FROM BAROQUE TO ROCOCO TO RIDICULOUS?

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler takes a monthly break from decrying official corruption and assorted forms of decay (I stumbled across his weblog initially from an environmental site) to honor the architectural "Eyesore of the Month."

In February, he took a break from "the usual cavalcade of horrors for a brief lesson."  I think he's praising Our President for ordering commissions for federal buildings to be submitted in traditional architectural vernaculars.  (That his DOGE boys are hoping to sell off a lot of the postmodernist and brutalist stuff offers some sort of a plot twist.)

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Safetyism kills.  Democrat hysteria alienates.  "To many Americans, it makes these members of Congress appear hysterical and unhinged. Cooler rhetoric and messaging would create an image of thoughtful response, rather than hyperbolic ranting."  The real debt ceiling looms.  "If we want to have real savings, they're going to have to send this back to Congress, and Congress is going to have to approve of spending less money."

Bundle hysteria with process worship, Democrats?  "Democrats feel most comfortable going after Trump's administration for its desire to cut government spending, abolish federal departments, and reduce the power of the bureaucracy — all priorities that Republicans held long before he took over the party — rather than for his demolition of the DEI infrastructure, his ostentatious deportations, or his destruction of the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle agenda."  The attitude is always the same.  "Give us your money, and then go away, lest you impede the advancement of our agenda."

Give yourself no powers you wouldn't want your adversary to have.  "Conservatives should not applaud [the Federal Trade Commission's chief] as he tries to put the government's thumb on the scale in the name of fairness. If the FTC can second-guess editorial judgments to achieve what a Republican majority thinks is the right mix of opinions, a future commission controlled by Democrats can enforce a different agenda."  Who let the DOGE out?  "The Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions."  Pair those failures with a sense of entitlement.  "Federal employees are the permanent government, and they view the president as a figurehead."

Unleash the hounds of DOGE!  "Their release reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost."

Does anyone sing "Allentown" any more?  "What is interesting today is the massive media focus on college-educated professionals losing their jobs thanks to government scale-downs. The people of Weirton and Campbell would have appreciated this empathy when their lives were shut down."

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

GERMAN TRAINS, LACKING SWISS PRECISION.

That's been going on for over half a year now.

Switzerland has embarrassed Germany’s ailing railway operator Deutsche Bahn by stopping its chronically delayed trains at the border to prevent them from disrupting its clockwork timetables.

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the Swiss national railway company, prevented 11 per cent of all trains arriving on the route from Munich to Zurich from entering the country in the first quarter of 2024 because they were too late, the German transport ministry admitted in July. On the Freiburg to Basel route, it was 12.4 per cent.

A decade ago, that would have been seen as a national disgrace in the land of “vorsprung durch technik” (progress through technology), of problem solvers and top engineers reliably imbued with a get-it-done attitude. These days, news such as the Swiss snub is met with shrugs, much like the cancellations, delays, missed connections, overheated carriages and evacuations of broken-down trains that are now the norm in Germany.

The German passenger network might still be hanging together better than Amtrak, but it sounds like Deutsche Bahn could use a visit from the DOGE boys.

The state-owned rail company made a loss of €1.2 billion in the first half of 2024 and in July announced it would cut 30,000 full-time jobs over the next five years.

Internal online chats among staff leaked to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper this week revealed the level of their frustration. “What we’re delivering here couldn’t get more embarrassing, there’s not a day when things work,” wrote one train attendant, referring to his train that departed with a restaurant car that lacked a working fridge, freezer and any food or drink.

The problems are attributed to decades of underinvestment in track and equipment as well as sluggish management.

Oh, there's also material that might give advocates for parliamentary rather than presidential governance pause.

The railway is a symptom of wider problems besetting Germany: an ageing population resistant to change, the sudden absence of cheap energy after the end of supplies from Russia, the reliance on exports to China that are slowing, and a fragile three-party coalition, which critics say is too divided to pay enough attention to the economy.

Germany is predicted to be the G7’s slowest-growing economy in 2024, according to the IMF. It is on the brink of recession after a surprise 0.1 per cent drop in GDP in the second quarter. Carmakers and tech companies are shedding jobs. The quality of public services is deteriorating. High-profile building projects such as Hamburg’s €1 billion Elbtower skyscraper have been halted by insolvencies and investors pulling out.

The political problems are multi-dimensional.

Germany has been slow to adapt to a digital economy, ranking 40th worldwide in mobile internet speed. It also remains wedded to cash. During the Euros, foreign fans waving their bank cards to pay for their beers were met with a “Nein. Cash only.”

“Nein” is a popular word in a country strangled by lengthening red tape as the Greens-run economy ministry churns out energy efficiency and sustainability directives. This, say business federations, is turning investors away. The popularity of the hard-right AfD is also starting to harm Germany’s reputation as a business location.

On the rails, though, when Britons are mocking you ...

Germany’s crumbling rail services are less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain, analysis shows, after the country’s leader mocked the state of UK railways.

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, dismissed suggestions last week that the country’s network should be privatised arguing that it would “end as badly as in England, where nothing works any more”.

However, data shows that Deutsche Bahn, the German state-owned rail group, is consistently delivering one of the least reliable services in central Europe — even compared with Britain.

The rail network in Germany was once celebrated as sleek, efficient and reliable but has deteriorated dramatically in recent decades, blighted by unreliability, chronic delays and cancellations.

To an extend, the deferred maintenance that is having the predictable effect on Die Bahn started when the government was contemplating selling the railway.  And for all the troubles the Germans have at keeping time, they still have a more stringent standard for On Time than the Britons let alone Amtrak.

The data reveals that Deutsche Bahn, which runs about 95 per cent of all long-distance trains in Germany, is struggling to meet even basic service targets. Only 37 per cent of long-distance services arrived with a delay of less than 60 seconds. Even Avanti West Coast — Britain’s worst performing train operator — met this service level for 41 per cent of its services. The UK average is 69 per cent.

Meanwhile, German Superintendent of Permanent Ways Berthold Huber is learning the lesson Patrick McGinnis and Hunter Harrison ignored.

The woes began back in the mid-Nineties when officials started to prepare for a privatisation that was later shelved. Since 1995, 12 per cent of the network has been mothballed yet passenger numbers are up by 50 per cent and cargo traffic is up 90 per cent.

Huber said: “With the reform of Deutsche Bahn in the 1990s we were trying to create the most efficient railway system possible. But we removed too much infrastructure. With the efficiency drive, we went too far.”

Sooner or later, people in business figure out that "doing more with less" is not the same thing as "efficiency," properly understood.  Downsizing for its own sake inevitably becomes a false economy.

