THREE SEASONS IN THREE DAYS.

Today, longtime WGN broadcast meteorologist Tom Skilling took his pension.  His final broadcast appearances would be a Midwestern career in microcosm.  Monday, late spring conditions, the clothes tree at Cold Spring Shops got a workout.  Tuesday, have you ever seen temperatures in the seventies in Illinois in February?  Good day to set out a folding chair and do some reading on the deck.  Tuesday night, though, the squall line came in, hail, tornadoes in the vicinity, then a dusting of snow and temperatures back to proper winter levels.  That in the wake of a Hallowe'en with snow and temperatures normal for Christmas, a Thanksgiving with approximately normal temperatures, a Christmas with no snow and temperatures normal for Hallowe'en, and shortly after Three Kings, a polar vortex.

At least the Snow Moon got to live up to its billing.

The Chicago streets department held a naming contest for their new plows, and "Skilling It" earned the most votes.  It's Chicago, take the tally with, well ...  Let us note the other names are "CTRL-SALT-DELETE, Casimir Plowaski, Ernie Snowbanks, Mies van der Snow, Bad, Bad Leroy Plow."  Not bad, a computer pun, a war hero, a sports hero, an architecture hero, and the South Side."

He will also receive an honorary Doctorate of Science from Northern Illinois University.

Trustees also approved a honorary doctorate to long-time Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling. His last day on air will be in February. The Aurora native has worked at WGN for the past 45 years. NIU President Lisa Freeman says the forecaster has worked with many NIU students through internships during his career. The board credited Skilling as a passionate educator, trailblazer, an advocate for climate awareness. He will receive an honorary doctorate of science in fall 2024.

In the same way that Mr Skilling got his broadcast start in Madison, the meteorology program at Northern got its start in Madison.  A number of faculty members in Madison figured out the tenure depth and the enrollment future and set up a meteorology department in DeKalb.  Reality has since come for meteorology as an independent department, first the forecast office went, then what remained of the academic effort got rolled in to a larger department with an ambiguous portfolio.

Fair winds.

IT CAME TO THIS LONG AGO.

Salena Zito continues to chronicle the "destruction" side of "creative destruction" along the rivers of northern Appalachia.

Most people in this town will tell you they'd rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.

It isn't just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there's also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.

Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.

"It's just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years," said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, "Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives."

He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were "used to be this" and "used to be that."

Weirton this week, a few years ago it was Youngstown, it's the same story.  "It would be scant consolation to these men that the closures of steel mills all up and down the Mahoning and Monongahela valleys was creative destruction at work, a shakeout of suboptimally small plants at less advantageous locations."

NEVER MIND.

Yesterday, hamburger purveyor Wendy's announced something that sounded a lot like peak load pricing, or "surge pricing," as the popular locution has it.

According to the original report from Nation's Restaurant News and Food & Wine, prices for food items would automatically change throughout the day depending on demand, similar to "surge pricing" in rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. The initiative was disclosed by Kirk Tanner, the CEO and president of Wendy's, in a recent discussion with analysts.

According to Tanner, Wendy's plans to invest approximately $20 million to install digital menu boards capable of displaying these real-time variable prices across all of its company-operated locations in the United States. An additional $10 million is earmarked over two years to enhance Wendy's global system, which aims to improve order accuracy and upsell other menu items.

In conversation with Food & Wine, a spokesperson for Wendy's confirmed the company's commitment to this pricing strategy, describing it as part of a broader effort to grow its digital business. "Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing a variety of enhanced features on these digital menuboards like dynamic pricing, different offerings in certain parts of the day, AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling based on factors such as weather," they said. "Dynamic pricing can allow Wendy's to be competitive and flexible with pricing, motivate customers to visit and provide them with the food they love at a great value. We will test a number of features that we think will provide an enhanced customer and crew experience."

It's always a tell when a Suit uses "enhanced" in combination with a change in policy that is clearly a retrenchment.  And isn't it annoying enough when a human clerk asks "would you like fries with that" or "you can supersize it for $0.25 more?"  Calling upselling "suggestive selling" makes it no less obnoxious.

The price-change plans are the latest in a series of moves designed to modernize Wendy's business using technology—and increase profits. In 2023, Wendy's began testing FreshAI, a system designed to take orders with a conversational AI bot, potentially replacing human workers in the process. In his discussion, Tanner also discussed "AI-enabled menu changes" and "suggestive selling" without elaboration, though the Wendy's spokesperson remarked that suggestive selling may automatically emphasize some items based dynamically on local weather conditions, such as trying to sell cold drinks on a hot day.

The robot is going to miss one opportunity, though, suggestively selling the salad bar to skinny people.  That's something a human clerk can do.

BREAKING THE ADDICTION TO ROADS.

I scoff at the Jarrett regency touting the "Bipartisan Infrastructure Appropriations" as a victory, as the current ration of pork doesn't even make good this year's wear and tear on the roads, bridges, and mains previous rations of pork made possible.

More generally, though, whenever there is talk of spending money on internal improvements, the advocates of Best Practice and the fraternity of Wise Experts are sure to follow. That might be the worst possible thing, compounding, as it is likely to do, the decisions that brought us to where we are. "The values of post-war American development are embedded in our current approach -- efficiency over resiliency, large up front expense over ongoing maintenance expense, comprehensive over incremental, one-size-fits-all over tactical -- and they keep us from seeing the opportunities that sit right in front of us." Perhaps I will have to continue to object to misuses of "efficiency." Too often, it's misinterpreted as attempting to do more with less, as in the quote.

Make no mistake, the municipalities will be on the hook for the repairs, unless they have well-connected Congressmen in future.

Pay close attention to those roads and bridges. Dementia Joe will be showing up at the ribbon cuttings, if he remembers and he can stay awake, but he will be out of office in another ten years, when the projects start to wear out and either the municipalities are on the hook for repairs or there will be another bipartisan porkulus.

The time to stop throwing printed money after bad money is now. "Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges."

PREPARE FOR ANOTHER CIVIL WAR?

So much for Our Democracy^(TM).  Democrat politicians and their court intellectuals for the Democrats have no problem with not certifying an election if they gain some benefit by it.  "Without clear guidance from the Court, House Democrats suggest that they might not certify a Trump win on January 6."

IF YOU WERE THERE, YOU WEREN'T THERE.

It might be better for historians without any lived experience of the 1960s to attempt to come to terms with them.  Me?  I was there and I didn't like it.  "The America of the 1950s was an America that worked. The counterculture that followed did not. It's more accurate to describe aspects of it as alien, immoral, and destructive."

Let's yield the floor to Chapman historian Luke Nichter, who is probably young enough to have pored through the newspapers and scholarly writings without attempting to square what he found with his own experience.  In The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 he presents a few surprises, which he obtained in conversations with people who were there, and have since crossed the final summit.

