that consumers loaded up on goods during the COVID pandemic, when they couldn’t travel or go out as much as usual. What's happening now is a shift in spending away from goods back toward services, which in a way is a return to normal.

Spending on services, measured by a different indicator, is holding up a bit better than spending on goods. But that’s slowing down, too, as inflation weighs on family finances and people spend down much of the excess savings they built up during COVID. Federal stimulus money, meanwhile, has largely run out.

The president wants to finish the job, according to a message the White House released this morning.

The ratio on that post is something to behold.  Negative comments predominate, and there are ways to find the down-votes, which You Tube now conceals from casual viewers.

IT'S LONG PAST TIME FOR SOMEBODY TO BUY HIM A TRAIN SET.

"Tenured and Making $0?"  The poobahs of Purdue have an interesting way of pruning deadwood.

Later, in early 2022, the department head wrote that “For more than a year, the Department of Mathematics and the College of Science have warned you that your failure to meaningfully prepare for and adequately deliver instruction could result in disciplinary sanction. We have provided helpful resources and feedback to you, which you have largely ignored.”

That email said, “We have provided explicit examples of what successful preparation and delivery of instruction entails. Your failure to meet any of the four criteria that were due on 24th of January, together with unsuccessful completion of two prior iterations of criteria, demonstrates that you have no desire or intention of providing adequate instruction.”

The mathematics professor in question has not wanted to go, and the university is not being subtle about wanting him to go.

He's over seventy, and apparently has not visited the Purdue model railroad club, or taken up some other hobby.

You can walk away from it if you want.

MORE ECHOES OF FIFTY YEARS AGO.

It was during 1973 that Chile's last experiment against reality ran into reality.  They seem doomed to repeat it.

Leftist Chilean President Gabriel Boric on Thursday announced plans to slowly nationalize the country's lithium industry, aiming to take advantage of massive reserves of the metal, key to electric vehicle batteries and other technology, while protecting the environment.

"Today we present a national lithium strategy that's technically solid and ambitious," Boric declared during a televised address, outlining his plan—which needs congressional approval—to create "a Chile that distributes wealth we all generate in a more just way."

"This is the best chance we have at transitioning to a sustainable and developed economy," he argued. "We can't afford to waste it."

Reuters reported that "Boric said the country would look to protect biodiversity and share mining benefits with Indigenous and surrounding communities."

About 60% of the world's reserves are located in the South American "lithium triangle," which includes Bolivia (21 million tons), Argentina (19.3 million tons), and Chile (9.6 million tons), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. For now, Chile is leading those nations in terms of production and ranked second globally last year, after Australia.

If those lithium mines are being developed by some latter-day Francisco d'Anconia, there will be a slow nationalization of empty holes.  Under the "transition," prospectors are likely to "transition" out of the country.  In addition, advocates of those electric automobiles aren't going to take too kindly to having to pay more for their battery packs.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,878.

From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health."  More hazardous than the latest coronavirus variant, which, apparently, more readily evades the latest vaccines, but appears to have mutated into something that doesn't "appear to be more serious" than the earlier mutations.

Sweden is a country, Illinois but a state, and yet, the Swedish approach has worked, while the Illinois approach has not.

The harms from locking down society, denying children education, forcing people out of their jobs, delaying treatment of life-threatening diseases; all this was ignored. It was almost as if our very life as human beings was now a threat; the concept of public health had become a caricature of itself.

It is interesting to read the damning Nature report now, considering Sweden’s success. The authors strongly criticise the lack of mask mandates, which in fact have never been shown to work. They criticise the Swedish strategy for not being ‘proactive in stopping the spread of the virus,’ a criticism based on an utter negation of reality; all such attempts have failed. Of course the Swedish response was not free from mistakes, but this was the case everywhere.

The big difference was how the Swedish Public Health Agency kept their focus, while public health authorities and governments around the world resorted to pseudoscience, losing sight of the end-goal of public health, the broad consideration for the longer-term well-being of the population.

More and more people now recognise this. Among them is Preben Aavitsland, one of Norway’s leading epidemiologists. ‘Governments around the world hid their insecurity by scolding Sweden‘s Covid-19 strategy, because Sweden undermined the mantra that we had no choice.’

Last month, Dementia Joe teased an end to the federal state of emergency in May.  The last time weekly corona deaths were as low as they currently are, the emergency had just begun.  "An estimated 1,160 Americans died from the virus this week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

The pandemic is over.  "On [April 10] President Joe Biden quietly signed a Republican-sponsored resolution ending the national emergency related to COVID-19 that was first declared by then–President Donald Trump over three years ago."  The potbellied dictator, who Illinoisans returned to office, will hang on to his dictatorial powers at least until May 11, which was Dementia Joe's initial end date until Congress gave him a bill he couldn't veto.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he will end over three years of non-stop COVID-19 disaster declarations on May 11 when the national emergency ends.

But that also means until May 11 he intends to keep declaring statewide emergencies as a result of the pandemic. His 38th COVID-19 disaster proclamation will expire in a few days and must be followed by a 39th proclamation for him to extend his emergency powers.

Pritzker has held emergency powers for over 70% of his time in office.