A PLANETARY GROUP PHOTO.

I read the news today, oh boy.

Josh Dury photograph retrieved from Yahoo News.

You don't just put a wide-angle lens on a camera on a tripod and hope for the best.

A photographer is thought to have become the first person to capture all seven planets and Earth in one picture.

The rare image was made possible because a “great planetary parade” is taking place this week for the first time since 1982 – when cameras were not advanced enough to capture them all.

The panorama was taken from Somerset’s Mendip Hills on Saturday by Josh Dury, 27, an award-winning astronomical photographer dubbed the “Starman”.

Mr Dury said: “It is made of nine images, revealing Saturn, Mercury and Neptune.

“They were very tricky to spot. I used multiple image analysis and astronomy apps to confirm their location.

“As this was taken with a wide-angle lens, the nine images stitched to a panorama and a HDR blend of one of the frames to reveal Saturn, Neptune and Mercury. These three planets are not easy to see at all.”

The Royal Astronomical Society said that spacecraft, such as Voyager, had captured all the planets in the sky at once, but it was not aware of anyone taking such an image from Earth.

Mercury is generally the most difficult to spot, although on occasion it's higher above the visible horizon than Venus.  Getting Neptune requires a telescope, as generally does Uranus, although I claim to have caught it on camera not far from Mars.

BEYOND THE WIRES, OR WITHOUT THEM.

An old idea whose time might still come?  " Railroads have, for a long time, looked for ways to run an electric locomotive beyond the wires, either with an onboard power plant or with a battery."

Once upon a time, it looked like this.

Lackawanna tri-power locomotive 3501, somewhere in New Jersey.

Railroad Magazine photograph. 

Scanned from p. 302 of Middleton, When the Steam Railroads Electrified.

ALL FACT-CHECKING IS CENSORSHIP?

During last fall's presidential campaign, "disinformation" and "fact-checking" and "misinformation" came up again and again.  I lose track whether it is the legacy media or the political class that are most fretful.  Douglas Murray made the case for the legacy media losing their credibility.

Look around the media and you see the same problem everywhere. Much of the media will tell you that they regard their job as being to decide what is true and what is false. But the problem is that most of them aren’t any good at the task they set themselves.

In Britain, the national broadcaster — the BBC — recently set up a special department called “BBC Verify” that is meant to “fact-check” content across the media. But it can’t even get the BBC’s own facts right.

On issue after issue — foreign and domestic — “BBC Verify” has overseen verifiably untrue stories.

I understand the panic in these media institutions.

It is true that since the arrival of social media, the role of the media as the “gatekeepers” of what is true has fallen away.

On platforms like X, anybody can point to a piece of false information put out on the main news channels.

At the same time, the eruption of a whole new set of media platforms has diluted the power of the gatekeepers.

But the truth is that the new landscape is not so impossible to walk across as the BBC, ABC and others seem to think.

The public is wiser than it knows.

For instance, a story can be “fake” not just because it is untrue, but because it is a story that is either published or not published in order to suit a particular narrative.

Which means it's on each of us to call attention, to contribute our local knowledge to the conversation.  "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."

BARACK OBAMA'S COLOR REVOLUTIONS.

I've wondered whether Democrat machinations in these United States qualify as such.

Can you say Clinton Foundation?  There's likely some overlap between that sort of "high minded" liberals and the folks who ran a color revolution in Ukraine during the Obama years, which hasn't been turning out so well, and the continuing Trump insurgency in the current presidential cycle might have some roots in those same Obama folks running the same sort of information operation against the Trump presidency for going on nine years now.

Possibly.  A year ago, Matija Šerić offered an explainer under the title "Color Revolutions: The Most Sophisticated Means Of Warfare."  At first reading, his essay suggests those machinations might not qualify.

Color revolutions are political term used to describe turbulent political events: mass street protests and riots in order to achieve a revolutionary change of government. Some revolutionary upheavals are successful and some remain only attempts. However, so far they have taken place in a number of countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.

Color revolutions broke out in the countries of the former Soviet Union, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, and more recently in other places such as Iran and China. The most popular revolutions ares: the Pink Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, and the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Some observers called the events a revolutionary wave whose beginnings can be traced back to 1986 and the Philippine Yellow Revolution.

It's possible that there might have been the sort of "mass street protests and riots" in the United States.  Victor Hanson goes so far as to suggest those went on with revolution in mind.

pic.twitter.com/TKnjgsbQ0c

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2025

Hot Air's Beege Welborn likes the characterization:  "The more radical third term of the Obama revolution, using or employing the waxen effigy of Joe Biden."

WHAT'S OLD SLAVONIC FOR "POLAR VORTEX?"

I've been skeptical for some time about the weathermen using terms to push Narrative.

The expression for a patch to a model to explain this year's anomaly is ad hoc.  Such as what happens when January takes place in the big coastal cities.  Then it's "polar vortex."  Sufficient ad-hoc-ery, though, might as well be indistinguishable from a millenarian cult.

Here it is February, and a musing from 2021 remains relevant.  "All the same, I can't help but wonder whether these cold snaps that keep showing up around Groundhog Day aren't Kuhnian anomalies, and whether climatologist are so wedded to their paradigm of anthropogenic global warming that any ad hoc patch will do."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Precisely.  "The Forgotten Man in East Palestine, western North Carolina and on the subways of New York noticed.  This time he came off the bench and fought back.  DC still doesn’t understand what just happened.  The callous and cavalier abuse of power finally came to a head.  C is tired of A and B telling him what to do for poor, unfortunate X."  “I’m willing to put up with Trump's foul words to get the results.”

The Law of Unintended Consequences will not be broken.

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

CELEBRATE WITH TRAINS.

This year marks the bicentennial of the railways in Britain, with the September opening of the Stockton and Darlington.  There are a number of commemorative events going on there, as well as a Trains guided tour in September.  Although the United States and Britain had fought two wars in the fifty years preceding 2025, the common language, and commercial ideas crossing the Atlantic at the speed of sail in both directions, made people in North America railroad-aware, with the Baltimore and Ohio also conceived in 1825.  Here in the State Line, there is a Stockton in Illinois, once an operating hub for the Chicago Great Western, and a Darlington in Wisconsin, in the lead-mining district that might have led to Wisconsinites being thought of as Badgers.  That Darlington was at the end of one of The Milwaukee Road's branch lines into lead country.  But no railroad ran directly between Stockton and Darlington.

This year also marks a quarter-millennium since The Shot Heard 'Round the World.  Federalist contributor Jeffrey Anderson has a capital idea.  "For America’s 250th Celebration, Bring Back The American Freedom Train."  I was able to tour it during the summer of 1975, when it called in Madison.