Let me open Book Review N^o. 6 by noting that, unlike depressingly many recent political histories, Year that Broke is not a hair-on-fire reaction to Donald Trump's 2016 win, or to the strength he seems to be showing again this election season. That concentration on the year, and the events of that year, are even more commendable given the opportunities to foreshadow the various forms of populism, the Summer of Rage, and futile nation building wars that still seem to structure an impossible politics.  Nor is it the focus of Year that Broke to point out how Reliance on National Politics to Solve Problems is never going to end well.  It's going to take each of us to figure that out.

WHAT ARE THE EXIT CONDITIONS?

Early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I asked, "Might there still be a compromise in the Tom Clancy style available?"  A year into the trench warfare, the Tom Clancy outcome still looked better than what the peaceniks were contemplating.  "In Command Authority, the Russians gained Crimea and everything east of Mariupol, with relatively little loss of life.  The territorial outcome Mr Gerson advocates is similar, only with the puppet oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk picked over and destitute."

Here is the correlation of forces as of this week, according to Belmont Club.

It's been two years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and the big news is that there has been no battlefield decision, something few would have predicted in 2022. It's hard to say who is even winning. Putin wants victory more than Biden, a fact reflected by Russia's huge war production of arty ammo and manpower mobilization, but the Kremlin is paying for it by starving its economy and military of innovation investment.

The Ukrainian soldiers are getting fewer, and Russia's military equipment is getting older by the day. Both things are occurring simultaneously. Each is weakening and gaining strength in his own way. On some time spans, it means disadvantage Kyiv. On other time scales, it spells game over Moscow as a world capital. The analyst must reckon which effect is dominant.

One of the challenges in understanding the situation is drawing the right map. The terrain map measures how much land Russia has acquired in exchange for its loss and suggests how much more it must spend in men and treasure to win completely—or in Kyiv's case, regain completely. For the moment, it seems unlikely Russia has the power to seize all of Ukraine to its Western borders, just as it is hard to imagine Ukraine retaking all its Eastern losses. Absent a collapse on either side, the division line may settle in between.

But you can draw another map that depicts the gains Kyiv and Moscow have made in the world in terms of supporters. The war is being fought on a geopolitical scale, too. Winning and losing are measured in terms of the world's balance of power. Here, the picture is more definite. The global, rule-based world has been shattered. People have described our current state as "the era of competition." But those are weasel words. It is more direct to say that we're in the middle of Cold War 2.

The optimism that some people held last fall, as summarized by Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, has long since passed.

Ukraine’s war aim has always been maximalist: not simply pushing Russian troops to the pre-2022 invasion status quo but retaking Crimea. I’m still not sure that’s possible without substantially more Western participation but they’re certainly making it very costly for Russia to hold the territory.

NATO countries, and the United States in particular, have very slowly ratcheted up the deadliness and range of weapons they are willing to supply Ukraine. They’ve just taken possession of US M-1 Abrams tanks and President Biden has promised ATACMS missiles, which have a range upwards of 200 miles. While maddeningly slow from the Ukrainian perspective, it makes sense given Western fears of escalation. It’s not clear what Putin’s “red line” is and at what point he’ll go into desperation mode.

Despite his War College background, he shied away from "the only winning move is not to play," which subsequent events have suggested is where we find ourselves as the spring mud season approaches.  "Ukraine Faces Growing Calls From US to Cede Land to Russia."

DESPERATELY SEEKING THE HOUSING FAIRY.

It should be clear by now that "Common Dreams" means "wishful thinking."  The latest believer in miracles is Farrah Hassen, who somehow passed the bar exam, offering "Housing Is a Human Right, Not a Luxury Commodity."  I guess the communists aren't whining about those little boxes made of ticky-tacky any more.  "In the wealthiest country on the planet, this is unacceptable."  The problem, in her nightmares, is that people are adding to the housing stock.

Over the past decade, according to the Harvard study, the majority of growth in renter households has come from Millennials and Gen Zers who continue to be priced out of homeownership while also paying more for a declining supply of affordable units.

Meanwhile, construction in the high-end “luxury” rental market, which drives up rents for everyone else, remains in an upward trend. And private equity firms like Blackstone, the largest landlord in the U.S., have been expanding their real estate portfolios. These trends have fueled increased housing costs and evictions across communities.

The Harvard study revealed that our nation’s aging rental stock also needs crucial investment. Nearly half of renters with disabilities live in homes that are minimally or not at all accessible. Further, around 4 million renter households live in units with structural problems and lack basic services like electricity, water, or heat.

That's quite the bundle of points, isn't it?  First, how is it that construction expanding the supply of high-end rentals drives up the rents for everybody else?  (Let's leave aside for the moment what those additional upscale renters implies for the vanishing middle class, dear reader.)  Are those renters leaving cold-water flats for tower apartments with pools and a lake view?  Or might their departure simultaneously lead to vacancies in less-tony apartments or condos, and a removal of those high income bidders from the waiting lists there?

THE FRACTIONAL INTERURBAN.

The current proprietor of the Rock River Valley Traction Company offers a carbarn tour.

Among the rolling stock in the barn, a believable representation of an Indianapolis and Southeastern curved side car, one of the "rubber stamp" cars built by Cincinnati Car Company for numerous traction companies.

That's an intriguing choice of prototype, as when Indianapolis and Southeastern fell on hard times (thanks, road socialism!) they went to the lightweight, one-man cars as an economy measure.  Thus their heavy combination cars became bargains for The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, which rebuilt them as three-truck articulated units.

Two decades later, after I&SE had quit business, those cars again became available for sale, and The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Company bought them ... to replace the heavy interurbans, including the rebuilt combines.

A two-foot gauge replica Duplex would be a bit of a stretch for a garden railway.  There are smaller, rideable Duplex models that run on 7 1/2" gauge tracks, well-proportioned for outdoor riding.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We could fill Cold Spring Shops solely with elaborations on "One of the most frustrating aspects of the attitude of people who see more government as the solution to every problem we have today is that they aren’t willing to do the hard work of cleaning up the mess the government made in the first place before calling for more government actions."  I would get as bored with writing only on that theme as you, dear reader would get reading only about that theme.

Politics divides.  "Support for democracy is not in decline because voters are being brainwashed by enemy propaganda on TikTok. Support for democracy is declining because democracy is simply not working the way we were told it would."  The continuation is instructive:  "Perhaps the creation of societies so stratified that the ruling class can barely comprehend the concerns of ordinary voters was not such a foolproof recipe for democracy after all."

Is crisis-mongering the handmaiden of governmental overreach?  "Maybe you could stop the endless Cycles of Crisis where one Outrage is only displaced by the next Cause for Alarm and then that is replaced by the next Moral Panic."