The final proclamation, with typography redolent of a Presbyterian hymnal, covers March, April, and May.  "Announcing three declarations at once was the culmination of Pritzker’s years of wearing down democratic norms, the roteness of which Wirepoints covered on our Instagram."  The potbellied dictator is unapologetic.  "Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker recently claimed that 'thousands and thousands of more people would have died in Illinois if we had followed the lead of a state like Florida.'"

Facts are stubborn things, aren't they?

[A]ll three states had roughly equal age- and disease-adjusted health-outcomes scores, suggesting that there was no substantial health benefit to more-severe lockdowns. Florida, however, easily surpassed California and Illinois in educational and economic outcomes.

Florida had the third-highest number of in-person school days in the nation. California had the lowest, and Illinois’s was almost as low (43rd among the 50 states and D.C.). Florida was well above average in economic outcomes (13th best), while California and Illinois scored 40th and 47th, respectively.

Migration patterns reflect what the three states’ residents thought of their governors’ policies. Florida, which had consistently large migration inflows before the pandemic (an annual average of 169,569 new residents between July 2015 and June 2019) saw a 59 percent jump in in-migration during the pandemic years. California and Illinois had large pre-pandemic out-migration rates (139,710 and 110,893 annually, on average, over the same period), which increased 163 percent and 19 percent, respectively, during the pandemic.

Freedom wins, and if it wasn't the corona tyranny inducing people to leave Illinois, it might have been the continued punitive taxation of productive activities, or the breakdown in civil order.  All of which will be on display in another year, when the Donks hold their nominating convention in Chicago.

Pritzker, like his California counterpart Gavin Newsom, lies with a straight face, and then when called on it, pretends he never said it. Pritzker hasn’t stated he wants to be president, but he does have ambitions for some kind of national role. So, his social medial reflects his support of abortion and so-called “reproductive freedom,” a heavy commitment (and heavy funding) to the transgender lobby and “synthetic sex identities” (SSI), and more calls promoting gun control and draconian safety measures in a state that has some of the strictest gun laws, yet some of the highest gun crime in the nation.

People who want to live free are moving elsewhere, so why not create a sanctuary state for people who don't want to bear children?  It's a matter of choice whether to patronize the abortion clinic or the sex change clinic, isn't it?  Make sure you bring your mask, at least until May 11.

These posts will continue until the emergency decrees end.

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 changing the 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 2,704,966 infections, an increase of 4,735 over last month, and 23,988 deaths, a change of 230 from the preceding report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 4,127,625 infections, an increase of 35,366 over last month and 41,866 deaths, adding 293 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.    The winter spike we observed in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 has not appeared in Illinois, or Sweden.

The most recent tally of vaccinations continues to report around 26.5 million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of today.  The state also has modified its count of the scary variants, with the XBB 1.5 Omicron variant dominating the chart.  We'll see whether the behavior of what the boffins call XBB without any suffix leads to more executive orders.

At the third anniversary of the onset of corona tyranny, the governor trailed by 17,788.

At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 17,728.

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 18,068.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week has been growing only slowly.  The details from the end of 2022 to the beginning of this reckoning in 2020 are on page 2.

ARE WE RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED, FIFTY YEARS AGO?

Sigmund Freud's mommy issues might have manifested themselves in his elaborations on "Anatomy of the Mental Personality," and a lot of the intellectual work of second-wave feminists went into changing the paradigm.

Back then, psychoanalysis and psychopharmacological interventions were criticized; both Freud’s focus on sexual fantasies and the use of “mother’s little helpers” (benzodiazepines) came under fire. Critics drew from second-wave feminism to refocus on the role of women in mental health.

Radicals criticized psychiatry for reinforcing notions of the dutiful mother and obedient housewife, suggesting psychiatry (and pharmaceuticals, yes) were a means to regulate women. Those women who did not behave “properly” risked ending up in psychiatric care and possibly chemically sedated, or worse. Works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, for instance, suggested that mass tranquilizer use during the 1950s had pacified women and had facilitated women assenting to the limits imposed on them.

Other books displayed the complicity and willing participation of mainstream psychiatry in disciplining women and placing constraints on what was regarded as unfettered emotional, sexual, and artistic activity. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published in the United States in 1971, as well as Virginia Woolf’s five-volume diaries (1977–1984), underlined women’s experiences with mental illness and raised awareness of the dangers women faced at the hands of the mental health system.

Altogether, these books humanized the suffering and the social controls that women had to deal with if they didn’t act according to the so-called norm or accept their role in American society.

The article is instructive reading, including this: "Radical women in the 1960s and 1970s pushed back against orthodoxy in mental medicine, but also against wider patriarchy in the country. They challenged cultural and medical norms."

To what end?  "The abstract of a scientific study published in 1991 has been making the rounds on social media, and it is shocking on two levels. The first wave of shock (although not surprise) comes at you from what the study discovered: the mothers of gender dysphoric boys tend to suffer from a host of mental illnesses of their own."  The article appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and I don't have a Social Science Citation Index or Science Citation Index to hand to see what sort of response it elicited over the years, and a short article based on sixteen mothers of boys with gender identity disorder, the term of art thirty years ago, compared with seventeen mothers of normal boys, a small sample; and the authors might be making too strong a conclusion, given the sample size, with their "The findings of this pilot study are sufficiently strong to call for a comprehensive study of psychopathology in parents of children with GID."