The Quarter-Millennial needs to be more than just an event held on July 4 — and more than just an event held in Washington, D.C., or any other single place. It should be a year-long national celebration. Indeed, the Bicentennial festivities lasted more than a year. They began in April 1975, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of shots ringing out at Lexington and Concord. The opening event was the launching of the American Freedom Train on April 1.

Painted red, white, and blue, the American Freedom Train was a symbol both of America and of America’s history as a nation of pioneers and settlers. Portland, Oregon donated a steam locomotive, evoking America’s exploration of the West, and it was refurbished for the occasion. “Doubtless the most photographed locomotive in the world,” per the American Freedom Train website, it pulled train cars rich in American historical artifacts across all 48 contiguous states from April 1, 1975 to December 31, 1976, travelling 25,833 miles — slightly more than the circumference of the Earth — in the process.

Strictly speaking, quarter-millennial observations can run from April 18 of this year into 2031 for the surrender at Yorktown and 2033 for the Treaty of Paris ending the War for Independence.

STOP OVERWORKING THE WORDS.

Our President laid down a marker in favor of sanity in youth sports, but in so doing got it about half right.  It's an overworked word or two doing the damage.

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."

Blast furnaces are still "she," but the word-noise goes on forever.

Accordingly, the federal government will now use the word “sex” for male and female, not “gender,” in its official documents, including identification forms such as passports and visas.

But the directive is even broader: Agencies must now remove any content “that promotes or otherwise inculcates gender ideology.” That could be interpreted as an almost completely discontinued use of the word “gender.” Let’s hope so. Good riddance!

Today, the word “gender” seems to be everywhere. It wasn’t always like that. Not long ago, “gender” was heard almost exclusively in grammar lessons, including pronoun-antecedent agreement, and also for foreign languages since their nouns often have genders. For example, “fork” in French is feminine (la fourchette), while “knife” is masculine (le couteau). Nouns in German can also be neutral such as the word “child” which is das kind.

When officials replaced the word “sex” with “gender” on government forms, they were intending to signal that “male” or “female” are also man-made, the way grammar rules are. In this way, they set the stage for the larger “gender identity” movement, which is really a war on reality, though it’s marketed as a war on man-made power structures or “social constructs.” This obsession with power by the political left, including the gender movement with its manipulation of language, is distorted and destructive. Any doubt about that is resolved when one sees how the movement has metastasized to the point of falsely claiming that mutilating an individual’s genitals can change his or her sex. It can’t.

Even on this aspect, Trump is doing what can be done: EO 14168 not only bans federal funds for these “transition” procedures (on inmates, subject to the Bureau of Prisons, for example) but also points out the movement’s internal inconsistencies: It insists one’s sex is fluid—“an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity”—but at the same time insists that one must have access to clinical and chemical castrations because someone was born in the “wrong sexed body.” (Maybe the body will be correct next year?)

In sum, with this administration, the grown ups are back: Trump is replacing confusion and chaos with clarity and common sense—not just for women’s sports but also for America.

It might be a start.

KOOL-AID, KOOL-AID, TASTES GREAT.

Rush Limbaugh might have crossed the final summit, and yet, his observation about Democrats and their lefty hangers-on getting wackier when they're out of power lives on.

At The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper writes that Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History. Empires tend to collapse when they lose wars, or are attacked by barbarians, or suffer a series of debilitating crises, or maybe just stagnate over a period of years. What we’re seeing now, he says, may be the first time in history that an empire in “splendid condition” chose to deconstruct itself.

I'm not sure how "splendid" a condition the Rules Based Global Order is in, particularly when the real debt ceiling is likely to crash in on the Almoner in Chief, but go ahead, Maha, do you.

USURPING FACULTY STEWARDSHIP BY GOING AROUND IT.

Northern Illinois University administrators seek to expand the responsibilities of contingent faculty.  "The University said it intends to offer longer contracts to some instructional faculty and add a service component to their responsibilities at a Faculty Senate meeting Wednesday."

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, DEPENDABILITY.

It's the triad of effective transportation.  "We've heard that tune before.  'I've invoked that trifecta so many times I should apply for a copyright.'"

Public Transit consultant Jarrett Walker offers the technical details, calling that triad "The Transit Ridership Recipe."

The triad must be harmonic.  "People will only use a service if it is useful, which means that it completes the trip they need to make, in an amount of time and money they can afford. Where ridership is low, it’s usually because the transit system just doesn’t do this for very many people."

Without frequency, it's inconvenient.

People who are used to getting around by a private vehicle (car or bike) often underestimate the importance of frequency, because there isn’t an equivalent to it in their experience.  A private vehicle is ready to go when you are, but transit is not going until it comes.  High frequency means transit is coming soon, which means that it approximates the feeling of liberty you have with your private vehicle – that you can go anytime.  Frequency is freedom!

At the opposite extreme, if you live in a single family house with a driveway and usually get around by car, imagine that there were an automated gate at the end of your driveway that only opened once an hour, on the hour.  When it’s closed, you can’t get your car in or out.  If that were your situation, your biggest transportation problem would not be traffic congestion, or how fast you can go on the freeway; it would be how to get this frigging gate to open more often.  That’s how low frequency feels to a potential transit customer, and why frequency often swamps other factors, like speed, in determining whether transit is actually useful.

Without connectivity, it's futile.

The most successful transit, in terms of ridership achieved for a fixed operating budget, is called mass transit for a reason. The busiest transit lines – a big city subway system, for example – succeed precisely because they are not designed around the details of anyone’s needs. You will not get much assurance that planners of the system understand you in particular, or know what trip you’re making now, or care much about your unique point of view. Instead, you’re likely to notice how many different people are finding the same vehicle useful. You’re likely to notice diversity. We’ll come back to that.

And if it's not dependable, all your good intentions are for naught.

The notion that ridership depends on network design may be new to you. Haven’t you heard that ridership relies on having the right marketing, the right logo, an attractive vehicle, a courteous driver, or whatever? Well, those things can help, but only if the service is useful. Those features attract people to try transit, but people only use it routinely if it’s a good use of their time and money, day after day. Marketing can attract customers, but only the product will keep them.

What I am talking about, throughout this post, is the math of how we deploy service that’s useful to large numbers of people.

The core of being useful is being a logical choice, compared to your alternatives, for getting lots of places that you need to go. And since most of us are in a hurry, travel time matters. Frequency, for example, is an overwhelmingly important factor because it is so dominant in determining actual travel time in the urban context.

There's a lot more by way of advice and technical details in the article.

