THE GAME IS AFOOT IN PITTSBURGH.

In the past ten years or so, I have seen remakes of Sherlock Holmes with Dr. Watson being a veteran of the Afghan wars of the Elizabethan era (Sherlock);  with Sherlock Holmes banished to New York to get sober, assisted by Dr Joan Watson (Elementary); and now CBS has Holmes and Moriarty taking a fatal plunge that Dr John Watson survives, and once he recovers he has a bequest to set up a hard cases medical clinic in Pittsburgh.  TV Fanatic contributor Joshua Pleming notes, "It also doesn’t hurt that the network has given viewers the tall drink of water, Morris Chestnut."  He continues,

The story itself seems pretty cut and dry. Holmes left Watson a bunch of money so the doctor could return to medicine. It’s all very straightforward, which is exactly what Sherlock Holmes is NOT known for.

The show worked hard in the pilot to establish that nothing is as it seems. I don’t even want to make assumptions because I’ll be dead wrong, but something is definitely afoot.

Is a Scotland Yard guy in league with Moriarty?  Only the Shadow knows.  Oh, sorry, wrong mystery series reference.  And television might be able to portray the price of ambition.  "Every show, from Nurse Jackie to Grey’s Anatomy, proves that the cost of a successful healthcare career is a volatile love life."  The One Chicago series generalizes that to first responders generally.

At CBR, Joshua Patton quips, "Watson Series Premiere Review: The Holmes Inspired Drama Is Basically Sherlock House."  That might not be surprising.

Hugh Laurie's surly doctor solved medical mysteries for eight seasons, and series creator David Shorn said House was inspired by Sherlock Holmes.  Watson brings things full circle, from using the protagonist's surname as the title to his medical deductions, so comparison is inevitable. Of course, that series is not the most important source of inspiration. Of the mixture of elements that make up Watson, that which is inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic character amounts to about a seven percent solution. Now in the public domain, the series is free to borrow, remix and ignore whatever elements it wants. Rather than a traditional mystery procedural, the show centers on John Watson's life as a doctor. He's also without his more famous companion, though given how "Pilot" ends, that may not be for very long.

None of which comes as a surprise: Conan Doyle was a medical student who credited one of his professors for stressing the usefulness of observation in diagnosis.

The pilot show fails to impress TV Pulse contributor Jennifer Griffin (not to be confused with the eponymous Fox News diplomacy correspondent).  "The problem is Watson is neither sufficiently coherent in tone, nor unique in execution, to carry the weight of its own premise."

The next show will air on February 16, as pitchers and catchers are reporting.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux posted "Some Links" on Thursday with all sorts of pithy stuff.  Honors go to George Will for "Many Americans are now indiscriminately skeptical, in reaction against the recent authoritarian dogmatism of, and censorship by, 'experts.'"

Remember Michael Dukakis?  "Competence, not ideology."  There's too much ideology.  "Whether it was arrogance, ignorance or self-righteousness, the Democratic Party failed to understand what President Trump sees as clear as day: the American people despise politics."  There's too little competence.  "If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?"

The only rational response is populism as self-defense.  "We keep hearing about threats to democracy, but the transnational elite is determined to destroy it. For some reason, they genuinely believe that savage cultures are more worthy of celebration and protection than their own."

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

BET ON EMERGENCE.

Greg Lukianoff's "When you add billions of eyes to the problems of the world, the result is not just noise but incredible breakthroughs" has Friday short take potential, but for the instructive elaboration that follows.

Mr Lukianoff is a First Amendment fundamentalist, and he recently received an award from the Russell Kirk Center.  In the course of accepting the award, he offered a history lesson.

But if I’m being honest, there is one world leader who I can’t entirely blame for being frustrated with a press that ceaselessly hammered his personal life, his marriages, his affairs, his sometimes-reckless decision-making, his outsized libido, and even his weight.

I am, of course, talking about Henry VIII. And the “press” I’m referring to is, of course, the printing press.

Despite what is now a fairly well-known antagonism, Henry VIII actually started out as a huge fan of the printing press. In fact, the Catholic Church dubbed him the “Defender of the Faith” for his writing. (This, by the way, was a title he kept using after he turned on the Catholic Church. Honestly, kind of a baller move.)

But eventually, Henry turned against the widespread use of the printing press. Why? Because it was disruptive. It was destabilizing. It was dangerous.

I’m not kidding about that either. The printing press was dangerous, in many ways.

What Mr Lukianoff is about to do is connect the dots by which the Critique of Pure Tolerance goes from treating the ownership of a printing press (or social media platform) from being a hidden restraint on freedom, i.e. a manifestation of repressive tolerance, to a means for propagating false consciousness, i.e. something that must be suppressed in order for tolerance to be liberated.  Plus, he's going to have opportunities for musical interludes, coming below the jump.

THE WAY TO DEMONSTRATE THE FOLLY OF A RULE IS TO COMPLY WITH IT.

That's been a principle at Cold Spring Shops almost from the beginning.  "Common Sense and Wonder report that the Berkeley chapter of College Republicans have demanded an apology from the Berkeley administration, for hyping a derogatory psychological profile of conservatives. Time to use a little jiu-jitsu and find PC elements of the Berkeley judicial code to use against the university."

Something similar presents in Official Washington, as senior managers use their jiu-jitsu to slow Our President's executive orders.  "Career employees with this degree of expertise and experience are exactly the type who would embody institutional norms and, thus, exactly the sort who could be expected, in their own way, to form a bulwark of institutional resistance to Trumpian excess."  Don Surber calls it "insubordination."  It might be work-to-rule, a useful tactic for railroaders to obtain a more favorable contract without going out on strike.

In Official Washington, the Trumpians call it "malicious compliance."  For example: Our President issues a ukase removing diversity training.  Somebody at the Air Force Training Center in San Antonio interpreted that as removing all mention of the Red Tails.

Republicans exert leadership on something, then resistance activists pretend to "comply" with the new rules, in a way that deliberately and misleadingly reflects poorly on the new rules.  The 'news' media, meanwhile, misrepresents that those rules are, also in order to undermine them and those who made them.  That's what happened with the Tuskegee Airmen posturing.  The Trump administration ended DEI programs and mandates within the federal government, so someone decided that they would "obey" these new orders by barring historical instruction about American heroes who happen to have been black.  This does not look like an honest mistake.  It looks like a deliberate political manipulation, executed for the entire purpose of leaking it to journalists.  As soon as this episode started to draw attention, Republicans in the legislative and executive branches intervened to put an immediate stop to it.