Athena Thorne at Pajamas Media called attention to the paper with a clickbaity headline.  Whether there has been subsequent academic research clarifying or refuting its claim, or whether, as she suggests, "At that point, you are struck by the full weight of the precise extent to which discourse and honest research into this subject has been smothered, and it’s breathtaking. You want to weep for the deliberate blinding of intellectual inquiry,"  I don't know.  Google Scholar didn't give me much on the search string "psychopathology parents children with GID," and nothing within the last year.

Is it time to dust off the Freud?

HAS MELISSA CLICK LEFT GONZAGA?

We last had reports of her on the faculty there.  That post noted, "Perhaps, though, one sign that universities are no longer playpens for really stupid people will be when faculty hirings are not so obviously skewed toward annoyingly self-righteous ideologues."

Nearby Whitworth University remains a playpen for really stupid people.

A week after Whitworth University’s student government rejected a campus TPUSA chapter’s request to hold an event, the university reportedly canceled the Pride Club’s Queer Church event.

Although Whitworth is a private, religious institution not otherwise required to respect students’ expressive rights, the Spokane university affirms “freedom of expression for its students, staff and faculty” in line with the “Constitutional understandings of free expression.” It additionally commits that “students are free to express their views . . . on any matter of interest to the student body.” Given those commitments, both TPUSA and Pride Club must be able to express themselves freely without administrative interference.

According to Pride Club, the administration canceled Queer Church — advertised as a “celebration of LGBTQIA2S+ resilliency and love” featuring “food trucks, gender affirming resources, an open mic, and a drag workshop” — because “it doesn't align with the ethos of the university.” If this event was canceled based on the event’s content, it’s a clear violation of the university’s commitment to free expression.

What "ethos" are Whitworth aligning with, that of Dresden Technical University of ninety years ago?

More amusing, dear reader, is how quickly the censors came for Whitworth Pride.

In an interesting twist, the Pride Club itself expressed support for denying TPUSA’s event featuring Chinese dissident Xi Van Fleet. Pride Club’s disapproval of TPUSA’s free expression — just days before being censored themselves under similar circumstances — shows why students need not support certain speech while still vigorously defending the right to say it. Instead, when you call for censorship of certain views, censors will eventually suppress your views too.

Rather than show up to debate the speaker, who intended to compare struggle sessions during the Chinese cultural revolution with contemporary diversity education, Pride Club members lauded the cancellation of the visit.  The epistemic closure apparently crowds out any higher learning.  "Students who aim to express themselves in college and are considering what institution to attend should look elsewhere until Whitworth recommits to protecting expressive freedoms."

I should think so.  Cardinal Stritch shut down, and a quick look through The F.I.R.E.'s case file turned up no freedom of speech investigations involving them.  Let Whitworth fail its market tests.

SECOND SECTION: the people in charge at Whitworth realigned their ethos.  Worship at the Queer Church of your choice.

THERE ARE LIMITS.

Freshpet recently might have hit a culture-wars nerve.

Read whatever symbolism you want into what you have just seen.

THERE ARE OTHER MARGINS ALONG WHICH TO OPTIMIZE.

The latest attempt by the Jarrett regency to place equity first is means-testing of the filing fees for mortgages that will be sold to the federal agencies.

Homebuyers with good credit scores will soon be facing higher mortgage fees as the Biden administration seeks to close the racial homeownership gap and get more first-time and low-income buyers through the door.

Starting in May, a new federal rule will upend the current structure of the Loan-Level Price Adjustment (LLPA) matrix. Homebuyers with a good credit score could see their monthly mortgage payment rise by over $60 a month, while riskier borrowers will get more favorable mortgage terms because their fees were reduced. It's a move the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) hopes will address housing affordability challenges in the U.S., but it's come under scrutiny for being unfair and potentially ineffective.

"In the short term, this may increase homeownership among the targeted group, but I'm afraid it could decrease homeownership among the middle class," Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, told Newsweek. "I'm not sure that we're not robbing Peter to pay Paul here."

Only about 25 percent of homebuyers with Federal Housing Administration loans are people of color, according to the White House. Black and Hispanic people, on average, have fewer savings to use as a down payment on a home and tend to have lower credit scores, according to David Stevens, former CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and a former FHA commissioner during the Obama administration.

The Loan Level Price Adjustment matrix stipulates a variety of fees based on the borrower's credit score, the life of the mortgage loan, and the loan-to-appraised value ratio.  Under the proposed change, more creditworthy borrowers pick up some of the origination fees that would otherwise be borne by less creditworthy borrowers, whose creditworthiness might reflect a number of things.

A BATHROOM FLOOR UNLIKE ANY OTHER.

In mathematics, "tiling the plane" is apparently a gateway to any number of higher-order challenges.