HOW MUCH EVIDENCE DO YOU REQUIRE?

The beat goes on.  "The Sunday 'public affairs' shows are pro wrestling for nerds."  Think of Margaret Brennan as a heel.  "Last Sunday, I had the car radio tuned to 'Face the Nation,' which began with a notorious segment involving deputy moderator Margaret Brennan and Wyoming Member of Congress Liz Cheney."  That episode aired in July 2019, before the former Member of Congress broke with Donald Trump, got primaried, and endorsed Kamala Harris, all of which might have wrecked her ratings potential for the Sunday shows.

It occurs to me, though, that maybe the baiting of Republican guests, and the continued presence of Republican guests who know they are going to be treated badly by Democrat process-worshippers is for show.  Democrats might be Excessively Earnest People who know how to talk in acronyms.  That's no fun.  So, to build ratings, Republicans consent to go on, in order to fire up their base by talking about how badly the Drive-Bys behave.  Democrat moderators behave badly because to do otherwise would make the show as soporific as a Unitarian sermon, or anything on public radio on any morning.

And so it might have gone last Sunday, where Margaret "The Heel" Brennan goaded the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

CBS’s Margaret Brennan continues on a tour-de-force of galaxy-brained takes that ultimately cause her to get smacked down by her conservative interlocutor. The latest such instance involves her assertion that the Holocaust was caused by (weaponized) free speech, which was promptly and thoroughly rebuffed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Watch the remarkable exchange, which closed out their interview.

Yes, there's a clip at the link, as well as a transcript.  And yes, it's possible to treat the Sunday shows, and the CBS News enterprise, as Something Serious, as Reason's Robby Soave does.

The weekend programming over at CBS was unusually focused on speech norms and censorship in Germany. First, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan casually asserted that free speech is what empowered the Nazis to take over the government and implement the Holocaust; then, 60 Minutes conducted an interview with present-day German authorities in which they detailed their efforts to suppress not just Nazi speech but also misinformation, gossip, and insults toward politicians.

It was an alarming degree of contempt for cherished free speech principles, to say the least. News organizations are free to evince a preference for Europe's pro-censorship policies, but the criticism they attract from the right—from Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in this case—was quite deserved.

Moreover, CBS had its facts wrong. Brennan's claim that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Nazi Germany is a profound misreading of history.

He concludes with an observation more in keeping with our wrestling theme.

This is a textbook example of why Americans are rightly proud of our robust First Amendment traditions, which stand in the way of such nonsense. Never forget that the European bureaucrats who assert the importance of censoring Nazi speech are the same people who want to arrest their citizens for saying a politician is a dick.

Decide for yourself, dear reader, whether Margaret Brennan is a heel, or as Chicago Boyz contributor Mike puts it, an idiot.

I think we are being a bit unfair about Ms. Brennan and her comment because 1) she’s an idiot, and natural law dictates that no one should be held accountable for actions that they have no control over, and 2) I think her point is far worse than her historical illiteracy implies.

In case you are wondering, yes, this is the same Brennan who got memed by JD Vance a few weeks ago. I’m sensing a pattern here.

I think her point isn’t necessarily that the Nazis exploited free speech once they gained power, but rather that they used free speech to gain power. As I said, this interpretation is far worse.

For years we’ve been treated in this country to the whole Orange Man Hitler meme, that normalizing Trump as a legitimate part of the political system is a threat to democracy. We also have been hearing laments from Brennan’s colleagues in the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) that the right to free speech is not absolute, with the implication that Trump and his band were not to be allowed the same access to American rights and the democratic system as are others.

The content and the framing of the Sunday shows might be influenced by the logic of the Critique of Pure Tolerance.  It's simpler to think of it as pro wrestling for weaklings.

WITH AN AMTRAK LIKE THIS, THE DOGE BOYS DON'T EVEN HAVE TO RAID THE OFFICE.

The all-weather mode hasn't fared so well once the cold snaps began.  Today, for example, is just another annulment for the Empire Builder, and the hits keep on coming.

Add westbound Empire Builder for today (Feb. 19, 2025) to Amtrak’s cancellation list, making for a fifth straight day that the Chicago-Seattle/Portland train will have been cancelled in both directions.

The company has also canceled several Northeast Corridor trains today and tomorrow (Feb. 20), as well as Wolverine and Hiawatha trains in the Midwest.

Today’s westbound and eastbound Builder cancellations have not been listed on the Amtrak Alerts social media feed. A query of the train status section of the Amtrak website now shows both as cancelled; the eastbound train was so listed at midday Tuesday, but the westbound train was still shown as operating on Tuesday evening. No reason is offered, although extreme cold warnings continue today in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota.

Also canceled today in the Midwest: the scheduled 5:43 a.m. departure of Wolverine train No. 351 between Pontiac, Mich., and Chicago; No. 352, a 2:15 p.m. departure from Chicago for Pontiac; the early southbound Hiawatha, a 6:15 a.m. departure from Milwaukee; and the 8:15 a.m. Hiawatha from Chicago to Milwaukee. According to Amtrak Alerts, the Hiawatha cancellations reeflect mechanical issues and equipment unavailability; the Wolverines were scratched because of equipment unavailability and weather-related equipment issues. Bus transportation is being provided for Wolverine passengers; Hiawatha passenger were booked onto the next available train.

Last week, Thursday's Illinois Zephyr departure from Quincy was unable to run for some reason.  The morning Carl Sandburg did run, and when it reached Quincy, it added the power and coaches of the Zephyr and brought the whole works back to Chicago.  Here it is as recorded by the Galesburg rail camera.

The newish Charger diesels have not been covering themselves with glory ever since cooler weather arrived; and sometimes the formations run with whatever older coaches are available, this despite recent infusion of new coaching stock supposedly to build the Illinois and Michigan network back better.  Nor does the relatively short turns the Quincy trains make help much: recall an earlier screen grab showing the stock of 381 which turned back at Galesburg with a bus bridge to Macomb and Quincy.  That was a consequence of bridge repairs toward Quincy: these days that train has been turning back because of mechanical troubles.

CREATE A MIDDLE, SLEEP WITH THE FISHES.

Whenever there is an arbitrage opportunity, there will be people who discover it and act on it.  Sports betting, where for one reason or another, the point spread and all the other derivative securities such as over-under, total points, what have you can change from when betting opens until the game starts.

Middling isn’t a term that many who are new sports betting are familiar with. The opportunity to middle a game is when a point spread or total moves in a game. Bettors can middle a bet when a wager is placed on different sides of the same game.