Deliberate, and yet telling.  "Excellence is the best response to racism" doesn't align well with the priors of critical theory.

CONTROLLING COSTS, OR CONTROLLING CONTENT?

Earlier this week, we called attention to Milwaukee's Weigel Broadcasting terminating Channel 58 meteorologist Sam Kuffel.  That post noted what might have been a related phenomenon in local television.

There is something going on in local television, though, involving the weather broadcasts.  "According to her LinkedIn page, Kuffel joined Channel 58 more than five years ago. She previously worked at WAOW-TV (Channel 9) in Wausau after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2016."  The three Allen Group television stations of Wisconsin, Wausau's WAOW, LaCrosse's WXOW, and Madison's WKOW have of late been hiving off their meteorologists.  That might be the normal churn in small-market television, or it could be another economy measure, contracting delivery of the local weather forecast to The Weather Channel.

Allen Group own a number of local broadcasting stations in the Midwest and elsewhere.  They also own The Weather Channel, and there might be the harvesting of an economy of scope involved.  "The media group, which owns roughly two dozen local TV stations, recently announced it would phase out local weather reporting, opting instead for forecasts provided by The Weather Channel's national bureau led by veteran meteorologist Carl Parker, based in Atlanta."

YOU DON'T BETTER MANKIND BY ENSLAVING IT.

That might be the real answer to Jim Jump's question, "Did the Ivy League Really Break America?" in Inside Higher Ed.  (Should I refer to him as Coach Jump?)  He's reacting to David Brooks's "How the Ivy League Broke America" which begins with this potted sociology.

Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.

Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics—the “grinds”—were social outcasts. But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House. (From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command. This was the age of social privilege.

Social privilege there might have been, and yet that introduction does nothing, nothing, to support his assertion, "The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new."  Note how the titans of industry, the masters of Great Lakes steamers, the engineers that laid out the railroads as well as the engineers who ran the trains might have been able to live their lives without ever encountering a Harvard man, let alone worrying about being "clubbable" outside the local Brotherhood, Grange, or Masonic lodge, or after the overseas wars that those Clubbable Men started getting the country into, the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

SOONER OR LATER YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLES' MONEY.

In a week, Donald Trump has broken the morale of his most vociferous detractors of the left.  Common Dreams contributor John Ripton calls for help from his fellow-travellers.  "Without resistance this regime will ensure that Americans are more vulnerable to climate change and to political chaos, moral decay, and social disintegration."  Yes, Donald Trump was running around California setting fires.  Yes, Donald Trump was running around Chicago looting the Magnificent Mile.  Yes, Donald Trump was running around the campuses chasing Jewish students into the library attic and facilitating the rabbit culture.

DID LORI LIGHTFOOT DO DONALD TRUMP A FAVOR?

Earlier today, Our President issued a ukase pausing some Federal spending pending review.

The decision was announced in a two-page memo from the Office of Management and Budget titled "Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs." According to the memo, it affects at least $3 trillion in federal outlays.

The freeze refers to several Trump executive orders as the authority -- Protecting the American People Against Invasion (Jan. 20, 2025), Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid (Jan. 20, 2025), Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements (Jan. 20, 2025), Unleashing American Energy (Jan. 20, 2025), Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing (Jan. 20, 2025), Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025), and Enforcing the Hyde Amendment (Jan. 24, 2025).

I'm hearing echoes of Richard Nixon's impoundments and wondering whether we're seeing a squirrel to comply with the debt ceiling until income tax withholding payments roll in again with Friday's paydays.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information for States, a nonprofit that analyzes the effect of federal actions on states. “It is unprecedented.”

Although the federal government has rescinded unspent funds in the past, it hasn’t normally halted grants on the front-end, she said. The grant pause is perhaps most similar to a federal government shutdown, when a congressional impasse on spending legislation delays federal payments for some state and local services.

“What we generally have observed with states under those circumstances is that a couple of weeks isn’t hugely disruptive,” Howard said.

Twitchy's Brett T. calls attention to a number of supposedly non-profit and non-governmental organizations whose rent-seeking is involved.  Red State's Streiff notes that the clock on impoundments has more time on it than the Doomsday Clock.  "The 90-day hold is well within the letter of the Impoundment Control Act and is sure to inconvenience some grantees. What it does is prevent the federal government from directly funding activities, like abortion and alien smuggling, that are against the stated policy of the administration."

AMTRAK, THAT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

The last two weeks have not been kind to Amtrak.  It started with the New Year.

Amtrak has announced an extensive list of train cancellations as of today (Saturday, Jan. 4), extending into Tuesday, Jan. 7. Operations from coast to coast are affected as a result of the winter storm currently moving through the center of the country.

The cancellations began with Friday’s scheduled departure of the eastbound Southwest Chief from Los Angeles. Its opposite number, westbound No. 3 from Chicago, has been cancelled today (Saturday, Jan. 4). Also cancelled today are No. 22, the northbound San Antonio-Chicago Texas Eagle, and No. 50, the eastbound Chicago-Cincinnati-Washington-New York Cardinal.

The following day, several Hiawathas and the Borealis were annulled.

Citing equipment issues, Amtrak has cancelled one Hiawatha today (Jan. 6), after two other cancellations along the same route Sunday.

The cancellations of today’s Milwaukee-Chicago train No. 336, a scheduled 1:05 p.m. departure, as well as Sunday’s St. Paul-Chicago Borealis and Chicago-Milwaukee Hiawatha No. 341, are are all attributed to equipment and separate from the weather-related cancellations announced on Saturday, Jan. 4, and updated Sunday [see& “Amtrak announces extensive storm-related cancellations,” Trains News Wire, Jan. 4, 2025]. On the Northeast Corridor, the company also had an equipment-related cancellation of part of an Acela trip on Sunday.

The same cold snap that brought lake-effect snows to Pensacola affected train operations, particularly out of the Chicago coach yard.  From January 20 through the 22nd or 23rd, it was easier to list the trains that were still running than to count the ones annulled.  Cancellations or delays of eastbound trains led to delayed departures of westbound trains through Galesburg into Saturday.

OVERWORKING A WORD.

Sex is binary, personality is a continuum.  Our President, in his attempt either to score culture-war points or to force the culture-studies types to acknowledge there are coherent beliefs, gets it about half right.