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

WE'LL NEVER GET THE TIME LOST IN CONSTRUCTION DELAYS BACK.

Collective punishment, er, collective frustration in traffic jams, is your fate.

It's not enough that Wisconsin's department of transportation has to work on the expressways south, west and northwest of Milwaukee.  Now they hope to add a third lane in each direction on the easterly expressway running north.  There will be two years of construction delays.  "These changes are being made to address existing and future traffic volumes, pavement and structural needs. It will also improve safety and address deficiencies including clearance at bridges, visibility and merging and weaving distances, according to a state Department of Transportation project overview."  Will it be worth it?  "According to the state Department of Transportation website, I-43 carries 49,000 vehicles per day south of Highway 60 and 85,460 vehicles per day north of Silver Spring Drive, with future projections raising those figures to 65,000 and 112,500 by 2040, respectively."

The induced demand is right there in the forecast, dear reader.  When the work is done, it will be just as congested as it currently is.  There is no discussion of high occupancy toll lanes, let alone toll roads, in Wisconsin.

Let's at least credit Marc Williams, executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, for honesty.

“The work will never conclude on Interstate 35,” Williams said Tuesday at a regional transportation summit in San Marcos.

The rapid population growth in the San Antonio-to-Austin corridor has put significant pressure on TxDOT to keep up with the ever-rising tide of traffic between San Antonio and Austin, Williams said.

“We add 1,300 new residents every day in Texas, an extraordinary rate of growth. The demand on us is really to keep pace,” Williams said at the summit, which was hosted by the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce and the Greater San Marcos Partnership.

Because residential growth bids up the price of land, it becomes costly to condemn properties to widen the expressways.

OUR GERONTOCRACY.

We have little choice but to undermine them with mockery. "Biden Mocked for Holding Pelosi's Hand in Tarmac Shuffle, Gets Confused About Navalny's Widow."  Isn't it time that the Silent Generation relics who brought about the past quarter century of decay were turfed out?

WHO DID THIS???😭🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/2pxIp43VJZ

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) February 22, 2024

The Red State article also notes Dementia Joe was much faster to meet with the widow of a Russian dissident than he was to meet with residents of East Palestine, Ohio.

Between the senescence of the Democrats and their neglect of Normals, if the country gets another dose of Donald Trump, that might be something well-deserved.

THE SIXTIES CALLED, AND THEY WANT THEIR ACTIVISTS BACK.

The Jihad Fan Club at our allegedly most prestigious universities never ceases to come through, does it?  A few months ago, I wondered, "Is the Hamas-mania on display at institutions of higher learning you might have heard of the evidence that convinces the people that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people?"

The evidence continues to accumulate.

Harvard Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine is walking back an Instagram story that depicted Black men being controlled by a hand with the Star of David on it.

The post was originally made by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization, but was also shared by Harvard Faculty & Staff for Justice.

Apparently Elise Stefanik's dressing down of now demoted Harvard president Claudine Gay has encouraged her successors to ... use their speech codes.

The groups immediately faced criticism for the post, prompting the university to open an investigation.

”The University is aware of social media posts today containing deeply offensive antisemitic tropes and messages from organizations whose membership includes Harvard affiliates,” a statement from Harvard reads. “Such despicable messages have no place in the Harvard community. We condemn these posts in the strongest possible terms.”

”This matter is being reviewed by the University and is being referred to the Harvard College Administrative Board, which is responsible for the application and enforcement of undergraduate academic regulations and social conduct,” the university said. “Harvard rejects antisemitism in all of its forms.”

The now withdrawn visual invoked the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party; in a follow-up statement the Justice in Palestine soviet issued a new statement, invoking ... Stokely Carmichael.  People with long memories took notice.

Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine circulated an amended graphic with an image of Stokely Carmichael, a Black Panther Party leader who praised Adolf Hitler in 1970 as the "greatest white man" and later complained, in a 1990 address, that "zionist pigs have been harassing us everywhere."

Fitting, isn't it, that a brain-dead parody of Lyndon Johnson in the White House merits a brain-dead parody of The Movement in Cambridge?

JESSICA CORBETT CLIMBS THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN.

It's always amusing to read Common Dreams.  When they're not lamenting the latest Threat to Democracy^(TM) they're begging for the sock puppet president they argue with but vote for to act more like a dictator.

After nearly two dozen Sunrise Movement campaigners were arrested Monday at U.S. President Joe Biden's 2024 campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the youth-led climate group is planning over 40 protests across the country.

Next Monday, movement members plan to demonstrate at local Democratic Party offices and city halls to demand that Biden declare a national climate emergency and use the full extent of his powers to tackle the fossil fuel-driven global crisis.

"Biden can't build renewables on Monday, approve fossil fuels on Tuesday, and then claim to be climate president. That's not how science works, and young voters know it," said Sunrise campaign director Kidus Girma in a statement Thursday. "President Biden must declare a climate emergency and go all-out to stop the climate crisis."

"There are dozens of things he could sign into law tomorrow if he wanted," Girma noted. "He could make sure that every time a climate disaster hits, no one gets evicted and everyone has access to free healthcare. He could end the fossil fuel era by refusing to approve a single oil or gas well in this country."

Sunrise is calling on the Democratic president to reverse the massive rise in U.S. fossil fuel production—rather than approving projects like Willow in Alaska—and to "create green union jobs by unleashing the full power of the Defense Production Act."

All that wishful thinking about executive orders neglects two things, acts of Congress and consent of the governed.

The group's plans for next week's protests were announced as nine Democrats joined Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill intended to reverse Biden's recent pause on approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, and as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rubber-stamped the Saguaro Connector Pipeline in Texas.

While Biden has faced intense criticism from campaigners and scientists for various decisions—from backing Willow and Mountain Valley Pipeline to continuing fossil fuel lease sales and skipping last year's United Nations summit—former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, has been far more hostile toward climate policies.

Mr Trump also understands that a lower world price for crude oil and natural gas makes it more difficult for Iran to underwrite the jihad and the Persian Gulf piracy or for Russia to continue its annexation of eastern Ukraine.  It's amusing, though, that an executive order contrary to a president's Article II powers is fine if it "ends the fossil fuel era," particularly if it's an implementation of full-on public assistance for everyone; whilst a proper decision by an independent regulatory commission, which is to say, the quintessential manifestation of the Administrative State, is a "rubber stamp."

What would we ever do without the sort of naïvete that prays for a president to use his pen and 'phone to decree the Big Rock Candy Mountain?

PRESIDENTIAL RANKINGS ARE LESS USEFUL THAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL POLLS.