One of the reasons new sports bettors aren’t familiar with middling is because it involves multiple wagers on a game. Most new bettors are usually just interested in wagering once on a game. A middle opportunity often presents itself to bettors at different times of the week leading up to a game.

Sportsbook operators are very aware that there are bettors looking to middle a game. They often have this in mind when setting and moving lines during the week. That said, there are still middle opportunities.

If the book is being run by the local don, it's not a friendly act to create a middle, if I remember my crime novels correctly.

The Michigan lottery might be a different story.

In 2003, an unusual lottery game, Winfall, was released.

The premise was simple:

• Pick six numbers between 1 and 49

• If you guessed two, three, four, or five numbers, you get a prize in increasing amounts.

• Guess six, you win the $2 million minimum.

If nobody won, the lottery purse went up each week. After 6 weeks, or when the jackpot hit the $5M dollar cap, they did a “Roll Down”.  A Roll Down occurs when winnings are spread downwards to lower tier winners, at 5, 4, and 3 level matches.

The State Lottery made a mistake in all this. They listed the odds of winning that was associated with each combination of numbers.

The math explanation could fill an article itself. But the short version, [party store owner and mathematician Jerry Selbee] studied those winning odds, and the timing of those Roll Downs. He realized that, statistically, a single one dollar lottery ticket was worth more than one dollar in those final weeks.

What happened next might be why the Department of Government Efficiency is so popular.

[Mr Selbee] knew he’d need to bet big to create a justifiable margin. In his first attempt, he bought $2,000 in tickets, which was an uncomfortably large sum for a man who never gambled.

He ended up losing $50. He reckoned this was bad luck and within the margin of error and realized he needed to wager more.

Three months later, the next rolldown was announced. He buys a full $8,000 in tickets. His winnings total $15,700, leaving him a $7,700 profit. From here, things escalated.

Each week his bets soared higher and higher. Some weeks, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. The game required you buy the tickets in person. So when a rolldown was coming, he and his wife split up into two cars and hit countless convenience stores across the state.

The government, with its usual iceberg reaction time, didn’t notice anything strange. The Selbees continued this mission for a full decade without the state noticing. Eventually, a group of students at MIT noticed a flaw in the math too, and started buying up tickets.

And somebody forgot the most important thing to do when you have a good thing going, which is to keep still.  Only after a newspaper broke a story did the Michigan Lottery shut down this game.  "No law was ever broken. A clever man, with a mathematical curiosity, spotted a hole and stepped through it."  And nobody went to lunch at the Fox and Hounds in Bloomfield and was never seen again.

THE SUNK COST FALLACY?

Milwaukee's downtown circulator streetcar, which was eleven years in the planning, has been a free ride for passengers, thanks at first to the Potawatomi Casino and Hotel.  But the City of Milwaukee have learned, the hard way, that levying new taxes doesn't bring in more revenue, and they're on the hook for operating the Hop.  Radio talker Dan O'Donnell makes political hay from those expenses.  "The City of Milwaukee is hemorrhaging millions of dollars per year in what may be the biggest left-wing boondoggle in its history."  According to Mr O'Donnell, the way out of the financial hole is ... more taxes.  "This is costing taxpayers $5.5 million per year in operational expenses, which Milwaukee is attempting to pay for by radically increasing parking tickets and parking meter fees. In other words, people who don’t use the streetcar are paying for it!"  Yes, parking spaces are productive assets and ought be priced accordingly, and yet, offsetting road subsidies with countervailing subsidies to a trolley doesn't make much sense.  Particularly if those people feeding the meter are driving downtown because ... the Hop doesn't serve residential areas apart from the Fashionable East Side, and only the inner parts of that.  Mr O'Donnell proposes turning the juice off.  "It is well past time to keep wasting money on Mayor Barrett’s Trolley Folly and put The Hop out of its misery."

Alas, Twitchy contributor "Ranty Amy" Curtis, a Wisconsin resident, notes that the Hop lives at the expense of everyone else.  "The city would be on the hook for tens of millions in Obama-era grants given for the building of The Hop."

It's policy follies like that which give rise to the Pig Book and the Department of Government Efficiency.  The inefficiencies add up.  In the early days of the so-called Great Society, an agency called the Urban Mass Transportation Administration thought that spiffing up the city bus fleet would get some drivers out of their cars.  (Didn't work, tolls and parking charges do that.)  That grant program still exists, under the Federal Transit Administration (a preservation railway can probably restore a basket case streetcar to service faster than the application gets funded) and for all I know the perverse incentives it creates also persist.

In Milwaukee, it was the prospect of Federal money that got the Hop built, and it was touch and go finding a corporate sponsor to pay for the rides.  Yes, it is convenient, easy ride from the railway station to the Grohmann Museum or close to the Summerfest grounds and because it's a free ride, a tired traveller might walk back from Walkers Point, grab refreshments in the Third Ward, and then take a short hop back to the railway station.

But was it good value for money?  And those more mundane capital grants?  Years ago, there was research in the transportation journals about how those led to uneconomically early scrappings of still-serviceable busses.

Do you wonder, dear reader, why I so often suggest the best thing for government to do is to go away?

FOURTH TURNINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE MESSY.

A recent post at The Upheaval asserts "Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century."

THEY'LL NEVER LEARN.

Daily Economy contributor Paul Mueller welcomes the Trump administration's withdrawal of sanction from the diversity-incompetence complex, but cautions, "Companies admit DEI wasn’t good business, nor for those it purported to help. But DEI grifters and grievance peddlers won’t give up easily."  Particularly, he cautions, in higher education.

A deep irony of the DEI movement is its posturing as a movement of the downtrodden and disadvantaged simply asking for a fair shake. That’s not the case at all. Many working-class minorities are fed up with identity politics. White women, for example, seem to have benefited disproportionately from DEI priorities. Meanwhile, black people only hold about 4 percent of DEI positions. Perhaps that contributed to the share of black men voting for Trump in November doubling.

You know who are major DEI advocates? Millionaires (and in the case of Bloomberg and Soros, billionaires), also highly paid consultants at McKinsey & Co. and other consulting firms, highly influential university administrators, highly credentialed university faculty and medical professionals, the rank-and-file government employees, and, of course, DEI peddlers.

Academia remains rife with the ideologies that birthed DEI: critical race theory, cultural Marxism, intersectionality, and the like. Although a few universities have rolled back their commitment to DEI, for most DEI remains the dominant modus operandi. Though less prominent, and couched in other terms, DEI continues to be advanced in the halls of academia. And not just there. The enormous public K-12 education apparatus remains riddled with DEI, especially when it comes to transgender ideology.

He concludes, "Despite legal, political, and public opinion losses, the DEI establishment presses on for its own privileged, elite benefit."