In an effort to "defend women's rights" against "efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex," the order—titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government"—seeks with the force of federal law to establish men and women as distinct and immutable categories.

"It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female," which "are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality," the order states. It defines "sex" as "an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female" and notes that the term is "not a synonym for and does not include the concept of 'gender identity,'" which the order says "does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex."

Perhaps ironically, supporters of transgender equality might agree with parts of this characterization. "Sex is a label—male or female—that you're assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate," according to Planned Parenthood. Gender identity, on the other hand, "is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It's a feeling that begins very early in life."

I forget when the overworking of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex" began.  Years ago, when I was helping construct Divisia indices of labor quality, which, these days, might have to be prefaced with an apology for "neoclassical economics" and insufficient "decolonisation," I recall something like a five-way classification of workers by sex, age, experience, industry, and occupation.  My own research focused on location problems in heavy industry, and some years into that work, all those dummy variables for "sex" became dummy variables for "gender."  I suppose that's also a problem for Reason's Joe Lancaster.

The order tautologically defines "sex" in terms of "male" and "female," which are then defined in terms of "sex."

But by ruling so starkly, the order completely writes intersex people out of existence.

"People who are intersex have genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don't fit into a male/female sex binary," according to the Cleveland Clinic. "Some people who are intersex consider their gender to be intersex. Others identify as female, male, nonbinary or a different gender." In this case, a person's professed gender may change from the one assigned at birth because they literally have biological markers of both. The clinic further notes that one in 100 Americans is estimated to be intersex.

The executive order criticizes "gender ideology," which it says "replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity" and "diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body." But intersex people literally are born in the wrong sexed body, at least as defined by the executive order, which says everyone is either all male or all female.

I don't recall that being an issue in assessing the quality of labor, although in those days dealing with the lingering effects of Jim Crow was where the research action, and the grant money, was.  And I worry, a bit, about that Planned Parenthood conception of "gender identity."  Should Charles Schultz have done a series of panels on Peppermint Patty's sex-change operation?

YOUR JOB IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

If you are stuck in the basement of the ivory tower, the tension between having to drop the hammer on the Distressed Material whilst dealing with the imprecations of the deanlets who see something noble about admitting unprepared students and calling it access is no end of stress.

Professor X has the commuters and the returning students and the non-traditionals, the usual gondola-load of Distressed Material, but he doesn't get down on them. Page 37: "My students were unskilled and unpracticed writers, but they weren't stupid; they knew what the point of the comparison essay was. The devil was in the doing." So it is. Professor X does not use his book to develop a coherent evaluation of the forces that left so many of his charges unprepared to do the writing. He has an opportunity, page 79, to question the constructivist nonsense that I maintain is a fundamental cause of academic decline, but passes on it. "No one would expect to pass a calculus class if he had not yet mastered basic arithmetic. Why, then, are most attempts to adhere to basic standards in the use of the English language in college courses heaped with scorn?" Perhaps the answer comes at page 144. "Our American unwillingness to count even the most hopeless of us out in the educational marathon may be one of the most debilitating ideas in contemporary culture, a jagged gash through which vitality and truthfulness and quality slowly drain away."

From her post, probably far from the basement, Duke's Rebecca Vidra reflects on twenty years of taking those imprecations to heart, and despairs.

I have now been teaching at Duke University for 20 years. I have been through all kinds of teaching fads—active learning, team-based learning, alternative grading, service learning, etc. You might assume that I have become a better teacher over these many years. Yet I am noticing a curious trend in my course evaluations: Some of my students like me and my courses less and less.

As a teaching faculty member, this matters greatly to my own career trajectory, and so I’ve wondered and worried about what to do. Why am I struggling to teach well and why are my students struggling to learn?

Looking back on the past two decades of my teaching and reaching further back into my own college experience, I see six clear differences between now and then.

Let us count the ways.

1.  Access to information.
2.  Attention. 
3.  More Lectures, Please.
4.  Sense of Entitlement.
5.  Assessment Confusion.
6.  Our Students are Struggling.

Her lament about access to information includes a telling phrase.

Today, my students show up in my course often having taken AP Environmental Science, with access to unlimited information about the course topics, and with AI assistants that will help them organize their notes, write their essays and prepare for exams. I have had to shift from expert to curator, spending hours sifting through online articles, podcasts (SO many podcasts) and videos, instead of relying on a single textbook. I look for content that will engage students, knowing that some may also spend their class period fact-checking my lectures.

It's called course preparation.  Textbooks are so obsessively edited and revised that any one of them is probably equally bad, which is why a good course outline will have supplemental readings, and any good opening to the course will include advice on how students might best learn to distinguish the useful from the nonsensical.  The professor's job is to recognize the basis of the most popular arguments, and to ask questions of students posing more obscure arguments.  And class participation becomes fact-checking?  Is she teaching, or issuing position papers?

DESPERATELY SEEKING DIOCLETIAN.

Incoming vice-president J. D. Vance faced the nation on Sunday and current moderator Margaret Brennan made a fool of herself.

MARGARET BRENNAN: A lot has happened in the past week.

VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Yes, it has.

MARGARET BRENNAN: You campaigned on lowering prices for consumers. We've seen all of these executive orders. Which one lowers prices?

VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: Well, first of all, we have done a lot, and there have been a number of executive orders that have caused, already, jobs to start coming back into our country, which is a core part of lowering prices. More capital investment, more job creation in our economy, is one of the things that's going to drive down prices for all consumers, but also raise wages so that people can afford to buy the things that they need. If you look at our slate of executive orders--

MARGARET BRENNAN: So, grocery prices aren't going to come down?

VICE PRESIDENT VANCE: No, Margaret, prices are going to come down, but it's going to take a little bit of time, right? The president has been president for all of five days. I think that in those five days, he's accomplished more than Joe Biden did in four years. It's been an incredible breakneck pace of activity. We're going to work with Congress. We're of course going to have more executive orders, and we're going to try- the way that you- you lower prices is that you encourage more capital investment into our country, and you asked specifically what executive order is going to help lower prices. All of the stuff that we've done on energy, to explore more energy reserves, to develop more energy resources in the United States of America. One of the main drivers of increased prices under the Biden Administration is that we had a massive increase in energy prices. Donald Trump has already taken multiple executive actions that are going to lower energy prices, and I do believe that means consumers are going to see lower prices at the pump and at the grocery store, but it's going to take a little bit of time. Rome wasn't built in a day--

I thought I was being funny last August when Kamala Harris was pushing her crackdowns on price gouging.