Academics who fancy themselves Court Intellectuals for the Administrative State have a propensity to evaluate American Presidents for their Conformity to the Academic Prejudices.  Thus we have the latest Presidential League Tables, courtesy of those Court Intellectuals.  Not that it fools Noah Rothman, or anybody else with a functioning jive detector.

If the historians who contributed their alleged expertise to compiling a list measuring “overall presidential greatness” brought any history with them into their analysis, that’s hard to discern from the product they produced. My colleagues will take the list to task for its authors’ revisionism, but it seems that the point of this exercise wasn’t an objective assessment of American presidential legacies. It was to convey to the list’s readers that Donald Trump is bad.

According to our most influential historians, Trump earned himself a spot at the very bottom of their list registering relative “greatness” in the Oval Office. Perhaps owing to a latent sense of shame among practicing academics, Joe Biden managed only to be named America’s 14th greatest president, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson. It should surprise no one that, with throat-clearing exceptions made for presidents such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the list favors progressive Democrats and progressive Republicans. The virtue of progressivism is the common thread. We can, therefore, deduce that the goal of this enterprise was to advance voguish narratives favored by progressive academicians.

The list is reminiscent of other efforts to manipulate public perception via the selective deployment of “expertise.”

Yes, and it will be treated as Received Wisdom on the Sunday shows, all the efforts of citizen pundits and social media scribes notwithstanding.  The Credentialed Experts push such things because they think their salaries depend on them doing so.

What’s remarkable about these efforts to launder opinion into the national discourse under the guise of expertise is that the architects of these experiments are possessed of such self-regard that they think they can reshape our perception of reality. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t invested in promoting an agenda agree that Barack Obama belongs somewhere on the spectrum of historical greatness between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. No one in their right mind believes America’s civic institutions and civil society are roughly comparable to Italy’s. Anyone who was persuaded to put off emigrating to the United States because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia better cares for its female population has been profoundly misled.

Why would anyone believe this nonsense? Indeed, it sometimes can seem like belief is beside the point. The objective in articulating facially nonsensical untruths such as these isn’t to convey “expertise” but zeal in service to a faddish political cause. Today, the cause is anti-Trumpism. If history gets in the way of that goal, then history has to go.

Dominic Pino, also reacting to that silly survey, gets to the point my title hints at.

[P]residents should not be ranked in the first place, and if the APSA cared about its credibility, it would stop ranking them.

This is not to say historians should not evaluate presidents. They do and they should, and some are better than others. Exactly how that evaluation is done will take into account factors such as the evaluator’s worldview, or his belief about what presidents ought to do. That will vary, and arguments will be had on whether certain presidents were good or bad, and in what ways.

In a logical world, yes. "Presidential historians," though, are a class of people who serve as Morale Conditioners for those Credentialed Elites who have done away with self-service drug stores.

[Jon Meacham is] part of a cadre of scribblers who traffic in the role of "presidential historian," which neither implies nor is implied by holding an academic post, and which includes the likes of the long-departed Theodore H. White; and the book's dedication is to Evan Thomas and Michael Beschsloss, two more of the tribe.  For the most part, the presidential historians share the world view of the Credentialed Elite who see Governance by Wise Experts as something to be desired, and Successful Presidents as holders of the office who advance that cause.  Thus, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson rate high in that cadre's estimation, while Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan ... do not.

It will be up to future genuine historians, perhaps in another three centuries, to sort those rankings more precisely.

So let it be with the latest survey. As if the people who are inclined to vote for Donald Trump in their state primary, or should he earn the Republican nomination, in the general election, are going to be dissuaded from so doing by ... university professors?

POUR ANOTHER SPRECHER.

My Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom chronicles the descent into irrelevance of Establishment Journalism.

I have to confess to feeling a positively unholy degree of amusement, watching the Establishment Mainstream Media publicly coming to grips with Joe Biden’s senility … this after pretty much papering over his decaying mental condition over the past three years. That President Biden’s remaining brain cells have been melting into a slightly greenish and glowing puddle of goo has been screamingly obvious to everyone on the center-to-right quadrant of the blogosphere with any sense and worldly knowledge since his installation in the Oval Office. That the major national media minions are now having to wrap their tiny minds around that realization, and not just acknowledge but explain how it is now urgent that he be replaced on the Dem party ticket this year, as well as how they managed to escape noticing the freaking obvious for the past two or three years … well, all sorts of fun for those of us with a freakish sense of humor. It’s like watching a hapless stage magician try and gingerly handle a turd by the clean end.

The National Establishment Media – the public affairs branch of the Democrat Party – just spent the last three years trying to cover up his mental incapacity, not to mention his corruption, mendacity, and nasty tendency to perve on any attractive female of any age within reach, even on public occasions. The jig is up. The party’s over. Credibility is shot … not just shot but bleeding messily out in the center of the dusty street, while the large crowd of onlookers who perhaps held Tea Party sympathies, willingly served in our nation’s armed forces in the past, believed that our votes – and our protests counted for something – point and jeer.

Yes, indeed – learn to code. Or wait tables, dig ditches, sling packages at Amazon or drive for Uber. If it’s good enough for former millworkers, coal heavers and truck drivers in the industrial heartland … it’s good enough for those who have called themselves news reporters for years, people who have lied to us by commission and omission. There are too many Taylor Lorenzes, and not enough Salena Zitos, it seems to be all too important for the top-ranked national news outlets to have a seat in the farcical White House press conference room, and thus, the national news industry is a fading one. It’s fading for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones is that a large proportion of consumers of news are tired of the lies and are fleeing to other sources than the mainstream purveyors of the government party line.

We'll see: web logs used to be the New Citizen Journalism, then Social Media was supposed to be the New Citizen Journalism, until the gatekeepers unleashed their fact checkers, now Substack appears to be a way for people to turn their punditry into a hobby business.  And yet the Sunday shows, and their cheap imitations available any evening on the political cable channels, continue to define The Narrative.

THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING FOR SECULAR PROGRESSIVES IN IT.

Among today's Common Dreams scare stories we find "Christian Nationalist Insiders Are Prepping for Trump's 'Dystopian' Return."  It's based on Politico speculation that the Trump campaign has not yet confirmed, denied, or mocked.  The article includes a snippet of social media:

Amongst some of the proposals for a second Trump Admin:

- end surrogacy
- end no fault divorce
- invoke the insurrection act to stop protests
- end sex education in schools
- stop policies that “subsidize single motherhood”

Also predictably, the hysterics look up from their wine glasses.

The proposals of Trump's allies are "straight out of The Handmaid's Tale," said Lauren Hitt, senior spokesperson for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. "Nationwide abortion bans, attacks on same-sex marriage, and restrictions on contraception—this is the horrifying reality being openly discussed by Team Trump and the likely architects of his second term agenda."