Right on schedule, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education rolls out trade association senior executive Marjorie Hass to exhort the deanlets and deanlings to double down.  "A Dear Colleague letter seeking to prohibit race-conscious DEI initiatives should push campus leaders to rethink their core programs."

ROLL BACK THE INFRASTRUCTURE SOCIALISM?

New transportation secretary Sean Duffy, formerly representing Wisconsin, laid out new goals for transportation spending that the Passenger Rail lobby likes.

The order stipulates that “sound economic analysis” should guide the agency’s programs and policies. It also says priority will be given to programs that “utilize user-pay models.” And it commits the DOT under its new leader, Sean Duffy, to prioritizing projects that promote “economic opportunities, such as increased access to jobs, healthcare facilities, recreational activities, commercial activity, or any actions or project components that will help alleviate poverty, enhance safety, and primarily benefit families and communities by improving the quality of their lives, raising their standard of living, or enabling them to participate more fully in our economy.”

Trains hit each of these marks. They must be a top priority for a DOT that prioritizes sound economic analysis.

The High Speed Rail Alliance correctly identifies how much road socialism there is.

It’s a myth that highways pay for themselves through gas taxes.

In truth, all taxpayers heavily subsidize highways in many ways.

The most obvious way is direct General Revenue payments into the highway trust fund. The current gap between gas-tax revenues and federal highway spending is about $20 billion per year. The total since 2009 is about $280 billion. And the gap keeps growing. Inflation steadily erodes the value of the 18.4 cents per gallon collected through the gas tax, for starters. (The purchasing power of a dollar is about half of what it was in 1993, when the rate was set.) At the same time, with the transition to EVs and hybrid vehicles, drivers buy less gas. And highway construction costs are rising faster than inflation. One analysis found that the annual rate of growth was about 15 percent from 2003 to 2024.

But federal taxpayer subsidies are just the beginning. We subsidize cars and highways in countless ways.

Here’s how it works: Parking minimums and zoning force cities to sprawl, which in turn causes the cost of roads, public utilities, and public services to climb. Meanwhile, states struggle to keep up with repair work; the infrastructure deteriorates; and crumbling roads drag down a state’s quality-of-life and eat up more and more of the budget.

Well, yeah, the roads and parking spaces are productive assets and ought be priced accordingly; the so-called bipartisan infrastructure act doesn't even make good this year's wear-and-tear on the roads; and zoning boards and traffic engineers make it up as they go along, improvising and pretending to call it expertise.

CONTEMPORARY MATING PRACTICES ARE NOT EVOLUTIONARILY STABLE.

So I noted two years ago, hailing an essay by self-styled feminist Louise Perry.

She's back, and not confessing error.

Hookup culture benefits some men, at the expense of most women.

That’s because male sexuality and female sexuality, at a population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do. Hookup culture therefore demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to meet the male demand for no-strings-attached sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing. This is unfair, particularly given that sex carries so many more risks for women, who might end up with an unwanted pregnancy, or being slut-shamed, or even being assaulted.

But even though hookup culture is a terrible deal for women, it is often presented by liberal feminism as a form of empowerment.

It's not, as we noted some years ago.

I can't help you with better. But I can help with "efficient." And there might be an efficiency argument behind social construction, namely institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs.  But even that notion is controversial.  Let me propose one hypothesis.  Slut-shaming is a dishonor tax, and feminism is a tax cut.

Some of us have known this for two score years.  Reality is socially conservative, and sometimes reality dawns after all life's illusions have disillusioned.

[W]hy should we accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people who don’t particularly want casual sex, just to satisfy the demands of people who do? In my view, a truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites. If that seems unfair, then I’d also add: Unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration.

Sometimes it is hard to resist saying, "See, we told you so."

[T]he evidence doesn’t suggest that today’s young women are reveling in sexual liberation. Instead, it suggests that a lot of women are having unpleasant, crappy sex out of a sense of obligation. And to add insult to injury, this doesn’t actually increase women’s value in the eyes of men.

People may be reluctant to actually say so outright, but the truth is: Whereas promiscuity in men is generally viewed neutrally, a woman’s reputation is damaged as her number of sexual partners increases. When looking for a long-term partner, anonymous surveys suggest, the vast majority of straight men prefer a wife with a limited sexual history and little interest in casual sex. Women also prefer a husband who is not unusually promiscuous, but their preference is not as strong. Most are willing to accept a man who has historically enjoyed casual sex but has since settled down.

Importantly, however, men generally don’t mind a more extensive sexual history when they’re looking for a hookup. Then, in fact, promiscuity may increase a woman’s appeal.

Deconstructing double standards by deconstructing all standards becomes an evolutionary dead end.  The lady with a reputation is still ... a lady with a reputation.  Red State's Ed Morrissey summarizes.  "These are not new concepts. Human societies used to understand this, and ordered their mores and courtship practices to protect both men and women from this kind of exploitation and misery, not to mention the longer-term social consequences of promiscuity."

THAT DEFLATING COLLEGE FOOTBALL BUBBLE.

Northern Illinois football recently changed its conference affiliation to ... the Mountain West.  Northern Star sports reporter Skyler Kisellus hopes for the best.  "Though NIU has left the Mid-American Conference before, its upcoming departure won’t backfire like its ill-fated 1986 exit."

STRETTO AND COUNTERPOINT.

An Arkansas organist is playing 18 hours of Bach this year, one lunch break at a time.

The nave filled with the sounds of the Gothic church's pipe organ, and a screen showed a man performing the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Those gathered weren't there for church but for the third concert in a series Colin MacKnight is performing over the next year to commemorate the 275th anniversary of Bach's death.

MacKnight, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral's music director, is performing all of Bach's organ works throughout 2025 — one lunch break at a time. The ambitious plan entails performing 18 hours of music in half-hour increments nearly every Wednesday.

"I've wanted to for a really long time because it's, I think, the most thorough way of immersing myself in the brilliance of Johann Sebastian Bach," MacKnight said one morning as he rehearsed in the empty cathedral the day before a concert.

Orchestrating for organ really means pulling out all the stops.

MacKnight, who is from Bethesda, Maryland, has been the music director at Trinity for three years. He said the first time he remembers hearing Bach was at a relative's funeral when he was about 12 years old.

"Something about hearing it that time just really mesmerized me, and that was the beginning of my love of Bach," he said.

The 31-year-old's hands move easily between the four keyboards of the organ console, flanked by knobs controlling different sounds that are assembled into various combinations.

Underneath, his feet press on the pedalboards, combining to create the notes of Bach's works. MacKnight, who has played the organ since he was 16, acknowledges how dizzying the sight of the instrument can be for newcomers.