There's generally a recent Common Dreams column available to provide comic relief on what is turning into an unedifying election season.

They're going to be too busy fangirling over ¿Que mala? this week, but have no fear, dear reader, there's always the World Socialist Web Site.  "Kamala Harris outlines pro-corporate economic agenda at North Carolina campaign stop."

After that speech, the shade of Henry Wallace called, asking for his stump speech back, and Diocletian could be heard wandering the Boundary Waters crying, "Nikita Sergeyevich, where are my edicts?"  Panem et circenses, not so much.

Margaret's fact-checking skills leave a lot to be desired.  Apparently she thinks that Dementia Joe standing in front of a big screen with slogans like LOWERING COSTS whilst mumbling something about "bottom up and middle out" or maintaining price caps on insulin work to lower prices, or perhaps it was Flibbertigibbet with her calls for a federal ban on price gouging and unspecified investments in strengthening supply chains that would do the job.  The vice president, on the other hand, is noting that by doing less, the Trump administration will do more to revitalize competitive markets than all the good intentions of Obama or Biden or Harris or Walz or whoever comes next.

Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis concurs.

This exchange showcased Vance's ability to connect the dots for viewers, illustrating how lowering energy costs directly impacts consumers' grocery bills. “So if we lower energy prices, we are going to see lower prices for consumers,” he concluded, reinforcing the administration's commitment to tackling the root causes of inflation.

I still can’t get over the fact that the same people who insisted that everything was just fine with our economy and accused the public of being ignorant for not realizing it are now suddenly acknowledging high prices and are trying to blame Trump for not doing anything or enough about it. Credit goes to JD Vance for schoolinng Brennan on how things work.

I opened my post with excerpts from the official CBS News transcript of the interview.  News Busters' Jorge Bonilla offers his annotations thereto.  "Brennan never so much as laid a glove on Vance, who disarmed her questions with humor and logic. Those wondering why the Vice President would grant interview time to a media that hates him now have their answer. Think of an elite cage fighter who has to grapple and spar in between big-money fights, and you’ll understand."

DON'T SOME LUTHERAN SYNODS SEAT BISHOPS?

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have a Conference of Bishops, although the home parish for those bishops does not rate the designation of a Cathedral Church.  Each bishop serves a region further disaggregated into synods; archdiocese and diocese being the terminology used in other denominations.  (There are cathedral churches in Germany holding Lutheran services.)

The National Cathedral in Washington is operated by the Episcopal Church, perhaps because as the cathedral took shape, there was a convenient overlap between having Episcopalians in the Eastern Establishment and a familiar Episcopal liturgy for regular worship or for State Occasions.

More recently, though, the Episcopal Church have gone all-in on liberation theology and the Social Gospel, and that prompted Rabbi Michael Barclay, a Pajamas Media contributor, to ask "Do We Want a 'National Cathedral' That Prays to the God of Leftism?"

On one level, the rabbi's complaint is a different sort of affirmative action complaint.

Theologically, the event was not reflective of this nation in any way, shape, or form.  Over 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholics, and yet there was no Catholic leader offering prayers.  Only 37% of American Jews identify as part of the Reform denomination, but the only Jewish voices were a rabbi and cantor who are both part of that theological stream of Judaism.  These two women supposedly represent the Jewish faith, and yet for the vast majority of Jewish history, women were not even allowed to be rabbis or cantors, nor are they today in most congregations around the world or in observant Jewish communities in America.  The Reform movement of Judaism officially includes political values that are not consonant with much of traditional Jewish theology, and are more aligned with liberalism.  The liturgy and choreography of this Interfaith service was controlled unilaterally and entirely by the Episcopalian Church, specifically through Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde, despite the American religious reality that at roughly 3 million practitioners, Episcopalians comprise 1.2% of Americans … significantly less than American Catholics, and even less than American Jews, American Mormons, or even American Buddhists.  And no one from the popular evangelical Christian movements practiced by churches like Calvary (over a quarter of Americans) brought their passion to the pulpit on that day.  From a religious standpoint, this service was not at all reflective of the diverse beliefs or practices of this nation's citizens.

Not because the pastors failed to respect the proper forms, rather, because they brought their tight priors into the service.

The entire day, led by and culminated with the words of Bishop Budde, was about an entirely different religion that has infiltrated America and been adopted by the Democratic Party: the religion of progressive leftism.

Across the board, the clergy who led prayers are identifiable not by their traditional theology, but by their left-wing political stances both off and on the pulpit. Budde is a progressive who uses her pulpit to push her left-wing politics on every stance from abortion to gender issues to immigration, as demonstrated by her truly offensive homily. Budde made sure that she was surrounded with clergy of that same ilk, if not of the same brazen offensiveness that Budde demonstrated in her sermon.

A theologically progressive prayer service dedicated to leftist values; led and designed by left-wing Episcopalians; with a focus on personally attacking the new president of the United States, who was elected in a landslide. Is this really what Americans seek from their religious leaders? Is this what the National Cathedral Interfaith Prayer Service is supposed to be, and might it just be better to stop honoring the religion of leftism, and let national prayer services become about prayer and God rather than progressive values?

In the rabbi's recitation of the history of a National Cathedral, though, there's the possibility for establishing a cathedral sans cathedra.

God and religion have been integral in the formation and sustenance of the United States.  In 1792, Pierre l’Enfant’s “Plan of the Federal City” specified a site for “a great church for national purposes”… but he specifically defined it as “non-sectarian and non-denominational.” Despite common belief, the National Cathedral was not intended to be, nor has it ever been or is it now, a national house of prayer. It actually has the same status in the District of Columbia as American University and the Catholic University of America, a building housing a religious organization. It is a beautiful building, but given how it has fallen theologically, it should no longer be used for any “national” interfaith event.

In Isaiah 56:7, we find a prophecy about the future Temple that will be built in the Messianic times of peace. “My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” This was undoubtedly l’Enfant’s intent in creating a non sectarian and non-denominational great church for national purposes. To create a sacred space that is utilized in a non-denominational way for prayers for this nation is a beautiful concept, but this is not what the Episcopalian National Cathedral is. The sermon of Bishop Budde, as well as the entire program, demonstrated that the secular God of the far left has superseded the God of the Bible in that building.