It's simple enough to cover a flat surface with square tiles, there's probably an example in a bathroom near you.  Congruent triangles also work, as do regular hexagons.  Anyone who has spent a few minutes on location theory and spatial competition likely has encountered the space-filling lattices of hexagonal market areas giving rise to central place theory.

Such tilings have in common their repetitiveness, which might be boring.  Therein lies the challenge to the pure mathematician:  is it possible to tile the plane in such a way that the arrangement of tiles changes in a way that a pattern never repeats exactly?  Yes.  "Around 1975, R. Penrose discovered a pair of figures (tiles) in the plane with the following properties: i) the plane can be tiled (no gaps, no overlappings) by infinitely many copies of these two, in infinitely many (even continuously many) ways; ii) none of these tilings is periodic; iii) any finite part of such a tiling occurs infinitely often in each one of the others."  The first criterion means there are no gaps to be filled with thicker grout or a fragment of a tile; the second, that the pattern never recurs in exactly the same way; while the third stipulates that elements of the pattern do recur, if rotated or offset in different ways elsewhere on the plane, or on your bathroom floor.  Because proof by picture is not proof, there's a fair amount of heavy mathematics in demonstrating that the Penrose tiles have those three properties.  "It can be proved that all Penrose tilings can be obtained as the topological duals of pentagrids: superpositions of five grids of parallel equidistant lines, obtained from one of these five by rotation over multiples of 72^∘ followed by translations."  Got that?

WE'RE STILL HERE.

Today is "Earth Day" in some circles, and I take this opportunity to call attention to how wrong the people who have been, for the past fifty years, suggesting that we are done for, by noting that, to the contrary, we're still here.

I'm hoping that the failure of the coronavirus contagion and death models to track reality a month or two out has given people motivation to understand how less reliable the climate models warning of doom in a century are than those epidemic models.

My 2022 "We're Still Here" calls the roll, as of a year ago, of the most egregious scares that haven't materialized.

Reason's Ronald Bailey went through his magazine's archives.  "To celebrate Earth Day 2023, we are recycling a selection of some of Reason's most incisive articles addressing the issues of population, pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity, energy, and the ideological environmentalists' penchant for peddling doom."

Perhaps the best indicator of resource depletion, or its absence, is in a Pepto-Bismol blurb, with a choreographed production number calling attention to heartburn, nausea, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea.  Had there been a real emergency by now, preparing such a message, in which the words and the dance motions scan, would have been frivolous.  No, they did not put it on their You Tube channel, which, in its own way, is also encouraging.

DO YOU STILL ASK WHO IS JOHN GALT?

In Atlas Shrugged, the "moratorium on brains" is the notorious Directive 10-289, an executive order that stops labor turnover by forbidding anyone to quit, stops inflation by freezing wages and prices, and stops recession by requiring everyone to spend as much money this year as last.

The directive came about as the brains trust, such as it was, were in the position of Warsaw Pact leaders, with the current year being an average year, worse than the previous, with the directive intended to head off the following year being worse still.

In the course of finding a link to the directive, I also found this short story, inspired, perhaps, by Atlas Shrugged and a Twilight Zone episode. “Censoring free speech and creating a feared autocracy is no way a government should be; outlawing knowledge is the ultimate crime against humanity.”

I doubt, though, whether Ayn Rand or Rod Serling or the author of the short story could have conceived of the "moratorium on brains" applying ... to candidates for high office themselves.  I've made my views clear about the empty head currently serving as president, and his predecessor with his ongoing grievance tour is no better.  "Can someone please get the hook and remove this dysfunctional has-been from the public stage?"

The audience sees it.  "[M]ore Americans say they feel 'exhaustion' over the prospect of a 2024 rematch between Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, than any other emotion."

THAT URBAN DEATH SPIRAL.

Last weekend came that first hint of summer, just in time for people to celebrate the filing of their tax returns by grilling out or wearing shorts to a sporting event or going for a run.  In Chicago, though, the people who don't worry about tax returns found an opportunity to engage in their favorite rites of summer.

The predictable suspects immediately ran to their predictable corners to issue their predictable talking points, to which we shall turn anon.  

SEEN AND UNSEEN.

Under other circumstances, the headline, "Tapping Into Warehouse Roof Solar Potential Could Power Entire US Cities," could be a Friday short take.  Or, I could subject the essay to an early-in-the-century fisking.  Let me limit myself to quoting a short passage from this panegyric to solar warehouses.

Fully tapping into the nation's warehouse rooftop solar potential would slash planet-heating emissions by 112.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually. That's comparable to taking 24 million gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year or shutting down 30 coal-fired power plants.

"The big, flat, and sun-kissed rooftops of America's warehouses are perfect places to put solar panels," said report co-author Johanna Neumann, senior director of Environment America Research & Policy Center's Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy. "It's time to eliminate the barriers that prevent us from maximizing the benefits of rooftop solar for businesses, electricity customers, the grid, and the environment."

Neither in that passage, nor in the balance of the essay, or in the Environment America supporting materials, do I find any mention of two things. What, dear reader, do you suppose those two things are?

EVERYONE IS NOW DUMBER FOR HAVING BEEN THROUGH THIS FIGHT.