"If you don't know what you're looking at, it's a little overwhelming, like an airplane console," he said.

MacKnight's concerts — which are free and open to the public — are also mini-lessons for those who come and include a glossary of terms like concerto and fugue. In between pieces, MacKnight gives audience members some background on Bach and his organ works.

"These pieces are in the unfortunate category of being much, much harder than they sound," he says.

All the more important, then, to appreciate the performances.

The free concerts so far have drawn a mix of church members, classical music aficionados and newcomers who say they want a quiet break from the daily bustle.

"I like the complexity of the music and the power of the organ, which stirs me internally," said Barry Coplin, a member of the church who has attended two of MacKnight's concerts.

Ben Wiley, who lives about 30 minutes away, is a classical music fan who was attending his third of MacKnight's shows and said he appreciates being able to hear Bach's works in half-hour increments.

"It's a good way to be able to get it done in short bursts, to be able to absorb it better and come back to get the next batch," he said.

MacKnight is also performing a 100-minute concert of Bach's most extensive organ work — the Clavier-Ubung III, sometimes referred to as the German Organ Mass — on July 28, the day the German composer died in 1750 at 65.

Find yourself a concert and go to it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Evergreen.  "Prosperity flourishes when businesses serve customers, not ideologies—and when customers choose, not coerce. Perhaps we’d all do better to prioritize peaceful exchange and good service, rather than political lockstep."

We have the oldest and most stable constitutional system in history.  America, with its unique Constitution is indeed exceptional.   “Constitutional crisis” is not a serious talking point.

Politics divides.  "Fed Up Man is the engine of our revolution."

Yes, Virginia, there is a fourth branch of government.  "The President of the United States is acting like he’s in charge of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to 'Our Democracy' are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy."  Or worse.  "You begin to detect that by 'our democracy' they actually meant 'our everlasting grift.'"

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

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Alon Levy is with New York University's Marron Institute, focusing on urban transportation.  He recently sat down with an Asterisk correspondent.  "The United States has the most expensive transportation infrastructure in the world. That’s because we refuse to learn from experts, other countries, and our own history."  That might be the thesis.  Everything you need to know, dear reader, is in the opening exchange.

Asterisk: The overarching question in your transit policy career has been: Why is America so bad at building transit systems? Earlier this year, your team at NYU released a massive report comparing transit costs in Istanbul, Italy, Sweden and Boston, and then, of course, New York. It culminates in your fantastic case study of the Second Avenue subway line. And that’s where I wanted to start. What went wrong?

Alon Levy:Let’s go back to John Hylan.

Hylan was a populist mayor between 1918 and 1925. He ran against various corporate interests, which at the time included private streetcar companies. Hylan was hostile to the private operators. This led to bustitution — using buses to undercut the streetcar companies, though even then it was clear that the buses were providing inferior service that cost more to provide.¹

And he was also against the private companies that were running the subway. So the city started building something called the Independent Subway System, commonly known as IND (because the private companies were called IRT, Interborough Rapid Transit). It was built by the city with the express purpose of driving the privates out of business — so the lines were kind of duplicative of the older lines. Only in two places did they truly expand into new places that were not served before. One is the G train, the Crosstown Line between Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn. The other is the Queens Boulevard line.

It added value. But it was also redundant on purpose — and it culminated in the city buying out the private operators at Depression prices.

Ah, yes, John Hylan, also known as John "Red" Hylan.  "Populist" is being polite.  And yes, he thought city management could provide a better subway service than that offered by the two private companies, the Interborough and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, or BMT.  (And if you wonder why some New York subway routes are letters and some numbers, well, the old A train was a BMT route.)  Most of the interview focuses on the sort of process worship that followed from the city's construction protocols.

No, 13,000 people in the United States work for a state government who are appointed by the governor or lower-level official. The governor may choose to appoint a technocrat, but it’s not expected. And then there’s also the indirect people, the people who these appointees hire as their personal staff. When these people walk into the room, the experienced civil servants lower their heads a little bit. When you tell the civil service that it’s always going to be on the lower end of the class system, you’re going to lose the best people. The best people will pick a career path that lets them be on top, which in this system means they’re doing many different things and never learn one thing well.

What do I keep telling you, dear reader, about complexity confounding coordination.

There's a lot to digest in the article, it comes down to the absence of anyone with the vision of Alexander J. Cassatt and the drive of J. Edgar Thomson. "But Penn Station has actually languished at the hands of another simple reality: No one has the leverage to fix it. "  It's another inheritance from the truly most destructive generation of the modern era, the process-worshippers of the Silent Generation.  "Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power—to pull it away from imperious technocrats who might use government to bulldoze hapless communities."  It's enough to make a Marxist giggle (a phrase that I lifted from Trains editor David P. Morgan, who noted the rigamarole strangling Commuter Rail service in New York in the late 1950s.)

Mr Dunkelman is still a believer in the power of Governance by Wise Experts.  "To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest."  I fear, though, that he has really made the case that the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to go away.

First, though, we might want the government to go away.  Red Hylan had a counterpart in Detroit mayor James Couzens, who thought the way to keep the investor owned streetcars of the Detroit United Railway (itself, as this was easier to do with infrastructure inherited from horse-car companies, an amalgamation of several streetcar lines) from overcharging commuters was to build a city-owned streetcar system and a fleet of Birney Safety Cars (yes, the same as Milwaukee's dinkeys) to serve the passengers.  As was the case in New York, the municipal operation was with a view to getting Detroit United to sell to the city.  That Detroit was becoming known for its production of flivvers adds spice to the story.  From 1920 when the first Couzens Cooties, er, Birneys, started running, until 1956, when the last Detroit Street Railway cars went out of service, that government took more interest in providing the infrastructure for the products its residents assembled.

A HYPOTHESIS BECOMES HARDER TO REJECT.

There's nearly forty years of accumulating evidence that the campus rabbit culture is not good for your health.

Badger Herald editorial writers Michael Warner and Dorothy Freiberg looked at the scene on 21 April 1987, with the following:

So why should men marry and start families? It must be said that we know a fair number of college-educated young men in their late twenties, making good salaries, who seem never to have thought about marriage. They remain in a state of suspended late-adolescence, living and acting as they did as seniors in college, only now they have plenty of money for dates and toys.

"This is an enormous waste, and a shame. So many young men never grow up, never taking the responsibility of supporting a family and never knowing that God made families to draw each of us out of the selfish squalor of our personal lives and devote us to loving and helping others.

"One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional role as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

"Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed, and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families."