"Every day Donald Trump openly supports an agenda of restricting Americans' freedoms, dividing our country, and attacking our rights," said Hitt. "That's what he will do as president. It's not who we are as Americans."

The Jarrett regency, shoring up its support among welfare recipients and Weimar America.

That's how you get more Trump.

DISPLAY THAT NEW CONSTELLATION FOR THE AGES.

Commander Joel Holwitt argues, "Let's Restore the Navy Jack." Apparently, the First Navy Jack might not have been the first.  "As both a naval officer and a naval historian, I recommend the Navy secure the First Navy Jack and restore the traditional Navy jack."

The "First Navy Jack" captured the spirit of September 12 Americans, and there's one in the Cold Spring Shops flag rotation.

Its origin story, though, involves more than a little imagination.

Use of the First Navy Jack was directed by then-Secretary of the Navy Gordon England in May 2002. Secretary England wrote: “From the very beginning of our Navy, the Jack has been used on board American warships. . . . The temporary substitution of this Jack represents an historic reminder of the nation’s and Navy’s origin and will to persevere and triumph.” The Secretary ordered that the First Navy Jack remain flying until the end of the Global War on Terror.

Regrettably, the First Navy Jack probably is not the actual first jack of the U.S. Navy. The jack that the first commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy, Esek Hopkins, ordered his ships to fly in January 1776 was described simply as a “strip’d jack.” His instructions made no mention of a rattlesnake or “Don’t Tread on Me.” Hopkins did fly a rattlesnake flag known as the Gadsden flag, but it had a plain yellow background and served as his personal standard. At the time, most American merchant ships frequently displayed a red-and-white striped flag, and in all probability, the first Navy jack was a similar striped flag.

None of this is recent news. The Naval History and Heritage Command website states that the design of the First Navy Jack “rests on no firm base of historical evidence.” The North American Vexillological Association, dedicated to the scientific study of flags, awarded their 2002 William Driver Award to Peter Ansoff, whose research concluded that “while the rattlesnake-and-stripes flag that currently flies on the bow of every U.S. warship has a long tradition in American flag use, its design was a 19th-century mistake based on an erroneous 1776 engraving.” In fact, the flag we call the First Navy Jack actually was not flown on board a U.S. Navy ship until 1975, when it was used as part of the bicentennial celebrations.

The Commander goes on to note that going to that flag might have brought ill fortune.

At best, the First Navy Jack is historically unsupportable and represents the embarrassing initial missteps of the U.S. Navy. At worst, it is encumbered by a superstitious sailor’s worst enemy: bad luck, a superstition that a multitude of events and programs over the past 17 years seems to support.

It is time to secure the First Navy Jack and use the traditional Navy jack, which has a long and storied history. The traditional Navy jack actually did fly during the American Revolution. It flew on board the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. And it flew on the bow of the USS Missouri during the Japanese surrender ceremony. And instead of the prickly warning that the First Navy Jack symbolizes, the traditional Navy jack is a reminder of the indivisible strength of our union. Just as Secretary England intended when he wrote that the use of the First Navy Jack would be “temporary,” the traditional jack can be raised to end one period of our Navy’s history and reconnect us to our distinguished past.

The past 17 years have been a time of great change in our Navy: new uniforms, new ships, and new policies. It’s time to change back to one of our best traditions, the U.S. Navy jack that flew proudly for more than 200 years, in times of peace and war.

That "indivisible strength" looks a little shaky these days, but then one like it flew on Monitor and Hartford, didn't it?

VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE, OR SCHRÖDINGER'S CHRIS CHRISTIE.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner offers the usual sort of guilt-tripping the devotees of the major parties engage in during election season, particularly when there's a binary choice of two particularly evil candidates, or their party manifestoes.  "There are two and only two viable candidates for President. To refuse to vote for either of them is to let others decide between them."  I want better choices, and I'd rather vote for a manifesto closest to what I want and not get it than vote for what I know is going to be a crap sandwich.  That's long been my stance.

Mr Will recognized, dimly, what his advocacy brought.  Follow the link if you want.  It's this message I want to reinforce.  "Dear reader, if you're uneasy about that sort of Republican ... and your choice is between a Trumpian showboater and a Squad-adjacent Democrat, reject the false binary, and don't let those irritated rumps on the extreme get your vote.  There might be libertarians or socialists or free-soilers elsewhere on the ballot."

He continues, taking to task former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who will vote his conscience this November.

But there are plenty of folks out there like himself—homeless Republicans who think Trump is morally unfit for the office—who might be persuaded to hold their nose and vote for Biden with the nudging of Christie and other likeminded Republican leaders. Given that Christie knows damn well that Biden is better for the country than the alternative, abdicating that role is feckless at best.

What's amusing is that the somewhat more polemical Stephen Kruiser of Pajamas Media makes the same argument, but with the colors reversed.

A vote for Joe Biden or whichever commie ends up on the ballot in November is a vote for the imminent demise of the United States. That's not hyperbole. ... There is no "principled" reason for any Republican to vote for anyone other than Trump or any other Republican who might replace him should the Democrats' pre-election rigging work. Sitting this election out because of delicate feelings or a misbegotten sense of honor would be unconscionable.

Which means that Chris Christie is simultaneously helping Donald Trump and helping Joe Biden.  Sorry, no.  He's part of the Coalition of the Unwilling, which I would like to see get bigger.  "The so-called binary choice is only a binary choice if voters vote with the expectation that other voters are treating the choice as a binary choice. In the states and districts that skew strongly one way or the other, if you're going to be disappointed with the outcome anyway, at least vote for the choice you want, rather than vote the Nash strategy."  And in a battleground state, or a close district, should you vote your conscience and someone slag on you for spoiling their preferred candidate's chances, your response ought be, "Offer me a bundle with more policies I want."  Governments are supposed to derive their just powers from our consent, and if they don't, they ought to be gridlocked anyway.

SPEAKING OF FRINGE IDEAS.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education heaves up today's entertainment.  "The current assault on academic freedom operates through anti-Muslim racism."  Recall, dear reader, what happened when those Ivy League presidents invoked context for their assaults on academic freedom.  "People who tick the right Diversity, Inclusion, or Equity boxes will likely be promoted until they reach several rungs above their respective levels of competence."

VIVE LE DIFFERENCE.

The following headline is a candidate for a Friday short take, but for a lack of Cold Spring Shops posts elaborating on its message.

Men and women's brains do work differently, scientists discover for first time.

To borrow a maxim, if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research.  "That I might get into trouble claiming sex is binary, while personality is a continuum, and body types require Euclidean n-space to categorize does not mean using the left's cancel mob tactics on the left's court intellectuals in Bloomington or anywhere else."