About three weeks ago, we called attention to the rage mob objecting to a debate between Michael Knowles, whoever he is, and economic historian Deirdre McCloskey that was supposed to take place at the University of Pittsburgh.  Professor McCloskey subsequently begged off, noting, "Both are wrong, the hate-mongering Mr. Knowles and the speech-suppressing signatories of the petition. The result would be not a rational debate but a fascist rally."

So it became.  The details are on page two.

MARKING OFF.

In the Milwaukee area, the historic telephone area code was 414, and people use the day to celebrate all (good?) things Milwaukee.  Here, Four-Fourteen (to use the calendar locution, rather than the telephone company locution) has its own meaning.

The locomotive has featured in a few videos, most recently the record of the recent Open Day during the O Scale swap meet, and the first was running in, to musical accompaniment, on the test plant. 

I've got this hankering for long, rigid-frame steamers.

Thank you for looking in.  I'm going to take a few days away from social media.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Meet three new apprentice craftsmen in Galt's Gulch.  "One of them is a professor of economics who couldn't get a job outside, because he taught that you can't consume more than you have produced -- one is a professor of history who couldn't get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country -- and one is a professor of psychology who couldn't get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking."  I've tended, along lines suggested by Whittaker Chambers and James Fallows, to think of Atlas Shrugged more as over-the-top advocacy than as an organization manual.  And yet, nearly seventy years ago, are we not, dear reader, seeing modern monetary theory, the 1619 Project, and the denial of coherent beliefs foreshadowed?

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

GAFFES ARE PLENTIFUL, COHERENCE IS PRECIOUS.

Dementia Joe won't take any questions from even the Democrat operatives among the Washington press corps, but he attempted to take a question from an Irish school kid.

THE PRESIDENT: What’s your question?

CHILD: What’s the top step to success?

THE PRESIDENT: What’s the top what?

CHILD: Step — steps — step to success.

THE PRESIDENT: What’s the top step to succ- — to success?

CHILD: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, well, making sure that we don’t all have COVID. What — why — what are we talking about here?

CHILD: Like —

MR. HUNTER BIDEN: If you can — what’s the — what’s the key to success?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, what’s the key to success? You know what I found out is the key to success is? And I’m not sure I’m the best guy to explain it; these guys can tell you.

The key to success is whenever you disagree with someone, it’s okay to question their judgment — whether they’re right or wrong — but it’s never okay to question their motive. If you question their motive, then you never get to be able to agree.

For example, if you say to somebody, “The reason why you don’t agree with me is because you are stupid, you are bad, you are — you just don’t like the people I like.”

Instead of saying I just didn’t — just tell you why, I disagree with you because of the following things. Because once you question somebody’s motive — why they’re doing something — because you don’t know. In fact, what happens after that, you can never get an agreement, get together.

I learned that lesson a long time — I say to that to all the embassy folks, too — I learned that a long time ago.

Spencer Brown quips, "This is, unfortunately, very real and not the work of satire writers."  I wonder if the coot's stumbling and fumbling is as much of a challenge, in plain text, as a Signal Corps decryption of an intercepted dispatch.

Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green brought the predictable receipts.  "Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump would all like a word, Mr. President."

Yes, and this is the same president who, in compliance with the prime directive of keeping the corona tyranny going, dismissed liberty with an "I have the freedom to kill you with my corona."  The same president who denounced the Georgia election reform laws as a new "Jim Crow."  The same president who held a prime-time speech in front of Independence Hall as if Albert Speer set up the stage and Leni Riefenstahl directed the taping.

Some of us have been on to him the whole time.  "Biden is a failed president. He’s incompetent, he’s corrupt, and worst of all he’s mean, constantly showing hatred for his fellow Americans merely because they oppose him politically. America is already much worse off because of him."  So it has always been with Democrats, if they couldn't question peoples' motives or otherwise shame them, they wouldn't have anything affirmative to offer.  Pointing to others as the source of your problems, though, continues to be a winning strategy.

STOP PLAYING WITH FIRE.

Chicago Thinker contributor Mitchell Robson writes an instructive column asking pundits and pontificators to engage the criticism of the public figure on the merits, not on that figure's ancestry.

For years, liberal partisans have labeled any criticism of Soros as anti-Semitic. Forbes ran a piece in 2020 attempting to link Soros criticism to “QAnon,” arguing that “there is only one sordid reason for why attacks on George Soros are constantly trending” in the media: his Judaism.

Alarmingly, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which calls itself the “leading anti-hate organization in the world,” contends that “[e]ven if no antisemitic insinuation is intended, casting a Jewish individual [Soros] as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes has the effect of mainstreaming antisemitic tropes and giving support, however unwitting, to bona fide antisemites and extremists.”

I'm glad he wrote the column, because I would prefer to live in a world where people who disagree with the actions of Soros-funded prosecutors are not at the margin of a Lee Zeldin or Ben Shapiro from shopping for brown shirts.  In recent months, I've seen insinuations that referring to "Zuckerbucks" supporting volunteer get-out-the-vote efforts are recruiting for the Bund, as well as efforts from the commentariat to suggest that criticism of the current attorney general is motivated by his heritage rather than his foolish policies.  A writer at Ace of Spades noted about Merrick Garland at the time of the Archives Mar-a-Lago raid, "That name sounds so Waspy it could have been in Bonfire of the Vanities," and that in the middle of a predictably cranky Ace post that went to a lot of bad places.