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution is clear that this nation shall neither establish a national religion, nor prohibit the practice of religion by any citizen. But the experience on January 21 actually did endorse the religion of leftism.  It attacked our new president, and all people of faith who interpret their religion to be in direct contradiction to what this leftist Bishop preached.

So why not rotate the liturgical duties among the various denominations?  Yes, the Episcopalians and the Catholics do cathedral services pretty well, and yet that National Shrine (otherwise known as the "tattooed tit") on the Catholic University campus do their Midnight Mass a little differently than the Pope does in Rome or the Cardinal Archbishop does in Chicago.  Perhaps, as the old Coastal Establishment is being dis-established, so too might now be the time to dis-establish the default setting of the National Cathedral as Episcopalian.  To do so, however, does not guarantee that the Social Gospel will be de-emphasized in services.

YOU'D THINK A MILWAUKEE TELEVISION PERSONALITY WOULD KNOW ABOUT GEORGE CARLIN.

In 1972, he was arrested for performing his "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" at Summerfest.

Last week, a Milwaukee television weathercaster with a social media following for her sports commentary was given her unconditional release by the station.

In her first public remarks since being dropped by WDJT-TV (Channel 58), meteorologist Sam Kuffel said Friday she "never intended to harm anyone" with her social media posts criticizing Elon Musk's straight-arm gesture that many have likened to a Nazi salute.

"First, I just want to thank everyone for the tremendous support I’ve received," Kuffel said in a statement to the Journal Sentinel. "I was just voicing my personal opinion on a private social media account that was not accessible to the general public."

In one post on her Instagram account, Kuffel shared a picture of Musk at the podium, saying, "Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration."

She added, "You (expletive) with this and this man, I don't (expletive) with you. Full stop."

Kuffel then posted a meme from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on Instagram along with a quote from the show: "Screw that old (expletive). He's a Nazi."

Conservative radio host Dan O'Donnell criticized Kuffel over her posts, accusing her of "spreading the lie that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute" during the presidential inauguration.

So much for that Instagram account not being accessible to the general public, if Dan O'Donnell got hold of it and Town Hall's Matt Vespa made the fallout available to Militant Normals everywhere.

The Elon Musk fake Nazi salute nontroversy has cost a local Wisconsin meteorologist her job. Sam Kuffel is no longer employed with Channel 58 after taking to her personal social media to blast Elon Musk, who liberals have become obsessed with, for making a Nazi gesture at President Donald Trump’s inaugural rally. That didn’t happen, with the Anti-Defamation League even calling out the lies about this moment. Still, it’s gotten liberal America into a tizzy, but no one cares or believes it, which is why it’s fizzling out.

Note, dear reader, three (incidences) of those words you don't dare say on television.  It might be that the station took no position on the lady's politics but might have treated the way she framed her argument as conduct unbecoming.  The station is not commenting.

There is something going on in local television, though, involving the weather broadcasts.  "According to her LinkedIn page, Kuffel joined Channel 58 more than five years ago. She previously worked at WAOW-TV (Channel 9) in Wausau after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2016."  The three Allen Group television stations of Wisconsin, Wausau's WAOW, LaCrosse's WXOW, and Madison's WKOW have of late been hiving off their meteorologists.  That might be the normal churn in small-market television, or it could be another economy measure, contracting delivery of the local weather forecast to The Weather Channel.  The weather forecast has long been a feature of the half-hour local news programs, but do you play it straight, or do you turn it into entertainment, complete with Albert the Alley Cat to help out?  Albert went from being hailed by the entertainment industry as part of the top weather team in these United States in 1968 to being denounced as "unprofessional" and getting the American Meteorological Society's Seal of Good Practice rescinded from Milwaukee's WITI a few years later.  "Science replaced silly."  And so, to an extent, it still does.

SUBURBAN SPRAWL WAS A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING.

I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.

Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published.  He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling.  The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment."  That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them.  Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book."  Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.

I intend to focus Book Review N^o. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title.  First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from.  My elaborations will come after the jump.

First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor?  Do you look in Lionel catalogs?  Do you read pulp magazines?  Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.

Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor?  Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"?  Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful?  Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare?  Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery?  Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings.  Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it?  Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs."  Les deplorables, an echo in time.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Reality bats last.  Reality thinks not.  (Even Charlie Sykes occasionally gets something right.)  "Dementia Joe would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was."  No fraud needed, only a vote of no confidence.  “The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA.”

Farewell, Jarrett regency.  "Biden’s presidency had been a sham from its very first day, a project managed by a group of advisers rather than an actual president, and that cabal couldn’t fire anyone who might reveal the secret."  We can't run him.  "I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function"  It is all an inglorious coda to five decades in public office.  Speaking of inglorious codas, "Joe Biden's advisory opinion that he thinks the Equal Rights Amendment ratified is empty, vain, given to the winds."

No kidding.  "The world will not end on January 20."  The squandering of the peace dividend might have.  "We had started electing cool presidents after the Cold War ended, when it suddenly felt as if the stakes of the American presidency were much less consequential—less nuclear.  Cool never ages well."

The time for cool has passed.  "Donald Trump is glaring because he means bidness. His bidness is to shift the paradigm on the mendaciously sanctimonious managerial class of the USA, of which The New York Times is the principal mouthpiece."  Has nearly 40 years of unserious presidents been enough?

America is done being guilted into accepting the crazy.  The hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.  Go figure.  "Young men don’t like being ruled over by neurotic — and sometimes psychotic — women."

CRISIS + BIPARTISAN = STUPID.   "Whenever there's a crisis and a bipartisan push to DO SOMETHING, the odds are about six out of five that the SOMETHING will turn out to be too big, too expensive, and corrosive to liberty."  With the rent-seekers cleaning up.

Reality dawns on the Woke.  "Despite living nowhere near working-class black and brown people, this do-gooder somehow knew he spoke for them.  'What happens if your social experiment of abolishing the police ends badly?  What happens if it causes an outbreak of gun violence, gang violence, and youth violence?  You lead an ivory-towered existence in a wealthy white neighborhood whereas my constituents, poor people of color, will be forced to live with the consequences of your social engineering.  Is that truly progressive—to have white progressive luxury beliefs whose costs are primarily borne by people of color?'"  Somewhere George Wallace is nodding.

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

NO THANK YOU.

Tennessee Republican proposes amendment to allow Trump to serve third term.  You have to be careful what you ask for, the XXII Amendment took effect in 1951 and the first president whose term was thus limited was Dwight Eisenhower, who I suspect many Republicans would have preferred to run in 1960, rather than turning to Richard Nixon.