And now, dear reader, there's evidence on the side of the binary.

The brains of men and women operate differently, scientists have shown for the first time in a breakthrough that shows sex does matter in how people think and behave.

The issue of whether male and female brains are distinct has proven controversial, with some academics arguing it is society – rather than biology – that shapes divergence.

There has never been any definitive proof of difference in activity in the brains of men and women, but Stanford University has shown that it is possible to tell the sexes apart based on activity in “hotspot” areas.

They include the “default mode network”, an area of the brain thought to be the neurological centre for “self”, and is important in introspection and retrieving personal memories.

The limbic system is also implicated, which helps regulate emotion, memory and deals with sexual stimulation, and striatum, which is important in habit forming and rewards.

There is always reason to conduct further reseach.

Dr Vinod Menon, prof of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford, said: “This is a very strong piece of evidence that sex is a robust determinant of human brain organisation.”‌

“Our findings suggest that differences in brain activity patterns across these key brain regions contribute to sex-specific variations in cognitive functioning.”

However, he added that further research is needed to fully understand the implications of the findings.

‌It is well known that male and female chromosomes release sex-specific hormones in the brain, particularly in early development, puberty and during ageing.‌

In particular, might the stereotypically male or female brain functions be evolutionary adaptations?

Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory.

Conversely, men seem to have stronger visual and spatial awareness and better working memory.

‌Yet scientists have struggled to spot these differences in neural activity, with brain structures looking the same in men and women.‌

Selection, respectively, for gathering and nurturing, or for hunting and defending? You decide.

Dr Gina Rippon, emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, and author of The Gendered Brain, has argued that society is to blame for brain differences in men and women.

‌Commenting on the study, she said: “The really intriguing issue is that those areas of the brain which are most reliably distinguishing the sexes are key parts of the social brain.

‌“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences?

‌“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?”

Personality is a continuum. The sifting and winnowing goes on.

THE BEST THING FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IS GO AWAY.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn lays it out in "Cities Can't Be About Moving Cars."  Part of his essay involves push-back from between people skeptical about government except when it involves road socialism.  Read that part there.  I'll focus on the main positive points he raises.

Central planners, lacking humility and perspective, created an overly simplistic set of zoning regulations and imposed them on cities. These included regulations on parking, some of the most inflexible, yet baseless, rules in the package.

These regulations have, among other things, resulted in a development pattern that costs more to service and maintain than it generates in local wealth and tax capacity. The results are higher taxes, more debt, reduced services, and local governments that are fundamentally insolvent. We need local governments to be smart and thoughtful servants of the people in their community, but insolvent governments tend to do dumb and desperate things. They tend to develop a rivalrous, predatory mindset with the populations they serve.

In addition, parking regulations hurt small businesses while strengthening the position of corporations and franchises. They limit the options of families, force burdens on churches, schools, and other civic institutions, and impair property rights without a justifiable nexus. They are universally a net negative, yet local governments cling to them, largely for the arbitrary empowerment parking regulations provide.

That's the short form of Donald Shoup's case against free parking.  I could add "opportunities to grift" to that "arbitrary empowerment," although that ought be self-evident.  If you have transportation options (meaning you live in a higher-order central place, there's more than zoning and planning at work here) the land-owner is probably a better judge of how many parking spaces to provide than somebody casting runes over a planning manual.

[M]y options increase the more parking spaces are eliminated and replaced with something else. Fill that parking lot in the downtown with a new restaurant and I’ve got another place to go. Take out some parking spots and expand seating and now that restaurant can serve more people, maybe expand their offerings, maybe be open more evenings. That’s all good. Add more homes to my neighborhood and there are more patrons for all this new stuff, all within easy walking distance, none of them requiring a parking spot.

All that zoning and mandating creates a one-size-fits-all land use pattern that doesn't suit Mr Marohn, and it probably frustrates a lot of people who don't have a background in traffic engineering, urban planning, or regional economics.

[D]riving in my city is way nicer than driving in the neighboring suburb. Sure, I never go over 30 miles per hour, but I can get everywhere really quickly. It’s not about speed; it’s about travel time. With gridded streets I’ve got lots of options for how to get somewhere.

When I’m forced to drive out to the edge of town, I’m continually frustrated by the way the roads have been engineered to maximize speed at the expense of my time. High speeds mean lots of traffic signals with long intervals. If I hit them green, great, but I seemingly never hit them green and so I spend lots of time going nowhere. Every car is channeled to the same places, so I’m always driving in congestion, even in off-peak times. And every destination is separated, so I can see where I want to go but it’s a five-minute circuitous trip to get there. The system treats me like an idiot and I find the entire experience demeaning and frustrating.

When you attempt to provide residents with quasi-private streets, you end up funnelling all the purposeful trips onto the stroads, and maltimed traffic lights are as common as those air-powered waving men.  Apparently the Radburn plan of Milwaukee's Wedgewood Park neighborhood never caught on, and now everyone suffers.

PUBLIC FUNDING OF EDUCATION IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Last week, it was the Utah legislature injecting itself into its state universities' core curricula.  But the fun goes on in the common schools as well.

To a naïve view, the local government school ought to be the canonical manifestation of Governance by Wise Experts: people knowledgeable in the ways kids develop would design suitable curricula, and the kids would learn, and voters could rest assured that their kids were developing their social and cultural capital.  "If there's broad consensus on what the common schools ought be teaching, the school board election is probably no big deal, and it doesn't much matter who runs, or who turns out to vote." That might not be what parents are seeing, particularly through the telescreens their kids have been chained to for much of the past two years.

That post also observed, "Might state operation of schools be even more dangerous to intellectual development than state operation of churches or mosques?"

MAROON SAM PIZZIGATI ON SHIP-TRAP ISLAND.

Common Dreams, in the name of equity, give other redistributionist lunatics their fair share of opportunities for me to make mock.

Sammy is too predictable.  In 2022, "we noted him channelling his inner Balph Eubank. 'The distribution of income and wealth will remain ridiculously top-heavy until we start limiting the 'rewards' gushing into corporate executive suites.'"

He then got worked up because trophy houses held their value during the bear market early in the Jarrett regency.  "[I]f you're a socialist of Sammy's caliber, all you can do is call attention to is those big houses and whine about how horrible it is there are still people living in small houses.  Real estate trading at higher prices?  Burn your woke manifesto if it raises the possibility that it's not a Musk or a Bezos or a Zuckerberg bidding up those prices."

Today, he fell off that yacht.  "How much — in our current 21st-century plutocratic climate — can our richest now get away with?"  After praising the efforts of some Swiss scolds to tax their productive citizens, he gets around to a new movie that apparently is winning some prizes.