LET'S GO, BRANDON.

The title of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, "Chicago Gets What It Voted For," has the potential has Friday short take potential, but for the extended observation in the body.

Two days after narrowly winning the election, [Brandon] Johnson thought it a good moment to blame the city's crime wave on business. "Seventy percent of large corporations in the state of Illinois did not pay a corporate tax," Mr. Johnson told CBS. "And it's that kind of restraint on our budget that has caused the type of disinvestment that has led to poverty of course that has led to violence."

In pool, they call that a triple-carom shot, and in logic a non-sequitur: From tax payments to budget restraint to poverty to shooting someone in the street. We're sure that's what the average Chicago gunman is thinking when he shoots someone: Companies don't pay enough taxes.

You'd think a new mayor who ran as a leftist would try to reassure employers that he'll not be as crazy as he sometimes sounded during the campaign. But now that he's won, he apparently feels liberated to sound crazier.

The editorial concludes, "He might want to look out-of-state, where more companies will be moving as they contemplate operating in a city run by a man who blames crime on employers and not on criminals."

THE FINAL HOMECOMING.

During last fall's Oktoberfest season, I had occasion to observe the Cardinal Stritch footie teams play games, with a team reunion between the women's and the men's games.

That was the end.

Cardinal Stritch University announced April 10, 2023 that it will suspend and cancel all educational services, activities and programs — including athletics — at the end of the 2023 spring semester.

On April 12, 2023, Daniel Kuklinski, Cardinal Stritch University Athletic Director, issued a blanket release for all student-athletes at Cardinal Stritch University. This release gives Stritch student-athletes permission to contact and be contacted/recruited by any interested institution immediately.

"All of our student-athletes at Cardinal Stritch University have been granted a blanket release. This will give them the best opportunity to continue their collegiate academic and athletic careers. Our athletic department remains committed to helping our student-athletes find appropriate places to continue the next chapter of their lives."

All is proceeding as I had foreseen, to borrow a phrase. "Sooner or later, reality will dawn.  There is excess capacity to shake out, consolidation will mean liquidation, and the terminally stupid people in charge will be brought to book for their failures."

THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR.

In the 2020 presidential election, Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts in Atlanta and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Milwaukee delivered electoral votes to Dementia Joe.

By their fruits shall ye know them.  "17 people died from opioid overdoses in 3 days in Milwaukee Co."  City public health officials properly declared an emergency.

Public health and emergency service officials are warning the public about a recent wave of overdose deaths in Milwaukee County.

Seventeen suspected overdose deaths have been reported in the county since Saturday, along with increased service calls for nonfatal overdose incidents, a range of officials announced at a press conference hosted by Milwaukee Fire Chief Aaron Lipski on Tuesday.

That translates to one overdose death every four hours, when normally the county experiences one every 16 hours, according to Ben Weston, the county's chief health policy advisor.

“All of this points to the possibility of what is sometimes referred to as a ‘bad batch’ of drugs, of opiates, coming into our community,” he said.

"Coming into our community." From where? Milwaukee media did not blank-out the cause.  "White House announces new actions against fentanyl supply chain."

The announcement comes as fentanyl seizures along the southern border continue to rise. Last year, more than 15,000 pounds of the synthetic drug were seized at the border. The Biden administration hopes to cripple the dangerous drug's supply chain through a series of new actions.

"We're going after the criminal facilitators and enablers and the targeting of key vulnerabilities in the illicit fentanyl supply chain to maximize our impact across the drug producer and trafficker spectrum of capabilities," Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director of National Drug Control Policy told, Scripps News.

The Beltway-speak and McKinsey worship-words are plentiful. Will the deeds be precious, now it's potential Biden voters in a swing state doing the dying?  Color me skeptical.

"We are matching this unprecedented challenge with unprecedented solutions," [homeland security secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas said. "We are surging resources and increasing efficiency, prioritizing smart border security solutions and making historic investments in technology."

To help stop fentanyl from pouring over the border, the White House plans to install 123 large-scale scanners at points of entry along the southwest border by 2026.

Construction is underway in El Paso, Texas to install low-energy portal systems to help identify potential threats and scan vehicles for weapons and drugs.

The first multi-energy portal, like the one in Nogales, is in the works in El Paso. It's a move to increase efficiency along the border, help stop drugs and prevent drug-related deaths.

We have much to look forward to.

CANCEL CULTURE IS CANCEL CULTURE, IRRESPECTIVE OF WHO DOES THE CANCELLING.

In the course of last month's report on the rage mob at the University of Pittsburgh, we noted the mob petitioning the university to cancel an upcoming debate between Michael Knowles and Deirdre McCloskey.  At the time, I hoped the university would not cave in to the mob.

I don't know much about this Michael Knowles, but he's asking for trouble hoping to score rhetorical points against Aunt Deirdre, and I bet even the most vocal of wokesters might learn something from attending and listening.