Moreover, I prefer that Constitutional amendments have the clarity of train orders, which this proposed amendment is not.

[Andy] Ogles proposed an amendment Thursday that says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

As written, it would only apply to Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump and it would have prevented Theodore Roosevelt from seeking a third term.  Donald Trump will be in his eighties in 2028.  Perhaps Representative Ogles and the rest of the Trumpian populists ought work on developing a bench in both houses of Congress and among the governors in order to continue the policies they seek to continue without making the presidency even more of a cult than it currently is.

SHOW US YOUR LARK TICKETS.

Last year, I called attention to a private venture working with Union Pacific to run an overnight train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

That venture is at the stage of issuing renderings of their latter-day Pullmans.

Dreamstar Lines, which hopes to launch luxury overnight train service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, has released conceptual renderings of Art Deco-inspired interiors for its equipment.

The company commissioned Designworks, a BMW Group company, to create initial concepts for its plan to retrofit cars with four types of accommodations, in addition to a lounge car.

Accommodations would include standard class, which the company compares to first class on an international flight, and three types of rooms with a private bathroom and shower:  bedrooms, sleeping two; suites, sleeping two in a queen bed with extra space;  and family, sleeping six (including two children).

The plan is to refurbish "existing bilevel cars," which could refer to former suburban gallery cars or to the remaining Santa Fe High Level coaches that have not gone to museums.  Standard class looks to be private spaces, not the extra-large reclining seats of airline first class or the old Canadian National Dayniter coaches.  No rolling tenements these.

Current plans are to have trains rolling sometime this year. I repeat, from last year.

We'll see whether a rolling upscale hotel is a meaningful value proposition in California.  If we had a bracket for Passenger Rail projects, I pick this one to turn a wheel before California's environmentally and politically hampered high speed rail project does.  "One small step in the right direction would be for Washington to stop bilking taxpayers for the sake of rail projects that might never be completed, let alone come close to being worth the cost."

Whether a regularly-scheduled high end sleeping car train, rather than de luxe cars for use on package tours as required, is a good idea anywhere remains open for debate.

As I finish this post, though, almost all the Amtrak overnight trains originating in Chicago are delayed or running late.

PRAVOSLAVIE.

Young, single men are leaving traditional churches. They found a more ‘masculine’ alternative.

WALKER'S TRAVELS.

That used to be about the peregrinations of Walker Ashley, Northern Illinois University storm chaser.

Retired geologist James A. Walker stands accused of creative peregrinations.

For more than nine months, police received complaints of someone littering from a vehicle, according to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office. Each littering incident involved a vehicle slowing down and throwing a plastic bag of cat feces onto the yards of the victim’s homes.

Each incident involved the victim displaying a Donald Trump flag in their yard.

According to the press release, the locations of these incidents were in DeKalb, Genoa and Kingston counties. Five homes were targeted and three were targeted on multiple occasions.

The most recent incident took place on New Year’s Day. Two different vehicles were identified as involved in the incidents. Police linked the incidents to Walker after the New Year’s Day victim recorded the license plate of one of the vehicles and police identified Walker as the vehicle’s owner.

Walker is expected to appear in court on Feb. 24 at the DeKalb County Courthouse.

It's a large university, I never met the man.  We'll see what happens in court.

I note only that such antics from university faculty, whether true or not, do nothing either to change the minds of Trump voters or to restore the academy's standing among Militant Normals who have for too long been on the receiving end of scorn from Our Intellectual Betters.

NEVER CHANGE, BERKELEY.

The university's newsroom asked its faculty to describe, using their discipline's conventions, the ways in which Donald Trump is awful.  Seriously.  "UC Berkeley scholars say the economy, sexism and conspiracies fueled Trump’s reelection."

I offer excerpts below the jump, with wisecracks to suit.  It might be prudent to finish your coffee first.

SHIVER FOR YOUR LUXURY BELIEFS.

New Orleans and Pensacola are among the cities that have recorded more snowfall this winter than DeKalb or Rockford.  Often the snow comes in before the polar highs, but all winter the polar high has been so positioned as to move the snow bands to the south.  Thus Indianapolis and St. Louis got the Christmastime panhandle hook storms, and that snow cover well might have enabled the polar high to nudge the next set of snow bands along the Gulf (of Mexico, or of America?) Coast.

Meanwhile, in Naperville, the citizens are doing their citizenly thing by directing the city power utility to boycott coal-fired suppliers.  "The Say No To Coal consortium wants to pack seats at the Naperville City Council meeting Tuesday night to raise awareness that a big decision looms over the city:  whether now’s the time for a contract extension with its current electricity provider, the coal-heavy Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA)."

HOW BAD DID IT GET?

Pretty bad, according to my Chicago Boyz colleague Mike.  "Biden, Scandals, and His Place in History: A First Look."  There are five dimensions.

1.  The Cover-Up of Biden's Physical and Mental Disabilities.
2.  The Biden Family Corruption.
3.  Lawfare Against Political Opponents.
4.  Censorship of American Citizens.
5.  Abuse of the Pardon Privilege.

No doubt that fifth point is going to call forth deflection on an intergalactic scale.  And yet it is hard for someone who has compromised his integrity to point out somebody else doing the same.

Militant Normals had better hope that Donald Trump keep up his Energizer Bunny ways.

[P]residential administrations are by nature entropic with power drifting to the bureaucracy. It takes a lot of energy from the West Wing, and from the president specifically, to keep things on track. From Day 1 Biden’s team was limiting him to what amounted to a six-hour daily schedule. In all likelihood, given the terms under which he got the nomination in March 2020, that was a feature and not a bug of his presidency. Biden was attractive to the Democrats not only because he was willing to be a figurehead but because he had little ability to be anything else.

The tell-alls I expect to come out as assorted functionaries seek plausible deniability in their participation in that trashing of constitutional government might answer two questions Mike poses.  "So who was exercising executive power in the federal government? Who was enabling the Biden regency?"

NO, MR TRUMP, YOU CANNOT BE A DICTATOR ON DAY ONE.

Volokh Conspirator Ilya Somin counts the ways.

1.  Denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.  (Unconstitutional)
2.  Using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a tool of mass deportation. (Requires a declaration of war.)
3.  Declaring a national emergency at the southern border.  (A chronic condition isn't the same as an emergency.)
4.  Declaring a national energy emergency.  (See infra point 3.)
5.  Designating Latin American drug cartels as terrorist organizations.  (Kurt Schlichter, call your office.)
6.  "Taking back" the Panama Canal.  (Is another nation-building war in Central America wise?)