How much — in our current 21st-century plutocratic climate — can our richest now get away with? They can, two Austrian filmmakers posit, get away with murder. Literally.

The two filmmakers, Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann, gave their latest collaboration a world premiere last month at the Sundance Film Festival.

“We always follow the money,” says Hoesl, the screenwriter of their just-released Veni Vidi Vici.

And the money this time led them to the story of Amon Maynard, a lavishly endowed billionaire who enjoys hunting humans.

“Decked in the epitome of rich-people elegance, Maynard seems to be the kind of man who has never heard no for an answer,” writes film critic Jose Solís in the journal Film Stage. “Killing a person doesn’t even seem to thrill him much as a fetish — it’s just something else he does in his free time.”

And what does Solis see as the “craziest thing” about Hoesl and Niemann’s “pitch-black satire about a wealthy family with a predilection for human-hunting”? The film, he notes, just “doesn’t seem that crazy.”

Why should it? As filmmaker Hoesl puts it: “Didn’t some country’s president say something like ‘I could kill someone on Fifth Avenue but still get elected?’”

I suppose if Harvard scholarship is derivative and uninspired, that is, when it's not cribbed from somebody else, why not indie moviemaking that's derivative and uninspired?  At least General Zaroff invented a new animal to hunt after he got bored with Cape buffalo and rhinoceroses and cheetah.

A GARDEN RAILWAY ON AN INTERURBAN SCALE.

Somewhere not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the Rock River Valley Traction Company, which has some of the same preservation and restoration problems the full size museums have.  Here a replica box motor that had suffered from years of deferred maintenance, while the property was changing hands, has been put back into service.

What the video also shows is that an outdoor railway, whether of traditional garden railroad dimensions, or built to a fractional scale, or a museum line, is subject to the encroachments of the wilderness.

Note: that is a proper interurban line, complete with overhead trolley wire.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Just how does the public get serviced by its politicians?  "Left unsaid is why 50 years as a politician and officeholder should be considered as of more value than 50 years as a farmer, an entrepreneur, research scientist at a drug company, or night-shift worker at a steel mill or a semiconductor fab. This kind of privilege seems directly contrary to the whole idea of equality before the law."

Speaking of privilege, there's Dementia Joe privilege.  "Pushing back at the image of a crotchety grandpa, he came across like a crotchety grandpa."  With unanswered questions.  "If Biden is too old to be charged, isn’t he too old to hold the most powerful position in the world? And if he’s not too old to hold the most powerful position in the world, why is he too old to be charged?"  Can't we turf him out?  "Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president, and he’s knocking on the door of being too old to be president, period. It was always absurd to believe that Biden would be able to handle one of the most challenging jobs in the world as an octogenarian, and the notion of his serving two full terms and remaining in the Oval Office until age 86 is ludicrous."  His inner circle noticed, long ago.  "People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border."  Dementia Joe dithers, we bear what follows.

Some peoples' salaries depend on them not seeing it.  "The president’s enablers are knowingly keeping a diminished man in the driver’s seat — which makes him, and the whole world, unsafe."  There are, still, the delusional.  "The White House will need to get Biden in front of interviewers, where he actually does quite well, and in widely seen venues, to counter it. It’s really as simple as that."  Not, though, Paul "Forehead" Begala.  “Look, I’m a Biden supporter. And I slept like a baby last night. I woke up every two hours and wet the bed. This is terrible for Democrats. And anybody with a functioning brain knows that.”  Joe Biden is a placeholder.

That is, unless you fancy yourself a court intellectual.  Sic semper tyrannis?  "The clerisy’s reaction (to social media bypassing content protectors) is no different than that of the Catholic Church in the 15th and 16th centuries: moral panic that triggers a repressive response."  That is, if they're not actively lying.  "Why will the media make Republicans Pounce!® the narrative? Because if they report on Biden's cognitive crisis with any honesty, they will have to account for their own efforts to propagandize Biden as vital and up to the job."  Because that's how they think!  "Democratic president is senile: why would we want to report on that? Republicans point out that Democratic president is senile: that’s the story!"

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

EXCELLENCE IS THE BEST ANSWER TO RACISM.

Coleman Young might have flown with the Tuskegee Airmen, but he disregarded his Commander's Intentions every time something went sideways in Detroit. "All My Troubles Reflect Your Racism."  It's not that things have gotten any better in Detroit in the past forty years.

THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS.

Biden's brain is glitching on live TV pic.twitter.com/pl14iIROuB

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 16, 2024

No further comment required.

PUBLIC FUNDING OF EDUCATION IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Last year at about this time, here we were.  "Legislators can engage in censorship, but should they?  'Years ago, pioneer economist Richard T. Ely engaged in some scholarship the legislators didn't like.  The regents responded, in a statement that has long been cast in bronze on Bascom Hall.'"

MIGHT AS WELL FACE IT, YOU'RE ADDICTED TO ROADS.

Federal grants for highways are almost always welcome.  Federal grants for rail transit, not in Arizona.

Republican legislators in Arizona are seeking to block rail service between Phoenix and Tucson as a condition of continuing legislation to maintain the state’s Department of Transportation, the Arizona Daily Star reports.

One of the conditions added to the continuing legislation, SB1184, by the Senate Committee on Transportation, Technology, and Missing Children is that the state DOT could not accept grants, donations, aid or any other federal funds to operate commuter rail service. State Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) called promoting 100-year-old technology. “Nobody’s going to ride it,” Hoffman said, according to the newspaper, saying funds should go to expansion of Interstate 10.

“People love their personal automobiles,” Hoffman said. “They love the freedom that it entails them, they love the ability to go when they want, where they want, how they want.” He also said he had a particular interest in blocking the Phoenix-Tucson proposal because possible routes would run through his district.

Other amendments would block the department from proposing plans to reduce greenhouse gases or motor vehicle miles traveled, reducing the number of lanes on any road, or building or maintaining electric vehicle chargers.

Republicans, predictably opposed to socialism unless it's road socialism.  That freedom to move?  It's there, until it isn't.

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.

Arizona, where the Populist Impulse rests on water somebody else pays for, and roads somebody else pays for, that is until the infrastructure crumbles.  And crumble it will.

Highway building is a bipartisan obsession. In fact, amid all the partisan rancor and cultural division that defines modern political discourse, the one thing that our national leaders can find consensus on is the funding of new highways and bridges.

The largest federal infrastructure spending plan ever proposed identified 173,000 miles of roadway already in poor condition. The bill would only have modernized 20,000 of those miles, and that would take a decade in which time the backlog of maintenance would be even bigger.