Pittsburgh deanlets apparently allowed both the Phillips and Gaines presentations to take place, and I hope to report that the April debate takes place.  My betting line, should it take place, is on McCloskey and the points.

Aunt Deirdre has now begged off.

Knowles was scheduled to participate in a debate against McCloskey hosted by the Pennsylvania public school’s chapter of the College Republicans and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on the topic of “Transgenderism and Womanhood.” There has been significant public outcry against Knowles’ appearance along with protest against speeches from both Cabot Phillips and Riley Gaines hosted on campus in March.

McCloskey is a respected free-market economist and economic historian who earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1970 prior to transitioning in the 1990s. At 80 years old, McCloskey is currently a distinguished scholar at the Cato Institute.

Michael Knowles is taking a victory lap. But should he?

“I’m happy to take victory by default,” Knowles added, “[b]ut it’s telling that even a distinguished scholar with three Harvard degrees and half a dozen honorary doctorates cannot defend transgenderism. Of course: the ideology is indefensible.”

On March 11, McCloskey stated on Twitter that the over 11,000 people who signed the petition to cancel the debate “should be ashamed” of themselves. “True, Knowles is an anti-Jesus Catholic, a fascist advocating state power over ideas. But we live in a free country.”

So it always is with epistemic closure. When I suggest that the campus left never gets to hear the best counterarguments, implicitly I'm suggesting that the campus right, or however we want to categorize the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, also handicaps itself by not hearing the best counterarguments. Here's Professor McCloskey.

Responding to a comment on this post asking how McCloskey could stand on a debate stage with a fascist, McCloskey responded saying “in the end it seemed irresponsible for a safely old and well positioned person like me to not reply to him. He does not believe in anyone's liberty.”

Yes, if General von Salmuth can say he's too old a bunny to worry about reports from the coast as OVERLORD comes in: dear reader, The Longest Day is great watching, accuracy or not -- and returns to his bridge hand, a similar demurral from another old bunny makes sense. The students of Pittsburgh, though, lose.

McCloskey was “dismayed by the anti-free-speech petition against allowing him to speak," adding that "Both are wrong, the hate-mongering Mr. Knowles and the speech-suppressing signatories of the petition. The result would be not a rational debate but a fascist rally.”

Campus Reform reports the story is still developing, and, subject to my availability, I hope to post updates.

BREAKING THE FAST.

Some years, Ramadan coincides with the end of Lent, and of Passover, and one way to help the faithful break their fast is to bring the feast to the faithful.

In honor of the holy month of Ramadan, a new tradition is starting in Milwaukee. For the first time, a food truck festival will be held in the city that specifically caters to the Muslim community.

"I think we’re ready to expand and venture into new things," said festival organizer Bushra Zaibak.

Zaibak, who spearheaded Milwaukee's first halal restaurant week last year, says this won't be your typical food truck festival. It'll start at 10:30 p.m. Friday and will go into the early morning hours, accommodating those fasting for Ramadan.

Serving commences this evening from 10.30 until 1 am Saturday, which is to say, bar time.

But don't roll your food trucks onto Milwaukee's Water Street, unless you snag a spot in front of a bar.

The Common Council's Public Safety and Health Committee has recommended banning food trucks on a stretch of Water Street in downtown Milwaukee from East Knapp Street to East Pleasant Street.

The ban would not allow food trucks to park on a stretch of Water Street that is home primarily to residential apartments and office space. Food trucks are still allowed south of Knapp, where most Water Street bars are.

On Thursday night, only one food truck, Oaxaca Taqueria, was selling food on the part of the street where the ban is being proposed. The operator of the food truck did not want to comment on the proposal.

The presence of food trucks in an entertainment district gives the owners of permanent bars or restaurants plenty of occasion to seek rents.

Bans on food trucks around the city have been handed down one by one, creating sort of a piecemeal approach. That includes a 2017 ban of food trucks on East Brady Street and a 2019 ban on West National Avenue.

East Brady is a few blocks northeast of the stretch of Water Street in question, and West National is near south side, with a cluster of taverns and cantinas.  But the way the rent-seekers operate is predictable, they'll attempt to codify standards and regulations, city-wide.  So it goes, wherever Democrats control the city government, as the idea of selling permits to set up in popular spots isn't technocratic enough.  I wonder if the food trucks that do snag the permissible spots along Water Street ever get accused of price gouging?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

This has not been a good week for regular order, but so things go when you're in the grim strategy equilibrium.  "In its desire to create a one-party state, the Democratic Party is willing to turn the country into a banana republic."  The perception of Democrat tyranny spreads.  "Their two-fold objective with the legal system is (1) to dismantle it as the undergirding of what progressives regard as a racist, exploitative society and (2) to control it as a punitive weapon against political enemies."  In the grim strategy equilibrium, though, punishment begets punishment.  "We do live in a country where you jail your political enemies and use the law to squash your opponents’ ability to compete. And we will live in such a country right up until the moment that us doing it to them causes them so much pain that they beg us to change the rules back again."  Call it demonizing dissent.  "The self-righteous authors assume that everyone would share their democratic-socialist worldview (which they declare to be 'the truth') in the absence of cupidity or deceit. Good faith disagreement is not possible."  Now square that with postmodern skepticism about truth itself.