I'd note, further to what Mr Somin elaborates in his essay, that Woodrow Wilson was not able to toss all the German nationals out of the country during his war, and that the government euphemism for "chronic condition" is crisis, and the bureaucrats and process-worshippers prefer that the chronic condition go on, in order that the agency goes on.

As far as the drug-runners, would you put it past Team Trump to produce evidence, as the roundups of illegal aliens takes shape, of someone with terrorist ties (noted by Interpol would be even better) being brought to the border along with the shipments of fentanyl?  Buckle in.

DEANLETS HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR EXISTENCE.

Maybe they should just go away.  "Students Feel ‘Spammed’ by ‘Overload’ of University Emails."

A new paper says that an “overload” of emails sent from universities to students means important emails are getting “buried” and that students simply disengage from their inboxes.

The article, based on interviews with students, senior academics and professional staff who typically distribute emails, found that students were more likely to read emails sent by course tutors, whereas they were likely to ignore mass emails sent from unknown senders.

“Students spoke positively about the messages that related to modules they were studying but were critical of the ‘dear student’ mass communications, which most described as ‘irrelevant’ and some described as ‘spam’,” says the paper published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education.

It found students were “remarkably consistent” when filtering their emails, explaining, “They read all the emails relating to their modules, then prioritized the rest using the name of the generator and the subject line. Messages from teaching staff were welcomed, but students rarely read messages from unknown generators, messages sent to all students or newsletters.”

Good.  By the time the kiddos hit middle school they should have developed a working knowledge of what is important and what is not and they likely heard Mom or Dad grouse about junk mail.  And really, a "Turn out for football on a school night" or "Wear red on Friday" coming from some functionary in Student Affairs or the Director of Athletics Himself isn't as relevant as that "Assignment posted on Blackboard" is.

The case for turfing all those deanlets out follows immediately.

Student services staff said they felt “uncomfortable [and] even guilty” about some of the messages they were asked to distribute, and one student told the researchers, “In my first year, like, there were so many emails being sent out that I basically just gave up.”

However, report co-author Judith Simpson, lecturer in material culture at the University of Leeds, told Times Higher Education that while institutions were “a long way away from optimal communication,” it was “important to note that we measured student perception of email.”

“Some students definitely feel as if they are being spammed, but we don’t actually know how many emails it takes to create that effect. A small number of emails asking you to do life admin might feel like a horrible burden if you haven’t done life admin before,” she said.

Seriously?  The kiddos picked up the elements of "life admin" from their parents or from those middle school teachers.  All the deanlets are doing is creating twentyish infants with all the communications.

WILL JESSICA YOGAMAT ACCEPT NIKKI HALEY?

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's first presidential victory, Rod Dreher, still with The American Conservative, took stock of Democrat Deep Thinkers taking stock of how The Most Qualified Woman in History could have lost.  One of the Deep Thinkers was Mark Lilla, author of The Once and Future Liberal.

Lilla has a knack for pithy, stinging phrasing. Look around, he says to fellow liberals, and see that the Republican Party, at the state level, dominates. They keep winning elections. They do so in large part because “they have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat.”

If liberals really want to improve the lots of minorities within their broad coalition, they have to first win elections. But the way they think of politics all but guarantees that they won’t. Lilla visits the Democratic Party’s website, with its pages and pages for various identity constituencies, and moans, “You might think that, by some mistake, you have landed on the website of the Lebanese government — not that of a party with a vision of America’s future.”

It hasn't gotten any better when a Historic Woman ran against the same Donald Trump.  The same sort of identitarian stuff was on the Harris campaign website, and their nod to Joe Sixpack was Bernie Sanders in Elmer Fudd rig.  And being tossed into the leading role with little preparation to placate the Pillage Party whilst keeping the Freakshow Party from staying home did her no good.

Not that the lesson registered on a real-life Jessica Yogamat, er, Mackler.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss was a deeply devastating one for so many of us—and certainly one of the hardest I’ve had to swallow throughout my career in Democratic politics—but skepticism about the viability of a woman becoming president in our lifetimes has added even further insult to injury.

As the president of EMILYs List, one thing I know with certainty is this: Underestimating the strength of women candidates based on the outcome of the presidential race is a grave mistake. The results of this election cycle proved that investing in women is not only central to creating a more representative government; it’s also a strong electoral strategy.

Across the ballot this year, women candidates were key to winning races under even the most difficult of circumstances and up against tremendous headwinds. Democratic women held onto highly competitive Senate seats in three battleground states that were won by Trump and won in four House districts that Trump carried. They flipped key Republican-held House seats from coast to coast—in Oregon’s 5th and New York’s 4th congressional districts. They broke Republican supermajorities in states across the country, and they protected and flipped vital state Supreme Court seats that are going to be essential to protecting our freedoms in years to come.

It’s clear: Women have what it takes to win. And Americans are ready and fired up to elect them.

Indeed they are, as Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are concerned.  But from her yogamat, Jess is quite capable of underestimating the strength of women candidates based on party affiliation.

Men lose campaigns all the time, particularly in the last 40 years as EMILYs List has grown, yet we never question whether another man can win in the future. We don’t debate their electability or the shortcomings of their gender—and we don’t let those limitations stand between them and the highest levels of our government.

To let gendered biases overshadow women’s extensive qualifications, their ability to best represent our communities, and their demonstrable strength as candidates, is a disservice to the American people and to our future. Misconceptions about women’s electability become a self-fulfilling prophecy only if we let them.

Kamala Harris herself said it best: It hurts to break glass ceilings. But just because we haven’t broken our nation’s highest and hardest glass ceiling yet doesn’t mean we won’t.

The women who won in 2024 reinforced a vital lesson: investing in women candidates is a winning strategy for the Democratic Party. So now is not the time to doubt, question, or give up on them. It’s time to double down on them—because women are our best pathway to taking back power. And with their leadership, we will undoubtedly shatter our nation’s last glass ceiling.

Should that first president bust through that glass ceiling on the back of an elephant, the reaction of the women of the fevered brow will be worthy of all the adjective-spinning skills of the greatest circus impresarios.

COMING OFF THE WORKBENCH.

This Sunset model of the Boston and Maine Lima Berkshire has been on hand for years.  It's probably fifteen to twenty years ago I attempted to install a selector switch in order to run it on command control track or on track energized with the traditional direct current.  Here it goes through some running-in.