Senator Hoffman, presumably, will take some of that money to add those lanes to Interstate 10 and pray for some future porkulus (with those maverick Senators in Washington, good luck with that) providing the money to keep it in a state o good repair.  As long as there are no rotaries, recharging stations, or those annoying trains.  This farce must end, notes a Strong Towns post, continuing,

Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges.

Every new lane mile we build adds to our backlog of future transportation costs. Every bridge or interchange we construct makes our fiscal insolvency worse. No matter how important you think your local project is, that project is making your transportation system worse off.

I must continue to take issue with the conservative populists on the subject of road socialism. "Why should road socialism be any different from any other socialism, and why do conservative populists think road socialism is fine?"

THE BEST TO YOU EACH MORNING.

There's more to this story than meets the eye.  "William Post, one of the inventors of an iconic breakfast staple that’s become an anytime snack with $1 billion in U.S. annual sales, has died."

That "iconic breakfast staple?"  The Pop-Tart, from Kellogg's.  Mr Post is not of the Post Cereals family, he is however, of the genus Determined American Inventor.

“There were so many naysayers,” Post told News Channel 3 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2021. “Some of my good friends would say, ‘I don’t know Bill.’ They would tell us it’s not such a good idea.”

Post had been plant manager at Hekman Biscuit Company, a regional baker that was part of the company that would become Keebler, when Kellogg’s came calling with the idea in 1964, his obituary said.

Post told News Channel 3 that he was used to making a single sheet of dough, like for a cracker. The challenge was adding a second layer with that delicious filling in the middle.

“To get that done, I had to break every rule in the book,” he said in a video produced by Kellanova, the current corporate name of Kellogg’s.

Pastries with a filling surrounded by dough on all sides exist, such as a strudel or a kringle, but those involve a lot of rolling out and folding, which you wouldn't want to then reheat in a toaster.  But there was more inventiveness to come.  "Pop-Tarts were unfrosted initially. The icing was added a few years later, and presented a new challenge including naysayers who worried the sweet topping would melt in toasters, making a gooey mess."  Mr Post lived long enough to see his creation, or was it a total team effort, become the first edible mascot-cum-trophy at a college bowl game.  R.I.P.

PITCHERS AND CATCHERS ARE REPORTING.

With the professional football season running as long as it does, we count the days from Lombardi Trophy being hoisted to spring workouts beginning.  And we note some classics are still among us.  Last week, Stephen Kruiser included in his Morning Briefing a referral, "My friend Stephen Green provides some great analysis of this lunacy here, replete with more acerbic gems than some Bob Uecker color commentary from a 17-inning baseball game back in the day."  You can't sneak that sunrise past this rooster!

"Back in the day" might include a few special broadcasts from Spring Training.  We might have a president who is a few apples shy of a picnic, but Mr Baseball is still fully with us and may be getting his swimming in during training camp, and calling a game or two.  He's still slated to call Brewer home games.

A WINTER VALENTINE'S DAY PLAYLIST.

There are a number of songs that feature in the Festive Season rotations that properly ought be heard for Valentine's Day, or for that matter, if there's a Sadie Hawkins Day with an early snowfall.

SQUANDERING RONALD REAGAN'S VICTORY DIVIDEND?

Twenty years ago, when George W. Bush won the votes of enough September 12 Americans to earn a plurality of the popular vote and re-election, I made what turned out to be a rash prediction.  "The Superintendent's advice to Democrats: you cannot beat something with nothing, or hold out your hopes for a fracture between the libertarian and traditionalist parts of the Republican coalition."  That fracture did happen, if not exactly in that form, with the Trumpian populists at odds with the national greatness conservatives, to the dismay of Democrats who hoped to hang onto enough Reagan Democrats to hold together their own fracture between the corporatists and communists in their coalition.  I've referred to that situation as four political parties attempting to present as two.  Nowhere, though, does there appear to be any room in either party as currently understood for what we might understand as Henry Jackson Democrats, or even, as Jeff Jacoby laments, Reagan Republicans. "How much disillusionment can our political system tolerate before it cracks up?"

FASCHING DIENSTAG.

It has been my custom of late to see Fasching off with a Nubbelverbrennung.  For this year, enjoy Dom Radio reporting from in front of Kölner Dom. Yes, the ritual parodies a number of Catholic rites, and yet the report got into the spirit of the thing.  There's closed captioning auf Deutsch.

The "cheeky clergyman" in the interview is in real life a practicing Catholic.

Again this year, there are a few pączki still on hand here, where "sacrificing for Lent" conflicts with "waste not, want not" we err on the side of wasting not. "If you don't eat at least one pączek, you will be unlucky all year long."

As we have noted previously, the sober times come.

A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL.

David McCullough wrote The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal: 1870-1914 (and isn't that a veritable Gatún Locks of subtitles, dear reader?) in time for the Bicentennial.  My Francis Parkman Prize edition dates to 2002, during which time Ronald Reagan made an issue out of Jimmy Carter offering to return sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama, Panama regained that sovereignty, and Operation Just Cause ousted Manuel Noriega, all of which Peter Winn notes in his Parkman Prize foreword; and yet publication preceded the expansion of the canal with larger locks.  He notes that Path, as written, provides sufficient background for someone interested in the more recent naval and geopolitical history.

I will open Book Review N^o. 5 with one spoiler.  The man with the plan is not Theodore Roosevelt.  Recall that the French first essayed a canal, and in their way (the French having perfected the Forms of Governance by Wise Experts long before Herbert Croly or Woodrow Wilson or Tony Fauci was born) they called a conference of a Technical Committee to do all the planning.  To this meeting came Adolphe Godin de Lépinay of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and he observed that attempting to dig a sea-level canal through the flood-plain and watershed of the Chagres River, which meanders through a tropical rain-forest, with all that implies, on the Atlantic side, would come to all sorts of grief.  Better, he suggested, to build a lock and dam, create a reservoir, make a cut through the top of the low cordillera at the continental divide, using that ridge as a natural levee, with another lock and dam along the Rio Grande leading to the Pacific side.  The resulting freshwater lakes would also allow the port cities to have running water, although that gets ahead of my story, or rather the several stories, in Path, each of which merits several shelves in a proper library.  Dear reader, with as many sea stories as follow, it might take as much time to read this post as it does to fill a lock.

The first such story is France itself in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century.  The Second Empire gives way to the Third Republic; Ferdinand de Lesseps manages the successful construction of the Suez Canal; the Prussians with steel cannon in World War II: The Prequel overwhelm the French with their bronze cannon and der Kaiser demands an indemnity he hopes will keep the French humble for a generation.  The French pay off the indemnity in a short time, then launch the Panama Canal project, and decide to write the book on International Expositions (literally, the commission on world's fairs subsequently set up in Paris) complete with the Eiffel Tower.  And somehow the Third Republic survived both an attempt at restoring the Empire and the Communists.