The good news is even some notional Democrats see clearly.  "If you don’t do exactly what Democrats want you to do, they will try to bully you, they will try to cast you aside." Plus "They have pushed me out."  Can we find a way to reject the false binary?  “The vast majority of people in America are not happy with the direction of the country and they don’t want to see either Joe Biden or Donald Trump as president.”  Once order collapses, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore.  Sometimes the only way out is through.

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

TRAIN WATCHING HAS BECOME MORE INTERESTING.

For years, only locomotives equipped with Chicago and North Western's intermittent Automatic Train Control would appear on the Geneva Subdivision.  When Union Pacific took ownership, that remained the case, leading to Amtrak detours over the years being led by Metra diesels, some of them otherwise relegated to work train service.

With the coming of positive train control, that legacy signal system has been retired, and all sorts of power might show up.

That's the DeKalb coal wharf, with the Troy Grove branch diverging at right.
Undated Joel Kirchner photograph retrieved from Trains.

The lead unit is one of Norfolk Southern's predecessor railroad diesels, apparently if you take a ride on the Reading, you get to pass Geneva and collect $200 in rental.  Canadian National power has appeared regularly on the former Burlington from Minnesota for years, now they show up on Union Pacific, and if they're properly configured, they can lead on the return trip.

On June 1, 2022, Union Pacific retired its cab signal system on a large segment of its remaining lines so equipped east of Cheyenne, Wyoming. This means that from now on, any locomotive from any railroad with PTC installed can be cut in to lead trains on these mainlines. Prior to June 1, PTC was already in use on these lines, though a Union Pacific cab signal-equipped unit was still required to lead the train. The crew would setup and test the cab signal system then cut it out prior to departure. It would only be cut-in and used in case of PTC failure enroute.

Until recently, Union Pacific had three types of in-service cab signals systems on various lines across its system, with only the Automatic Cab Signal/Coded Cab Signal system remaining after June 1 west of Cheyenne. Along with Union Pacific’s ACS/CCS mainlines east of Cheyenne being retired, former Chicago & North Western lines with Automatic Train Control were eliminated on June 1, with C&NW lines featuring the Automatic Train Stop system in the Chicago area phased out in 2019.

This leaves only Union Pacific’s Evanston, Laramie, Rawlins, and Portland subdivisions, along with a handful of other freight lines across the country still equipped with in service cab signals. They are among the last stretches of mainline that one can visit and be guaranteed to see a home-road locomotive leading all trains passing by.

If these lingering wintry conditions ever go away, perhaps I'll be able to head to trackside and see the variety in paint on otherwise under-the-metal very similar diesels.

DISCOVERING THE TRAGIC VISION.

The youngsters who raise market animals for 4-H projects have to deal with the reality of farming at a young age.

I suspect there is an element of the charity auction in these sales, as it's unlikely the dentist, or a cheese factory, or the feed mill, or my local bank, is going to process the hogs. The difference between what the business pays to 4-H and what the animals fetch at market rates as a charitable contribution. In my part of the country, the kids very quickly, and sometimes quite creatively, write thank you notes to decorate the pens.

A Cold Spring Shops source with 4-H experience has noted that the parting of kid with animal is often emotional.  It's rare, though, that a project participant wants to back out of the transaction.  "A 9-year-old backed out of a deal to sell her pet goat for slaughter. Local officials and sheriff's deputies used the power of the state to force her to go through with it."  What happened next might be unusual, but might not come as a surprise to people familiar with the 4-H show circuit.

According to the lawsuit, in June 2022, Jessica Long and her daughter, who was 9 years old and only referred to as E.L., attended the Shasta District Fair. The fair includes a junior livestock auction, in which members of 4-H youth programs exhibit farm animals they've raised. At the end, the animals are sold to the highest bidders to be slaughtered for meat. The fair takes 7 percent of the sale, and the kids get to keep the rest.

In April, Long purchased her daughter a goat, whom she named Cedar. From then until the fair, E.L. "fed and cared for Cedar every day." She "bonded" with the animal just as she "would have bonded with a puppy" and "loved him as a family pet."

At the fair, state Sen. Brian Dahle was Cedar's highest bidder, pledging $902. But by then, E.L. had second thoughts about sending her new four-legged friend to die. She and her mother tried to withdraw Cedar from competition but were told that the rules forbid it. After the auction, E.L. refused to leave Cedar's side, sobbing next to him in his pen. At this point, before money had changed hands, Long and her daughter sought to terminate the contract: California law allows that "a contract of a minor may be disaffirmed."

Long told representatives of the fair that she would happily pay the 7 percent fee that would have resulted from the sale (in this case, $63.14) and took Cedar home.

I won't comment on the legalities. Some of the details seem off, at least the way I understand the 4-H contests. The youngsters purchase infant animals at auction, and raise them for judging and ultimately for sale, with the proceeds going to the 4-H organization (that makes the excess of auction price over market price a charitable contribution, which would not be the case if the proceeds go to "the kids."