I took out the selector switch and replaced some wires that had worn thin.  That ended some annoying shorts.  I did not essay rewiring the headlight and class lights to illuminate separately.

For what it's worth, 4019 went to Santa Fe just before the end of the War.  My layout is notionally set in the summer of 1952.  Model railroading is supposed to be fun.

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Megyn Kelly hails a new ukase from Our President.

BEHOLD!! pic.twitter.com/XXcWlKWgdm

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 20, 2025

Twitchy's Sam J. carps, "It's insane that this is not just common sense, absolutely."

The ukase, sort of, recognizes that people overwork the word, "gender."

I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "Dear reader, we begin thus.  'Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?'  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up."

The screw-ups just keep on coming.  "Anthropology groups cancel all-female panel defending biological sex as ‘necessary category.’"

Maybe the practitioners of what we used to call abnormal psychology will get around to clarifying when personality is personality rather than some sort of pathology.

HIGHER EDUCATION, LOWERING ITSELF.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education anticipates the second Trump presidency.  "We asked some of academia’s sharpest minds to identify their highest hope—and biggest worry—for the sector in the next four years. Their responses may surprise you."

A HOCKEY MOM SINGS.

The Capitol rotunda isn't big enough for a military band, which meant the instrumental accompaniment to America the Beautiful was planned as a recording.

What's that line about plans not surviving their first encounter?

Here is the splendid @carrieunderwood performance at the Trump Inauguration. This is what a professional looks like. With grace, when the military band audio failed, she sang her song with the audience. All American and perfect. pic.twitter.com/Qce0AHj6fJ

— Raymond Arroyo (@RaymondArroyo) January 20, 2025

"You know the words, help me out here."

A Navy chorus was already on hand, having previously made a processional singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and they helped out with all the parts.  The past two months have been eventful for Navy singers, first singing second, then singing Eternal Father for former president Jimmy Carter, and now participating in the weather-modified inaugural events.

THEIR INCOMPETENCE IS THEIR DIVERSITY.

Hot Air contributor David Strom calls attention.  What's that line about one man with courage making a majority?

Once Elon Musk broke the taboo of working with Trump, the barrier to doing so fell to dust.

Perhaps I am too optimistic about the seeming collapse of support for progressive ideas in the general public, but it sure looks like Trump's magic has been working once again. Elizabeth Warren has always been a crazy leftist harridan, but now she seems to be a crazy leftist harridan with no ability to intimidate.

Sam Altman, who will likely shoot up the ranks of the world's wealthiest men due to his leading-edge position in the AI market, clearly isn't scared of her. I doubt any of the companies and men she is targeting are either.

Protection rackets only work if the victims are intimidated, and the intimidation seems to be wearing off.

The world is healing, although it has taken it long enough. One of the most frustrating things, I find, is predicting disaster, watching it unfold, and only after the maximum damage is done does anybody start paying attention, as if it was all a shock.

Trump warned that California would burn down years ago, and the Democrats laughed. Now it's happening, and Californians are waking up to the wages of leftism and noticing that backing leftists might not have been such a good idea.

Los Angeles elected an actual communist, and now they are surprised to see she is incompetent?

Who could have guessed?

The Hot Air editorial staff, however, are too committed to a presidential cult simply because it's their cult.

President Trump’s triumphant return to the Oval Office is just the first step in our fight to restore America’s greatness.

The Biden-Harris administration has left nothing but turmoil in its wake. Our economy has stalled, Americans across the country are reeling from natural disasters, our enemies are emboldened and the southern border is wide open, our college campuses and Ivy League universities have become safe havens for antisemitism and terrorist sympathizers, and our reputation on the world stage has been tarnished. That all changes next week, but it won’t be easy.

Democrats and their leftist lapdogs in the mainstream media are going to spend every minute of the next four years lying about the new administration and trying to block President Trump’s agenda, an agenda that more than 77 million Americans voted for. Here at HotAir, we fight back against their false narratives.

President Trump is the right man to bring America back from the precipice of disaster, and just like him, HotAir has a mission: to report the truth and deliver news you can trust.

That might be, but a presidential directive on day one that flags shall fly at full staff on inauguration day?  Yes, seriously.   “By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in honor of Inauguration Day and everything good and noble that it represents about our Nation, our people, and our form of Government, I hereby order that, on this and all future Inauguration Days, the flag of the United States shall be flown at full-staff.” Does a God who has a sense of humor call Donald Trump home shortly before a future inauguration?

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Shortly after Russia kicked off in Ukraine, I responded to the reactions of our now former president with a tweet.

For God's sake, this man cannot be allowed to remain in power. #BidenWorstPresidentEver pic.twitter.com/1tX2SSVkNK

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) March 27, 2022

Yes, it set off some of the usual conscience-cowboys, although it got a favorable ratio.  "Whether any minds get changed on social media, or if it exists to be cathartic, and everybody understands it as such, is more thinking than I want to do right now."

WAITING FOR THE REAL DEBT CEILING TO CRASH IN.

And it will, as Veronique de Rugy cautions.  "For all the excitement about the incoming administration and a return to the 2019 economy, market stability rests on the precarious assumption that the government will eventually put its fiscal house in order."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The End!  "Our favorite moment of the Biden presidency has arrived."  "Moderate" Joe Biden?  "He blew it."  Joe’s legacy is to be sandwiched by Trump in history.

I'm proud to be an American.  "We despise being bullied by our government."  Let this nation have a new birth of freedom.  "I’ve been a Trump skeptic all along. But if I’d known that Trump’s win eight years ago were going to bring out Big Left’s true inner nature this hard, I might have opened my mind up a little earlier."

The progressive left is discredited.  Good.  "Trump is in as strong a position to finish the work the Gipper started that will terminate the New Deal and the Great Society."  He'll have to be.  "Those are the seeds Biden planted — poison ivy where once a lush lawn grew.  That's his legacy.  That's what Trump must somehow undo."

Shock events are margin calls on governance.  California's margin is gone.  "After over a decade of one-party rule, California has become the testing ground for the left’s most extreme ideas — and we are seeing the results in real time now."  Surf City to that perfect petri dish of failed policies in half a century!  "It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving."  With nary a sewer socialist to be found.  "The Palisades had three million gallons of water in a local system that can hold up to 120 million gallons, if it’s maintained and operational. Everything else is just noise."

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