That's from the early days of Cold Spring Shops, and we have seen that passage invoked a few times since.  It's not surprising that Rod Dreher would have called attention to the waste, and the shame.

It's not that things are any better today, notes Rod Dreher.  "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags. The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."  He's basing his pessimism on a day chatting with people who work among the inner city poor, and on an essay by Mary Eberstadt.  "What the MeToo moment proves above all is that the time for magical thinking about the sexual revolution is over. Until now, many people simply accepted the realities of the post-Pill world as non-negotiable facts. It’s time to challenge that worldview as one that lacks moral and intellectual maturity."

That might be argumentation consistent with the priors of people running opinion shops such as American Conservative and Weekly Standard.

CONTEMPLATING URBAN FORMS.

Andrew "Post-Suburban Future" Burleson attempts to make sense of the logic of town formation.  His post notes that the private automobile is a Marshallian improvement, but as each car takes up more space than a pair of sneakers or a bicycle, and stabling a car is more practicable than stabling a coach and four, what he calls the Geometry Problem arises.

Simply put, the Geometry Problem is that cars are much bigger than humans. They have quite different spatial requirements, both in motion and at rest, than any other mode of transportation. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just a physical constraint.

But these physical differences mean that when we optimize places for cars, they end up not working well (or working at all) for any other mode. They become car-only places.

Like all design decisions, the decision to make car-only places has tradeoffs. The key tradeoff here is that car-only design requires a large amount of space to work well, and that conflicts with and stifles the natural economic growth of cities. Let’s unpack this.

What follows is an instructive exposition of the evolution of cities.

[T]o optimize for the car, we need to spread everything out. Speaking purely in terms of transportation design, this is fine. But, unfortunately, transportation design isn’t the only thing we care about.

Economic activity wants to agglomerate. This is how and why cities exist - they are convergence points of economic value that attract people.

Cities naturally grow as economic activity increases. Space at the convergence points becomes more and more valuable. To keep the economy growing we use the space more and more efficiently to keep it affordable. At first this means we put buildings closer together and cover more of each lot. Then we start to build taller.

In historic small towns you can still see how this used to work. Right at the city center there are a few tall buildings. Then there’s a Main Street with small buildings side by side. Just off the Main Street you have houses on small lots. As you spread out the lots get bigger. That’s the natural economic shape of a city.

Trigger warning: this idea of space being used efficiently is called “density.” Healthy cities gradually spread out around the edges as they also gradually grow denser in the center.

Sometimes those near-city-center houses on small lots give way to apartment blocks.  I quibble with his use of the term "efficiently" as it appears to be the restricted sense of using fewer materials, rather than the identification and harvesting of gains from trade.  One could build the apartment blocks farther from the central business district, to take advantage of the bid-rent curve, but that might not be the most efficient way to trade land costs for transportation costs.  Those houses on bigger lots?  Back in the day, that land was less valuable for retailers or whatever industries located along the railroad tracks, which might make buying a larger parcel suitable for a house with a stable the locationally efficient use of the land.  (And I haven't gotten into yet another complication, which is that there are many dimensions along which houses can vary, leading to the equilibrium householder being indifferent among the bundle of rooms, the lot size, travel time, and proximity to noxious facilities at various places in town.)

IT'S NOT DUMPING WHEN WE DO IT.

As the Government Efficiency examination continues, Members of Congress begin to argue that their pet appropriations are not government waste.

Republican Sen. Katie Britt has been working to make sure the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency doesn't hit what she called “life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions,” including her state's beloved University of Alabama.

Kansas GOP Sen. Jerry Moran is worried that food from heartland farmers would spoil rather than be sent around the world as the U.S. Agency for International Development shutters.

And Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson warns national parks could be impaired by cutbacks at the start of summer hiring in preparation for the onslaught of visitors.

Do you wonder, dear reader, why shutdown theater and earmark-rich continuing resolutions are so popular with the political class?

And of course, those sacks of grain marked "A gift from the people of the United States of America" look so good arriving on the dock at some famine-stricken country, particularly on the evening news.  That in any other context those sacks would be subsidized production dumped into another country is of no import.

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE WIND.

Mike Lofgren, who some time ago decided playing the role of renegade Republican to make self-styled progressives comfortable with their certitude, is at it again.  "Time to end the media silence over the American people’s headlong dive into authoritarianism."

Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Wouldn't it be easier to abolish the People and install another?

FIRST, CULL A FEW DEANLETS.

Here I have stood. 

From the founding of Cold Spring Shops we have maintained two core beliefs about higher education.  First, the faculty are the proper stewards of the curriculum.  Second, administrative usurpations, particularly by failed scholars or by people with no faculty experience, contribute mightily to the failure of universities in the past forty or fifty years.

I cashed out ten years ago.  Fortunately, Minding the Campus contributor Kenneth Corvo is on the job, calling attention to the continuing crisis.

The American university is in distress. Enrollment is declining, tenure is disappearing, administrative costs are ballooning, and public trust in academia is eroding. More concerning, however, is the deeper structural crisis that has transformed universities from bastions of knowledge into battlegrounds of ideological warfare and administrative overreach. At the heart of this crisis lies a fundamental shift: the weakening of faculty authority and the erosion of academic freedom, driven by political polarization and the corporatization of higher education.

It ought come as no surprise that when the institutional ethos is one of denigrating normal people, that the Militant Normals get, well, militant.  What's more amusing is that once the mode of inquiry is that of being oppositional to everything, sooner or later the academy itself becomes something to oppose.

Once seen as institutions dedicated to reason and empirical inquiry, universities now find themselves under attack from both the left and the right. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the populist distrust of “elites,” have sought to defund academic programs, impose ideological tests on tenure, and surveil faculty for perceived biases. State legislatures in Florida, Indiana, and Idaho, among others, have passed legislation directly forbidding types of speech, degrading tenure, and defunding programs that they find problematic. Meanwhile, postmodern academic currents, rooted in identity politics, have questioned the legitimacy of objective truth itself, sometimes using administrative mechanisms to censor dissenting voices.

The result? A climate where neither the political right nor left fully supports open inquiry.

Instead, faculty are squeezed between reactionary state legislatures that punish ideological nonconformity and progressive administrators who enforce ideological orthodoxy through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates and speech codes. The once-proud tradition of shared governance between faculty and administration has been systematically dismantled in favor of top-down bureaucratic control, further weakening the university’s mission as a space for free intellectual exchange.

Exactly.  "It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at 'cultivated ignorance' from a leader in an academic enterprise that 'decenters' hard-won wisdom of millennia; that makes students cowering subjects of Student Affairs deanlets; that cultivates ignorance and calls it access."